8 ms·

Not being from Toronto, never in a million years would I even think of that as a visitor.

gomoboo 2mo ago
I grew up in another country where Jamaican patties were popular and ordering a 'beef patty' would never get you a burger patty unless you were in a burger joint. Same as in Toronto; asking for patty (or beef patty) will 99% of the time get you a Jamaican patty.
- gruez 2mo ago
  >>Not being from Toronto, never in a million years would I even think of that as a visitor. >I grew up in another country where Jamaican patties were popular [...] Have you considered the possibility that Jamaican patties aren't universally popular and the fact that the two of you came from cities with a significant Jamaican diaspora doesn't invalidate the experience of the person who probably came from a city that didn't?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - beedeebeedee 2mo ago
    I’m from New Haven and if you went into a place and asked for a beef patty you would get a Jamaican beef patty, not a burger. It may not be everywhere, but pretty much every city I’ve lived in that is the case
    - cwillu 2mo ago
      If you ask for a beef patty here, the server will look confused, and then bring you a hamburger patty on a plate
      - dataflow 2mo ago
        Anecdote: I asked for the "mushroom burger" on their menu at an airport years ago -- I didn't want meat and it had nothing indicting meat in the listed ingredients that I checked -- and they brought me a hamburger beef patty with mushrooms on top. Imagine both of our surprises when they brought me the plate and I was like uhm I think that's another table's order? Well it turns out, at least to that restaurant (idk about the rest of the locality), that was considered a mushroom burger. Elsewhere in the same country (and even Googling it now), a mushroom burger means a vegetarian burger with a portobello mushroom or such as the "patty". Like how a salmon burger means the patty is made of salmon, or a veggie burger means the patty is made of veggies. I sat there looking dumb and the waiter thought (like everyone here) that I was some idiot who didn't know what a burger was. Now I'm not suggesting they need to regulate what "mushroom burger" means across the locality too, but I couldn't have been the first one to get caught off-guard by this, and the whole incident never needed to happen either. At least in an airport where people from all over stop by, I seriously wouldn't think that only a racist or anti-meatatarian/anti-vegetarian dictatorship would impose some common-sense rules to prevent confusion or food/time wastage arising from cuisine-"unculturedness".
        ta988 2mo ago
        I once ordered a vegetarian burger in some kind of trivia bar of a big american city. It came with bacon... When I asked they said: "but nobody ever complained about having bacon in it". there are alternate realities out there. Even in the deepest small town I had never seen that.
        robocat 1mo ago
        A mushroom burger is a normal order at a takeaway in New Zealand: the usual beef burger, but with added mushroom. Note that there is often a rather restricted choice for vegetarian or vegan food (unless you pick your place carefully).
        sokoloff 1mo ago
        If I ordered a mushroom burger (especially as my preferred “mushroom and Swiss burger”), I’d be surprised if it came without the beef patty (the burger part). It’s not that I can’t understand that the other exists, but my brain is wired to think of mushroom as a topping/adjective and burger as the noun.
  - arjie 2mo ago
    All of that may be true and yet it seems overly prescriptive for a state authority to determine the name of food. After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich. Regional variations on names are quite reasonable. On the other hand, Canadians are a prescriptive culture. In Montreal, for instance, they are very strict about street signs and so on. Perhaps it is just how things are done by that people.
    - dataflow 2mo ago
      > After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich. I don't know if you're not seeing the obvious or deliberately ignoring it, but the rather-salient differences between those are that (a) "cheesesteak" being one word rather than two tells you it might be a different thing, and (b) "cheesesteak" (or even "cheese steak" by itself) do not carry a single universal meaning different from the rest. You know, unlike "beef patty", where even Googling it now doesn't show Jamaica in the top result. If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk". Nobody minds if you sell soymilk or Jamaican beef patties. They're just asking you not to actively hijack terms that carry significantly different meaning to millions/billions of other people. It's not that hard and it's not some sort of totalitarian flex to have rules like this. With HN being what it is, they'd probably call banning that anti-veganism.
      - antonvs 1mo ago
        > If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk". Big Dairy got to you, huh. There’s nothing wrong with referring to other kinds of milk as milk. If anything, cow’s milk should be clearly labeled as such, if we’re following the approach of identifying ingredients properly.
        neuroticnews25 1mo ago
        How would you define milk?
        1mo ago
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 1mo ago
  If I got a jamaican beef patty instead of a hamburger beef patty, i think that would be close enough. But I have serious issues with the term "sweetbreads".
overfeed 2mo ago
How many visitors do you think would go to a restaurant intending to order a (hamburger) beef patty? The potential for confusion is overstated.
- dataflow 2mo ago
  You might be surprised, I had a similar kind of confusion myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164552
- gruez 2mo ago
  That's not too remote of a possibility given that street foods like currywurst exist, and sausages are theoretically supposed to be sold encased in bread (ie. hot dog) similar to beef patties.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- xp84 2mo ago
  I think that type of law is usually supposed to protect against, not a surprised restaurant patron (because that's the kind of thing that would fix itself anyway, the customer would send it back and/or not go back) but subtle adulteration of food. The law says the "patty" has to be nothing but meat and seasoning so that nobody can sell a "beef patty" that looks like a normal patty but actually is 10% sawdust (or more plausibly, some gross but very cheap filler product). In a well-functioning government, this kind of thing could be worked out - the regulators would realize their rules were too far-reaching and culturally myopic, and that this is clearly not an attempt to sneak adulterated mystery meat past them. They could alter the regulation, like allowing the term "Jamaican Beef Patty" to be used, and that prefix removes the 'no encasement' regulation and allows whatever other common safe ingredients. But of course, most governments don't function that well. The bureaucrats get deeply invested in enforcing their rules and no one with the authority to change the regulation can even hear the cries of those impacted, let alone change them.
- Hugsbox 1mo ago
  Many people on keto diets do exactly this, as they won't eat bread. I've dined with multiple people who have gone into a restaurant and ordered a beef patty. And until today, I'd never even heard of the Jamaican thingy, which would not be keto-friendly btw.
roncesvalles 2mo ago
Sorry, but you're just uncultured if you don't know what Jamaican patties are. This is like saying "never in a million years would I think 'butter chicken' is a red, spicy Indian curry instead of chicken roasted in butter".
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo ago
  Sorry, you’re just uncultured if you don’t understand that understandings of different “foreign” cultures differ from place to place. I don’t even agree that the use of the term “beef patty” should be regulated just so you don’t confuse a dumb tourist lol. Getting something you didn’t expect is part of travelling. But YOUR comment is too condescending and hypocritical to NOT draw attention to, and it’s a type of hypocrisy that’s endemic to North America. You tell someone from the US that you don’t know Spanish or some aspect of Mexican culture or something like that and if they’re snooty enough they’ll call you an uncultured trailer park hick or something. Put another 1,000–2,000 km of distance to the cultural reference you’re making and you’ll get blank stares. I live in a country that’s far further from the Caribbean, where it makes up an insignificant part of our vast multicultural landscape. Don’t act like I’m “uncultured” due to something that you’re much more likely to know about due to your geographic proximity.
  - roncesvalles 2mo ago
    1. Jamaican cuisine is fairly popular globally. 2. Patties are popular within Jamaican cuisine. It's not something very niche. I think my comment was perfectly fair. It's like not knowing what empanadas, samosas, shumai, or takoyaki are (and yes, one would be uncultured for not knowing any of these too). It betrays something about the cosmopolitan-ness of your life experiences. It's not even about geography. I'm pretty sure a good proportion of even Torontonians don't know about the Jamaican patty, and I'd call them uncultured too. There's nothing wrong about being uncultured, it's not the end of the world. You can even work to improve it.
    - elros 2mo ago
      If we're going by anecdotes, let's add mine: I've lived in 4 continents, about 15 countries, I speak 6 languages, I hold a few citizenships, I consider myself fairly cultured and not only I've never eaten a Jamaican meat patty but I've also never seen one for sale. In fact the only way I know about their existence is through watching news reports of what happened in Canada in 1985. How familiar are you with food from the Amazon basin region? I wouldn't consider you uncultured for not knowing much about it, but orders of magnitude more people eat food from the Amazon basin than Jamaican food.

I grew up in another country where Jamaican patties were popular and ordering a 'beef patty' would never get you a burger patty unless you were in a burger joint. Same as in Toronto; asking for patty (or beef patty) will 99% of the time get you a Jamaican patty.

gruez 2mo ago
>>Not being from Toronto, never in a million years would I even think of that as a visitor. >I grew up in another country where Jamaican patties were popular [...] Have you considered the possibility that Jamaican patties aren't universally popular and the fact that the two of you came from cities with a significant Jamaican diaspora doesn't invalidate the experience of the person who probably came from a city that didn't?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- beedeebeedee 2mo ago
  I’m from New Haven and if you went into a place and asked for a beef patty you would get a Jamaican beef patty, not a burger. It may not be everywhere, but pretty much every city I’ve lived in that is the case
  - cwillu 2mo ago
    If you ask for a beef patty here, the server will look confused, and then bring you a hamburger patty on a plate
    - dataflow 2mo ago
      Anecdote: I asked for the "mushroom burger" on their menu at an airport years ago -- I didn't want meat and it had nothing indicting meat in the listed ingredients that I checked -- and they brought me a hamburger beef patty with mushrooms on top. Imagine both of our surprises when they brought me the plate and I was like uhm I think that's another table's order? Well it turns out, at least to that restaurant (idk about the rest of the locality), that was considered a mushroom burger. Elsewhere in the same country (and even Googling it now), a mushroom burger means a vegetarian burger with a portobello mushroom or such as the "patty". Like how a salmon burger means the patty is made of salmon, or a veggie burger means the patty is made of veggies. I sat there looking dumb and the waiter thought (like everyone here) that I was some idiot who didn't know what a burger was. Now I'm not suggesting they need to regulate what "mushroom burger" means across the locality too, but I couldn't have been the first one to get caught off-guard by this, and the whole incident never needed to happen either. At least in an airport where people from all over stop by, I seriously wouldn't think that only a racist or anti-meatatarian/anti-vegetarian dictatorship would impose some common-sense rules to prevent confusion or food/time wastage arising from cuisine-"unculturedness".
      - ta988 2mo ago
        I once ordered a vegetarian burger in some kind of trivia bar of a big american city. It came with bacon... When I asked they said: "but nobody ever complained about having bacon in it". there are alternate realities out there. Even in the deepest small town I had never seen that.
      - robocat 1mo ago
        A mushroom burger is a normal order at a takeaway in New Zealand: the usual beef burger, but with added mushroom. Note that there is often a rather restricted choice for vegetarian or vegan food (unless you pick your place carefully).
      - sokoloff 1mo ago
        If I ordered a mushroom burger (especially as my preferred “mushroom and Swiss burger”), I’d be surprised if it came without the beef patty (the burger part). It’s not that I can’t understand that the other exists, but my brain is wired to think of mushroom as a topping/adjective and burger as the noun.
- arjie 2mo ago
  All of that may be true and yet it seems overly prescriptive for a state authority to determine the name of food. After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich. Regional variations on names are quite reasonable. On the other hand, Canadians are a prescriptive culture. In Montreal, for instance, they are very strict about street signs and so on. Perhaps it is just how things are done by that people.
  - dataflow 2mo ago
    > After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich. I don't know if you're not seeing the obvious or deliberately ignoring it, but the rather-salient differences between those are that (a) "cheesesteak" being one word rather than two tells you it might be a different thing, and (b) "cheesesteak" (or even "cheese steak" by itself) do not carry a single universal meaning different from the rest. You know, unlike "beef patty", where even Googling it now doesn't show Jamaica in the top result. If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk". Nobody minds if you sell soymilk or Jamaican beef patties. They're just asking you not to actively hijack terms that carry significantly different meaning to millions/billions of other people. It's not that hard and it's not some sort of totalitarian flex to have rules like this. With HN being what it is, they'd probably call banning that anti-veganism.
    - antonvs 1mo ago
      > If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk". Big Dairy got to you, huh. There’s nothing wrong with referring to other kinds of milk as milk. If anything, cow’s milk should be clearly labeled as such, if we’re following the approach of identifying ingredients properly.
      - neuroticnews25 1mo ago
        How would you define milk?
        1mo ago
DwnVoteHoneyPot 1mo ago
If I got a jamaican beef patty instead of a hamburger beef patty, i think that would be close enough. But I have serious issues with the term "sweetbreads".

overfeed 2mo ago

How many visitors do you think would go to a restaurant intending to order a (hamburger) beef patty? The potential for confusion is overstated.

dataflow 2mo ago
You might be surprised, I had a similar kind of confusion myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164552
gruez 2mo ago
That's not too remote of a possibility given that street foods like currywurst exist, and sausages are theoretically supposed to be sold encased in bread (ie. hot dog) similar to beef patties.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
xp84 2mo ago
I think that type of law is usually supposed to protect against, not a surprised restaurant patron (because that's the kind of thing that would fix itself anyway, the customer would send it back and/or not go back) but subtle adulteration of food. The law says the "patty" has to be nothing but meat and seasoning so that nobody can sell a "beef patty" that looks like a normal patty but actually is 10% sawdust (or more plausibly, some gross but very cheap filler product). In a well-functioning government, this kind of thing could be worked out - the regulators would realize their rules were too far-reaching and culturally myopic, and that this is clearly not an attempt to sneak adulterated mystery meat past them. They could alter the regulation, like allowing the term "Jamaican Beef Patty" to be used, and that prefix removes the 'no encasement' regulation and allows whatever other common safe ingredients. But of course, most governments don't function that well. The bureaucrats get deeply invested in enforcing their rules and no one with the authority to change the regulation can even hear the cries of those impacted, let alone change them.
Hugsbox 1mo ago
Many people on keto diets do exactly this, as they won't eat bread. I've dined with multiple people who have gone into a restaurant and ordered a beef patty. And until today, I'd never even heard of the Jamaican thingy, which would not be keto-friendly btw.

roncesvalles 2mo ago

Sorry, but you're just uncultured if you don't know what Jamaican patties are. This is like saying "never in a million years would I think 'butter chicken' is a red, spicy Indian curry instead of chicken roasted in butter".

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo ago
Sorry, you’re just uncultured if you don’t understand that understandings of different “foreign” cultures differ from place to place. I don’t even agree that the use of the term “beef patty” should be regulated just so you don’t confuse a dumb tourist lol. Getting something you didn’t expect is part of travelling. But YOUR comment is too condescending and hypocritical to NOT draw attention to, and it’s a type of hypocrisy that’s endemic to North America. You tell someone from the US that you don’t know Spanish or some aspect of Mexican culture or something like that and if they’re snooty enough they’ll call you an uncultured trailer park hick or something. Put another 1,000–2,000 km of distance to the cultural reference you’re making and you’ll get blank stares. I live in a country that’s far further from the Caribbean, where it makes up an insignificant part of our vast multicultural landscape. Don’t act like I’m “uncultured” due to something that you’re much more likely to know about due to your geographic proximity.
- roncesvalles 2mo ago
  1. Jamaican cuisine is fairly popular globally. 2. Patties are popular within Jamaican cuisine. It's not something very niche. I think my comment was perfectly fair. It's like not knowing what empanadas, samosas, shumai, or takoyaki are (and yes, one would be uncultured for not knowing any of these too). It betrays something about the cosmopolitan-ness of your life experiences. It's not even about geography. I'm pretty sure a good proportion of even Torontonians don't know about the Jamaican patty, and I'd call them uncultured too. There's nothing wrong about being uncultured, it's not the end of the world. You can even work to improve it.
  - elros 2mo ago
    If we're going by anecdotes, let's add mine: I've lived in 4 continents, about 15 countries, I speak 6 languages, I hold a few citizenships, I consider myself fairly cultured and not only I've never eaten a Jamaican meat patty but I've also never seen one for sale. In fact the only way I know about their existence is through watching news reports of what happened in Canada in 1985. How familiar are you with food from the Amazon basin region? I wouldn't consider you uncultured for not knowing much about it, but orders of magnitude more people eat food from the Amazon basin than Jamaican food.