Ethnocentrism vs. Chauvinism

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 on the menu.

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 known for absurdist humor and I would have had no choice but to assume that is what was going on. I would have looked for the hidden camera.

But seriously, such behavior would have been shocking for me and I would have been disappointed not to have figured out earlier that this deal was going nowhere -- he was upset about something else, probably about the deal, and I would have wanted to resolve that problem rather than worrying about his outward expression of frustration. Ethnocentrism is not necessarily a bad thing. It had better not be, anyway, because everybody has it.

You just have to be aware of it, and how it affects the way that you see different situations that you encounter. Patriotism is a little bit different -- it sort of depends how this is expressed. If expressed as pride -- saying for example that he thinks the restaurants in Paris do a better prime rib, that's one thing. If expressed as chauvinism, which is what he did here.