Product: Food appearance has a great influence in my decision; I tend to eat what appeals to my sight. In my opinion, the local places that we visited in all three countries don’t do a very good in presenting their product. Food is not presented in any fashion as to provoke your curiosity and your senses, but they just give you food on a plate. Food promotion ties in very closely here.

Price: Both Vietnam and China have very inexpensive food which is appealing to us as students and gives us more choices too. Prices also tended to be the almost the same in all the restaurants. South Korea is almost as expensive as the United States. This limited our options which in turn made the decision process a little faster.

Place: Restaurants in Asia, just like restrooms, are a little shocking. To me, most of them looked like dirty little places where I would never dare to eat. It took a great deal of effort on my part to bring myself to eat in most of the local places. However, not all the places were that bad. You could find really nice places where you could go in and have a nice meal. You just had to spend more time looking for a place to eat.

Promotion: Usually done by the person at the front desk. They tried to explain what they had the best possible taking into account the difficulties due to language differences. Language wasn’t such a big problem in Vietnam because mostly everyone speaks English, but both in China and South Korea we were very much dependent upon nonverbal communication.