Ethnic restaurants spring up as soon as new immigrants find a place to put down roots. In tiny kitchens they recreate the food of their mothers and grandmothers and everyone from the neighborhood flocks to eat it. The recipes are those that have been handed down from generation to generation.

Then everything changes.

The faster the immigrants become assimilated into the American culture, the quicker they adopt the eating customs of the new country. Tripe, trotters and jellyfish are pushed first on to the back burner, and then they disappear altogether. Sometimes only the name of the dish remains, a faint shadow of its noble past.

Soon, it is only in the finest restaurants that the genuine traditional foods of other nations can be found. Formerly humble dishes like cassoulet and fried polenta are served on fine china by the skilled hands of dedicated chefs who have undergone years of training and experience. When wine is served from crystal glasses, the price of dinner may be something close to astronomical.

Meantime, the small ethnic restaurants offer us what they think "we Americans" want to eat. Thus the glorious food of Spain is quickly reduced to paella, castanets and sangria, served by waiters adorned with wide-brimmed and embroidered black hats, tight toreador pants, and designer sneakers. Millions of Americans think they are eating "Italian" when they put pepper and Parmesan on the pasta in restaurants where Mom may (or may not) be thrilled to be addressed as "signorita."

Irena's got a point. But after much intrepid searching, we did manage to find some good, affordable "ethnic" food of all different kinds. Browse our favorite top picks; there's Japanese, Mexican or Latin-Caribbean, along with scads of others. And remember:"Yummy" is a universal concept.

The most popular ethnic restaurants produce food of dubious authenticity in low-rent dining establishments plastered with wall-posters where the Taj Mahal is always bathed in moonlight, the Eiffel Tower stands tall and the Tower of Pisa is perpetually leaning. These unintimidating eating places appeal to those who relish cheap eats, prefer booze by the jug, are undaunted by deafening noise and require ketchup on the table.

We may decide to go to a Thai, or Greek or Mexican restaurant, but once there we try to find something on the menu that we can relate to our own experience. This is why we are comfortable with sandwiches or wraps. But then, it seems like everyone is most comfortable with sandwiches. Almost every nation encloses small amounts meat or chicken in a wrapping of some sort in order to make it go further. In Israel and the Middle East, the bread of choice is pita, stuffed with ground chick-peas and called falafel, and in Greece, it is crammed thick with slices of roast lamb, onions, and peppers, and ordered as a gyro.

Elsewhere, other foods are wrapped in packages, some of which are intended to be eaten while others are simply the most convenient containers at hand: lettuce leaves, cabbage leaves, grape leaves, banana leaves, palm fronds, corn husks, envelopes of baked mud. Tasty fragments nestle neatly in noodles or in pastry; phyllo pastry, plain pastry, puff pastry or in paper, rice paper, parchment paper, even fish and chips in newspaper.

A bewildering variety of meats, fish, cheese, vegetables, nuts, and fruits turn up inside blintzes, buns, burritos, cannelloni, chimichangas, Cornish pasties, crêpes, dumplings, empanadas, fajitas, knishes, kreplach, quesadillas, ravioli, strudels, tortellini, turnovers, and wontons. Minute amounts of expensive protein are rolled in inexpensive rice and even cheaper seaweed. And an entire fortune can occasionally be found inside a cookie.

Of course, once the foods of other countries arrive in the U.S., their origins become terribly blurred. Olive oil turns into mayo; native spices are replaced by fresh-squeezed mustard and hand-made wrappings are assembled in factories and fortified so they won't fall apart when eaten with one hand while driving along the highway.

But this is nothing to worry about. After all, when it comes to foreign food, the more American it is the happier we are, so I'll just have what he's having!

For more from Irena, feast on subjects that have been On the Table.