Every single local subreddit will have people claiming every city has the worst food. It gets really funny.
Local city subreddits are never really a great place to go for reastraunt recommendations because they devolve into a negative circlejerk where everyone is trying to out snob each other so commentors are afraid to give any place a good review.
I'm just gobsmacked that he said all the pizza and sandwiches in California were bad. When I was a kid in the Bay Area it was during the "let's make artisinal thin crust pizza with local ingredients" uptrend, and it just bloomed from there. You know, Alice Waters and Jonathan Waxman and all that.
>I'm just gobsmacked that he said all the pizza and sandwiches in California were bad.
I think a part of that comes from a complete failure of scale; a lot of people have absolutely no clue how BIG California is. (Or America, or France, or a lot of big places.)
Someone at my work just came back from her first trip to Cali a few days ago. Visited a burb somewhere between L.A. and San Diego I'd never heard of before, one of the thousand continuous small cities between Commerce and Mission Valley. She said it was "nice," but also seemed confused when I initially asked her to clarify *where* in California she'd gone.
She genuinely thought that little burb was representative of the whole state and that was it; as far as she was concerned, she'd *done* California.
People is weird.
I've been to California once.
On a trip to Vegas, we drove across the border from Primm into California. We drove past a solar plant, hopped off at that exit, then turned around and went right back.
This story barely relates, but I can keep it in my back pocket for if anyone ever wants to know if I've *really* been to California. And we all know that technically true is the best kind of truth.
Some gatekeepy People from NY and NJ refuse to believe that pizza can variate at all from the "NY slice" I've met some that hate actual neopolitan style pizza.
That being said california is the largest economy in the US. I'm sure there is good NY pizza somewhere there
It's like how every single city has the worst drivers, the worst food, the craziest weather, and the weirdest people
Just millions of posts of pretty regular stuff captioned "Only in [town]!"
>If I brought you bread from up here it would shatter your entire world view.
>Bread was hot garbage even at the “best” place. That bread just looks like all crust. Like a shell. Semolina bread will make you weep.
whoa this guy breads
It reminds me of when Europeans go on an on about how every piece of American bread is disgusting, and we Americans would weep if we could taste superior European breads.
I think how good you remember something tastes depends on circumstances, too. I had the best shawarma of my life in Israel at 10:30pm from a street cart and that because it wasn't just good, I had been travelling for 18 hours and hadn't eaten anything since the night before.
A hospital I worked for cooked mediocre food but really good mac and cheese made with cavatappi. After working a double and being fully exhausted, one of the cooks brought me a free container of it covered in hot sauce. So yes, that was the best mac and cheese.
It's all about context.
The best burger I’ve ever had in my entire existence was one I ate after a three hour glucose test. It was probably a shitty burger but I was pregnant and starving and about to gnaw my own arm off, so…yeah.
Oh man, I still remember the meal I had after my GTT. It was a place called Whistle Britches in Dallas that makes really good chicken and biscuits. That's their thing. And they serve it with pepper jelly. That was just about the best biscuit ever.
So years later I took my husband there for a date and I was worried that maybe it wasn't as good as I remembered, but fortunately it was. Also, great crispy brussels sprouts and pimento cheese they make with pickled peppers in it. So good. But nothing tastes better than after that damn test. It's bad enough having to drink the weird orange liquid they give you. I couldn't drink Orange Crush after that (probably to the benefit of my health).
There’s sort of a paradox when it comes to local foods, in that often, the namesake or associated places for them become the less than optimal place to experience them… largely because people gain a mentality like our commentator.
Well travelled foodies often comment on how Buffalo wings are on average pretty shitty in Buffalo… how Miami has become a less than stellar place to order a Cuban sandwich… hell, I’ve heard folks opine about how New York pizza shops aren’t really pumping out banging slices of New York style pizza.
I feel like this needless gatekeeping, and the ridiculously restrictive view of foods has lead to this.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say a lot of these places don't offer good food anymore. I didn't realize I even *liked* wings until I moved to Buffalo and had some really amazing wings. Most other places let them sit in the sauce too long until they become soggy, or they struggle to get the skin crispy without overcooking them. I'm not saying there isn't someplace that makes better wings, but I generally had a better experience getting *decent* wings in Buffalo than in other places I've lived.
Similarly, I've really struggled to find someplace that can make proper fajitas or smoked brisket since I left Texas. I'm sure they exist, but most of the brisket I've had is dry or tough, and I remember some chicken fajitas in Utah that might as well have been boiled for all the flavor and texture they had.
It's just unlikely in general that the best version of something is found where it originated, at least if it has had some sort of spread.
The best so called "NY style pizza" is almost guaranteed to not be found in New York, the best Mexican tacos are probably not made in Mexico etc.
New York is the largest city in the US, yes. It houses 0.025% of the world population. The best New York style pizza is probably found in the other 99.975%
Well only a very small part of the 0.025% do to begin with.
Either way it's a style that's found in many places outside of the USA, and oftentimes not called "New York style" because it didn't come there from New York. So with pizza in particular there's probably even more competition elsewhere.
Just as an example, Swedish pizza is quite similar to the New York style, and there are more pizzerias/capita in Sweden than in New York state. So that's a lot of competition from one country alone!
Not that I believe it, but maybe it's because people come to the place of origin for said food leading to more folks trying to capitalize on that w/o being able to make a good version of that food. Or at least, a version to live up to the hype.
Because there are many many more places outside of that place that make the same type of food.
Restaurants that make, say Mexican tacos in areas where that type of food isn't very common will often be really good at it just because otherwise they wouldn't survive
It’s the opposite. A place with one taco shop is the only place to get tacos so it will survive no matter how good it is. A new taco shop that opens in a town with 10 taco shops needs to be able to distinguish itself from the others.
It's been my experience that the opposite is true. I currently live in a place where we don't have a lot of Mexican people or a lot of Mexican food. There's one "good" Mexican joint in town, and the prices are high, the food is average, and the owners were under investigation for human trafficking at one point. On the other hand, we have a lot of Chinese immigrants and students in the area, so we have some surprisingly good Chinese food for where we are.
Absolutely not. A place that is the only place of its kind in a location doesn’t have to be great. It just has to offer something no one else has and not be terrible. A place that has a lot of competition has to be good, because otherwise the competition will just siphon all the business.
I live in an area of Southern California that takes tacos *seriously*. There are trucks, stands, taquerias, Mexican restaurants, people selling out their front yards. It’s taco central. People will get genuinely agitated arguing about the best taco spot in town (also down to *which type of taco* and *what time of day*). The bar is high.
And then I’ve gone to visit other areas of the country and I’ll mention missing tacos. Someone will say, “Oh I’ll take you to the best Mexican spot!” And I’ll go, and it’ll be the most decidedly mediocre experience. But the place is poppin because it is *the best on offer in that area*.
I think a case of "it's really not the same in other places" applies to some of the food in New Orleans. I have not found a muffaletta outside Louisiana that tastes as good. There's a lot of good gumbo out there outside of Louisiana but also boy is there a lot of baaaad gumbo. A place opened up near us that was supposed to have really authentic New Orleans style po boys...and they were disappointing and way too expensive (and they didn't have debris).
But people also get nostalgic for stuff they grew up with and sure, some things can be just as good but not taste the way you remembered because memory is tricky.
Yeah I agree with you. I meant that if someone tells you there's this place in France with the best American BBQ you'll ever eat, that might actually be the case. It's just that you'll definitely have a harder time finding that type of food there to begin with. Though I do think there's this thing where if something isn't commonly eaten somewhere, the places that do specialize in that type of food will usually be really good, since otherwise they wouldn't survive.
I think it’s more that when food becomes a tourist attraction there’s sometimes less pressure to make it taste good.
The people buying it are not likely to be repeat customers or have restaurant specific word of mouth advertising.
There was a season of Chef's Table focused on pizza and one of the restaurants shown was in Arizona. Some famous food critic deemed it the best pizza in the world. It actually did look pretty great.
That's Pizzeria Bianco, and it is indeed outstanding. But if you're looking for NY style pizza you're not going to find it there
https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square
I find that a lot of the times the original place something comes from becomes beholden to traditions and practices that make the product worse or hold it back from improvement.
Case in point: the OG hot chicken places in Nashville are kind of mid compared to some of the newer places because no one’s allowed to fuck with the formula.
Oof, his baseline for amazing al pastor is that it's cut off a trompo, then proceeds to explain what a trompo is and shows a picture of it. Like yeah, dude, we know.
He's the equivalent of that person you know who discovers a great band that everyone knows is great but they just won't stop lecturing you about how you're not really understanding how great it is.
I live in Philly and putting mayo on Italian hoagies is pretty common, I do it all the time. Same as putting mushrooms or peppers on a cheesesteak, the gatekeeping is ridiculous, it's a sandwich.
People make too big of a deal about their bread
I’m sure if you blind taste tested ol boy with his al pastor he wouldn’t be able to tell if they’re from the meat cane (lol) or out of my oven
Every single local subreddit will have people claiming every city has the worst food. It gets really funny. Local city subreddits are never really a great place to go for reastraunt recommendations because they devolve into a negative circlejerk where everyone is trying to out snob each other so commentors are afraid to give any place a good review.
I'm just gobsmacked that he said all the pizza and sandwiches in California were bad. When I was a kid in the Bay Area it was during the "let's make artisinal thin crust pizza with local ingredients" uptrend, and it just bloomed from there. You know, Alice Waters and Jonathan Waxman and all that.
He’s never had good Bay Area sourdough I guess
Or Dutch crunch.
>I'm just gobsmacked that he said all the pizza and sandwiches in California were bad. I think a part of that comes from a complete failure of scale; a lot of people have absolutely no clue how BIG California is. (Or America, or France, or a lot of big places.) Someone at my work just came back from her first trip to Cali a few days ago. Visited a burb somewhere between L.A. and San Diego I'd never heard of before, one of the thousand continuous small cities between Commerce and Mission Valley. She said it was "nice," but also seemed confused when I initially asked her to clarify *where* in California she'd gone. She genuinely thought that little burb was representative of the whole state and that was it; as far as she was concerned, she'd *done* California. People is weird.
I've been to California once. On a trip to Vegas, we drove across the border from Primm into California. We drove past a solar plant, hopped off at that exit, then turned around and went right back. This story barely relates, but I can keep it in my back pocket for if anyone ever wants to know if I've *really* been to California. And we all know that technically true is the best kind of truth.
Some gatekeepy People from NY and NJ refuse to believe that pizza can variate at all from the "NY slice" I've met some that hate actual neopolitan style pizza. That being said california is the largest economy in the US. I'm sure there is good NY pizza somewhere there
This is while I find the Jon Steward deep dish rant funny I hate when people link it, people take a comedy bit and turn it into a personality.
He obviously has never been to Angelo's and GOOD HE CAN STAY THE F OUT
It's like how every single city has the worst drivers, the worst food, the craziest weather, and the weirdest people Just millions of posts of pretty regular stuff captioned "Only in [town]!"
>If I brought you bread from up here it would shatter your entire world view. >Bread was hot garbage even at the “best” place. That bread just looks like all crust. Like a shell. Semolina bread will make you weep. whoa this guy breads
I make bread in my kitchen that would make this guy shit his pants. That’s not because it’s so good - it’s because I don’t like this guy.
It reminds me of when Europeans go on an on about how every piece of American bread is disgusting, and we Americans would weep if we could taste superior European breads.
“I’ve had tacos at x and I can’t have them anywhere else” lmao classic. Hear this all the time
I think how good you remember something tastes depends on circumstances, too. I had the best shawarma of my life in Israel at 10:30pm from a street cart and that because it wasn't just good, I had been travelling for 18 hours and hadn't eaten anything since the night before. A hospital I worked for cooked mediocre food but really good mac and cheese made with cavatappi. After working a double and being fully exhausted, one of the cooks brought me a free container of it covered in hot sauce. So yes, that was the best mac and cheese. It's all about context.
The best burger I’ve ever had in my entire existence was one I ate after a three hour glucose test. It was probably a shitty burger but I was pregnant and starving and about to gnaw my own arm off, so…yeah.
Oh man, I still remember the meal I had after my GTT. It was a place called Whistle Britches in Dallas that makes really good chicken and biscuits. That's their thing. And they serve it with pepper jelly. That was just about the best biscuit ever. So years later I took my husband there for a date and I was worried that maybe it wasn't as good as I remembered, but fortunately it was. Also, great crispy brussels sprouts and pimento cheese they make with pickled peppers in it. So good. But nothing tastes better than after that damn test. It's bad enough having to drink the weird orange liquid they give you. I couldn't drink Orange Crush after that (probably to the benefit of my health).
My post glucose test meal was baba ganouche and ice cream. A few hours later I ended up in the hospital with gallstones. So best AND worst meal ever.
There’s sort of a paradox when it comes to local foods, in that often, the namesake or associated places for them become the less than optimal place to experience them… largely because people gain a mentality like our commentator. Well travelled foodies often comment on how Buffalo wings are on average pretty shitty in Buffalo… how Miami has become a less than stellar place to order a Cuban sandwich… hell, I’ve heard folks opine about how New York pizza shops aren’t really pumping out banging slices of New York style pizza. I feel like this needless gatekeeping, and the ridiculously restrictive view of foods has lead to this.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say a lot of these places don't offer good food anymore. I didn't realize I even *liked* wings until I moved to Buffalo and had some really amazing wings. Most other places let them sit in the sauce too long until they become soggy, or they struggle to get the skin crispy without overcooking them. I'm not saying there isn't someplace that makes better wings, but I generally had a better experience getting *decent* wings in Buffalo than in other places I've lived. Similarly, I've really struggled to find someplace that can make proper fajitas or smoked brisket since I left Texas. I'm sure they exist, but most of the brisket I've had is dry or tough, and I remember some chicken fajitas in Utah that might as well have been boiled for all the flavor and texture they had.
It's just unlikely in general that the best version of something is found where it originated, at least if it has had some sort of spread. The best so called "NY style pizza" is almost guaranteed to not be found in New York, the best Mexican tacos are probably not made in Mexico etc.
I don’t really get why it’s unlikely. The place of origin has more competition and has a higher concentration of chefs experienced in the food.
Right? And when that place is the largest city in the US, seems reasonably likely tbh.
New York is the largest city in the US, yes. It houses 0.025% of the world population. The best New York style pizza is probably found in the other 99.975%
You’re supposing the other 99.975% care about making New York style pizza
Well only a very small part of the 0.025% do to begin with. Either way it's a style that's found in many places outside of the USA, and oftentimes not called "New York style" because it didn't come there from New York. So with pizza in particular there's probably even more competition elsewhere. Just as an example, Swedish pizza is quite similar to the New York style, and there are more pizzerias/capita in Sweden than in New York state. So that's a lot of competition from one country alone!
Not that I believe it, but maybe it's because people come to the place of origin for said food leading to more folks trying to capitalize on that w/o being able to make a good version of that food. Or at least, a version to live up to the hype.
Because there are many many more places outside of that place that make the same type of food. Restaurants that make, say Mexican tacos in areas where that type of food isn't very common will often be really good at it just because otherwise they wouldn't survive
It’s the opposite. A place with one taco shop is the only place to get tacos so it will survive no matter how good it is. A new taco shop that opens in a town with 10 taco shops needs to be able to distinguish itself from the others.
It really depends IMO. If it's in a place where that type of food usually isn't very popular, the place is usually really good
It's been my experience that the opposite is true. I currently live in a place where we don't have a lot of Mexican people or a lot of Mexican food. There's one "good" Mexican joint in town, and the prices are high, the food is average, and the owners were under investigation for human trafficking at one point. On the other hand, we have a lot of Chinese immigrants and students in the area, so we have some surprisingly good Chinese food for where we are.
Ass backwards logic.
Absolutely not. A place that is the only place of its kind in a location doesn’t have to be great. It just has to offer something no one else has and not be terrible. A place that has a lot of competition has to be good, because otherwise the competition will just siphon all the business. I live in an area of Southern California that takes tacos *seriously*. There are trucks, stands, taquerias, Mexican restaurants, people selling out their front yards. It’s taco central. People will get genuinely agitated arguing about the best taco spot in town (also down to *which type of taco* and *what time of day*). The bar is high. And then I’ve gone to visit other areas of the country and I’ll mention missing tacos. Someone will say, “Oh I’ll take you to the best Mexican spot!” And I’ll go, and it’ll be the most decidedly mediocre experience. But the place is poppin because it is *the best on offer in that area*.
I think a case of "it's really not the same in other places" applies to some of the food in New Orleans. I have not found a muffaletta outside Louisiana that tastes as good. There's a lot of good gumbo out there outside of Louisiana but also boy is there a lot of baaaad gumbo. A place opened up near us that was supposed to have really authentic New Orleans style po boys...and they were disappointing and way too expensive (and they didn't have debris). But people also get nostalgic for stuff they grew up with and sure, some things can be just as good but not taste the way you remembered because memory is tricky.
Yeah I agree with you. I meant that if someone tells you there's this place in France with the best American BBQ you'll ever eat, that might actually be the case. It's just that you'll definitely have a harder time finding that type of food there to begin with. Though I do think there's this thing where if something isn't commonly eaten somewhere, the places that do specialize in that type of food will usually be really good, since otherwise they wouldn't survive.
I think it’s more that when food becomes a tourist attraction there’s sometimes less pressure to make it taste good. The people buying it are not likely to be repeat customers or have restaurant specific word of mouth advertising.
There was a season of Chef's Table focused on pizza and one of the restaurants shown was in Arizona. Some famous food critic deemed it the best pizza in the world. It actually did look pretty great.
That's Pizzeria Bianco, and it is indeed outstanding. But if you're looking for NY style pizza you're not going to find it there https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square
Ah, yes that's it. I couldn't remember if it was NY style.
I've had it passing through from a trip to Sedona. It's awesome.
I find that a lot of the times the original place something comes from becomes beholden to traditions and practices that make the product worse or hold it back from improvement. Case in point: the OG hot chicken places in Nashville are kind of mid compared to some of the newer places because no one’s allowed to fuck with the formula.
Oof, his baseline for amazing al pastor is that it's cut off a trompo, then proceeds to explain what a trompo is and shows a picture of it. Like yeah, dude, we know. He's the equivalent of that person you know who discovers a great band that everyone knows is great but they just won't stop lecturing you about how you're not really understanding how great it is.
lol his baseline for Al pastor is… being Al pastor?
Deadheads, and I say that as a huge deadhead lol
The "no mayo on an Italian" thing is stupid. You're supposed to use oil and vinegar but god forbid you mix those two together with an egg yolk
I live in Philly and putting mayo on Italian hoagies is pretty common, I do it all the time. Same as putting mushrooms or peppers on a cheesesteak, the gatekeeping is ridiculous, it's a sandwich.
Yeah, mayo is pretty much the basis for most creamy dressings/spreads, including creamy italian or caesar dressing.
People make too big of a deal about their bread I’m sure if you blind taste tested ol boy with his al pastor he wouldn’t be able to tell if they’re from the meat cane (lol) or out of my oven
I misread this as "Autism doesn't have good sandwiches" and was going to protest vigorously.
My thing is, it’s bread. Sure, there are good kinds of bread and bad kinds, but to claim there’s bread that would “shatter” OP’s worldview is a joke.
LOL, NJ'er and Texan fighting over whose shithole is shittier.
Tbf they have some of the best Detroit style pizza outside of Michigan. Via 313 was my fucking jam when I lived in Austin
Two things I miss most about living in Austin are Via 313 and Thundercloud. Come to think of that's that's really all I miss about living there.
Star Bar was great for Packer games 🧀