Ethnocentrism In this case, there is some ethnocentrism at work and the restaurant is just an expression of that. The reality is that only a crazy person would blow off a business deal on account of a restaurant not serving horse. French people do not actually eat a lot of it, and they know that American restaurants do not serve it. So the cheval blowup sounds like a pretext to bail on the deal. However, the client did display a certain amount of ethnocentrism in his rant, and his discomfort with America and our way of doing things in general might have been the catalyst for the deal going south.

So while in this case the client demonstrates a high degree of ethnocentrism in his rant about American hospitality, it was directed more at the totality of the experience than the lack of horse...

The client had to know that there would be no horse, and he was unlikely to be disappointed with his prime rib. I don't see this as being about food, but about the whole totality of his experience in America. I would have handled this a bit better than the person in the narrative, since I could have engaged him on the subject, knowing that he can get horse in Montreal, or Kazakhstan, rather than have him feign disgust at our lack of culture. I have a cultural variability perspective where I try to engage people from different cultures on certain basic dimensions, and food is actually one of those because I can relate a little better on food than most other cultural traits (Sing-Toomey, 1994) I think my response to his anger would have been to have trouble taking him seriously. The French are…