Ramen in NYC is mostly an exoticized item served at comparatively fancier places than the typically utilitarian presentation you'll find all over Japan. It's no wonder that you can find it at $20+ in Brooklyn.
It's interesting to see how foods become either premium (ala Japanese in the US) or commoditized like Vietnamese or Thai in the US. On the other hand, In Japan Thai or Indian can be premium cuisines.
On the other hand, most of it is presentation and perception. You can get a $5 burger as well as find a $20 burger --if you search hard enough you can find a $5 with the same quality as the $20 version --so it's not always exoticism that does the trick.
Pricing strategies for restaurants are not driven by whole-market perceptions but many combining factors such as local competition, available space, labor and rental costs, hours of available custom, etc.
To put it another way, you can do a high end anything restaurant, but takeaway makes far more sense in a high traffic location with massive rush hours, high rents and little available space, no foot traffic after 5PM and no access after 8PM.
As other commenters have said, its not specific to any cuisine. You can have "premium" any cuisine that you like. The difference seems mostly to be the people starting these businesses. If its easy for people from other countries to get a visa/start a business in the US, that will attract more "premium chefs". But if its not that easy, and the people running the restaurants are first-timers or relatives of immigrants just trying to make money, it would be hard for them to open a "premium restaurant".
I understand some of those aspects -- the curious part is that one cuisine from a third country might be seen as cheap food in an adopting country and premium in another adopting country -generally speaking.
I recently ate at a Chinese restaurant. My Korean roommate took me there with his family and told me that it was run by Korean people. I learned that Chinese food in Korea is fine dining, not the cheap shlock they dish out here.
Enough Korean people have come to Atlanta that there is a restaurant there aimed specifically at giving Koreans a taste of home, that taste involved a completely different cuisine from both American Chinese food and Chinese Chinese food.
Something to be tucked in the back of one's mind is that in France most French eat normal French food --not fine dining French food, some people do take their time to cook somewhat complicated dinners. In China people eat regular Chinese food, not fine dining Chinese food --based mostly on: fried noodles, rice or soup stock. Each will have some kind of meat and wilted veggies --not many people cook at home. It's greasy, it's tasty (in the way salty greasy things are tasty) --but it's not by any means great food. For fine dining they will go to a banquet dinner, or some foreign fare --even tacos are exotic, if you can find them.
I never got the impression that Chinese food is upscale as a Korean. 짜장면 may as well be pizza and hot dogs for Koreans, for example. However, the Chinese cuisine meal I had for well over $300 / head in Choson hotel years ago was certainly nice. 12 year old me still asked for 짜장면 and they brought it over from across the street probably.
It wasn't Golden Buddha I hope? That place is what celebrity chef David Chang probably would charmingly refer to as "bad" Chinese food that is addictive, and it's decided not nice by any stretch of the imagination. As an out of town Atlanta Korean I'm still clueless about what most Koreans know here ITP and what's around Duluth.
Had to go look it up, it was Fung Mei off of Pleasant Hill.
Yes, they absolutely loved the Jajangmyeon. (짜장면 for those curious) I couldn't eat it.
Now that I'm thinking about it, they didn't really describe Chinese food as upscale. But more as like a treat. We're super spoiled here in America with all these different kinds of cuisines.
ITP the best Chinese restaurant IMO is Chong Qing Hot Pot in Chamblee. We had good meals at Northern China Eatery on Buford Highway, but Chong Qing is way better.
I'll edit this with the best Korean restaurant when I can get back with my roomie on where it moved to. -- edit, sorry he doesn't know himself. But the original restaurant we used to go to is called Yet Tuh. The owner got fed up with the small space and moved the staff out to the sticks.
There of course are exceptions to all sorts of things, but generally speaking these things hold. There are also high-end restaurants which serve mexican cuisine, but by and large, most establishments selling Mexican food sell what poor Mexicans understand as fast food in Mexico --but one can also find these to be expensive in far away places like Japan or China where reproductions using more local flavors can go for relatively high prices.
Part of it with Japanese food in the US is that word associates with "sushi" for most Americans and Sushi/Sashimi is decidedly not inexpensive in Japan for the most part. Some of the conveyor belt places are pretty reasonable but a lot of sushi is pricey.
Ramen's becoming more popular now but it seems as if there isn't a lot of demand between 50 cent package of Ramen noodles and $15-20 quality Ramen place.
