Yeah, kebabs really aren't a Thing here, for the most part. Nor is poutine, or "curry." You can find all of those, but they're not on every corner.

What's drunk food in China, I wonder. Anyone?

I have fond memories at midnight barbeques.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaokao

Depends on where you're at - in Metro Detroit you can usually find shawarma, Indian, Pakistani, or Thai curry, pizza, taquerias, and a Coney Island within a mile of any random place, and poutine is just a drive across the bridge.

I'd vote for roadside BBQ mystery meat on a stick (烧烤 shaokao), but street food in China is quite regional. For me, a Shandong-style steamed big bao (savoury, not sweet dough) stuffed with all the things hits the spot.

Good mexican food is hard to come by, particularly texmex, and you can't find any texas style queso at all. People in the bay area have never heard of the stuff, even though it's on the menu at even non-mexican resturaunts and pubs in texas. I've seen it on the menu in seattle, idaho, north carolina, but the bay area is an absolute queso desert for some odd reason.

Perhaps because everyone here thinks, as I do, “who needs Tex Mex when you have real Mexican food?”

easy there. I'm not Texan and never even spent much time there. But texmex is its own thing.

If you look up "queso recipe" it often begins "take a pound of Velveeta."

Go easy on your parent, they're just parroting the 2005 version of Mexican food snobbery

And therein lies the problem...

Yeah and I get that, but I just don’t think TexMex is good, and I grew up in a part of the south where people fully believed it was real Mexican food.

Americanized Mexican food should be distinguished from formerly-Mexican food. The southwest has it's own food traditions which are often similar, but distinct, from contemporary Mexico-Mexican food. Dismissing those traditions as "TexMex", like they were made up by Anglos is both offensive and inaccurate.

Sonoran hot dogs my dude!

On my list now. Along with Korean hot dogs.

In Beijing, in '96, it was Weiwuerzu (Uighur) rouchuanr. Cheap-ass fatty lamb on sticks, fast grilled over charcoal. Seasoned w/ chilli, cumin, and salt I think. Buy 'em by the fistfull.