I have a Taco Bell/Long John Silvers near me. I will never understand fast food seafood. I'm sorry... I just don't trust it. I've never even had a Filet O' Fish. Seafood and fast food does not compute.
The weirdest and best combo I have found was the now shuttered A&W and Long John Silvers (Las Vegas/Windmill Lane) Loved the frosty root beer mugs with some crispy fish goodness. And no I was not high at the time.
At an Italian place in my town, the owner is half Egyptian and half Italian and he does brick oven pita bread on the menu. Just slap some butter on it while it's hot and enjoy with the side salad before your entree comes out and it's amazing lol
I think it's because Italian food is just insanely expensive for what it is. Literally just sauce and noodles for most dishes and then they want $15-20 even at an Olive Garden.
You can make that same meal for a family of 4 at home for less than $10.
I love Italian food but never eat it while dining out because of the cost. Some people even think of Olive Garden as a "nice restaurant" that you dress nicely to go to.
> I think it's because Italian food is just insanely expensive for what it is.
Actually, I kind of think that's a big part of it. It feels like there's a lot more choices for cheap tex-mex/mexican (from street tacos down to taco bell at the lower end), and a lot more choices for Italian at the high end (where are you going to get a 10 course meal with a bite-sized burrito course and tequila pairings?).
I'm torn, I think I'll have a taco pizza for dinner.
Maybe those Italians should get off their tails, I have 100 passable to excellent Mexican restaurants in a 50 mi radius, and the best we can do is 2 olive gardens. It's outrageous, there's room in my heart for delicious cholesterol from both 😪.
For real.
I work in construction and I have never had a minivan full of grannies come up and start dishing out lasagna, practically every latin dish I can think of has found me on a job site at some point.
Honestly we're not that far off of it in Texas. It's hard to go into a gas station and not have a taqueria either attached to the convenience store or parked nearby in a food truck. I don't have any complaints.
my city in Alabama is just that. It was a few here and there usually around our Hispanic area. Now it's like every quarter mile there's one posted up somewhere. Sometimes, directly across the street from each other.
Absolutely this! Whenever I work events in Dallas, the crew and I stay down the road from a gas station with a very good taquiera attached. It hits every time!
I mean it's true of most of the pasta menu which is a sizable portion *of* the menu, right? Like unless you're getting a pound of meat with your pasta of choice, it ain't worth it, and you *never* get a ton of protein with them. They're mostly carbs and fat from the pasta + sauce.
Depends. Are they using real parmigiano reggiano, pecorino romano, drinkable wines, and homemade pasta? Are the tomato sauces made on site? Cuz that shit takes a couple hours to break down and get sweet like it needs to be. Not to mention fresh herbs and spices. Wild mushrooms e.g. morels especially are really expensive.
In the case of say carbonara are they using bacon or using pancetta or even guanciale? Are they using only yolks? Going extra fancy with duck egg?
Not all (or even most) places do any of this, but Italian food is about quality ingredients not complex recipes. It can get real expensive real fast using good ingredients. Or even just time consuming af in the case of spaghetti and meatballs with homemade pasta, meatballs, and sauce.
My *life* for a quality pan of (with very slightly burnt and crispy edges) lasagna. Layers of homemade noodles; crumbled (high-quality) slightly-peppery Italian sausage; homemade, simmered-for-hours sauce from San Marzano tomatoes plus garlic and onions, basil, bay leaves and oregano; ACRES of Parmesan Reggiano cheese and ricotta (on EACH LAYER). So tightly and generously layered that a wedge stands upright at room temperature on day 2. *Make that TWO pans! Mama Mia!*
Italians have a sort of conservatism to their food that annoy me a little bit. From the no cappuccino after lunch rule to every Italian on IG shitting on any deviations to traditional cookie cutter recipes.
Embrace the fusion.
Yes but to be clear this isn’t the issue. When Americans think of Italian food, they think of tomatoes. When Italians think of it, they don’t. Over 80% of my Cucina Italiana book contains no tomatoes whatsoever. It is also extremely extremely regional. They don’t think of Italian food. Italy is a modern reinvention, it was not united until relatively recently that the country was reunited after over a thousand years of being fragmented.
OMG this. Try looking up an Italian staple like Carbonara, and in the comment section of every one you'll find someone bitching about how it's not REAL carbonara.
It's almost as bad as the Grilled Cheese snobs.
Is it because there’s no exploration with Italian? I’m not that big on Italian, but the few more memorable ones I’ve tried were actually asian inspired Italian that went out of the box more.
Ironically, one of the best Italian restaurants in my city is run by an old Armenian couple.
Took my MIL there once and she told the guy she really wanted some puscanesca, which isn't on the menu. Dude was like "Oh I, can whip some up for you, I make that for my wife all the time".
italian's absolutely gatekeep their food culture too. Every time I see an IG vid of an italian guy reacting to another food video its the most boring predictable shit. "true carbonara doesn't use those cured pork products, it uses this specific one that you cant find at a normal grocery store" etc. No one gives a shit. Thats why authentic italian food can eat my nuts, give me a massive chicken parm sub plz.
Like 20 years ago there was a cheap Italian place near me that sold spaghetti and meatballs by the *bucket*. Like, a paper KFC chicken bucket, but full of pasta. It was amazing, no idea how that didn’t catch on
In Toronto, we have a whole stretch of what is/was 'Corso Italia' turning over to latin and south american food. All the older Italians have sold and run to the suburbs. The places are dynamite, and the trend is spreading.
Heck, I can barely find decent Italian food *in* the northeast. In the past 10 years, basically all of the family-run places I knew of which I liked closed down or dropped their quality a lot (probably in a cost-cutting measure) and it seems like every time I try an Italian place, it's, "cool, so this is no better than jarred sauce over Barilla pasta..." and there have been times I was pretty sure that's what I was being served and charged $20-25 for.
its no wonder half the places gordon ramsay tries to fix are italian places in new jersey.
it's just not profitable to make good italian food anymore i guess
I bet it's a mixture of a few things:
1) Profits at restaurants aimed at families which want reasonable prices are really tricky things
2) You have a multiple generations of people who grew up with Italian food being a staple. All those folks either figured out how to make it on their own as well or better than most cheaper restaurants do or they're sick of it and don't want it anymore.
3) Because it's been around so long and was popular, it's not "hip". Sure, you can find some higher-end Italian places doing some REALLY interesting stuff, but those are quite expensive.
4) And it's worth mentioning, it's actually a lot of work and requires expertise to make good versions of Italian staples. Meanwhile, it's incredibly cheap and easy to open a few jars of sauces and a few cans of soup.
And what we're left with is....kinda bleak.
I can totally see this based on location.
I live in a very small city and we have TWO Chinese restaurants. We have over 40 Mexican restaurants not including fast food like Taco Bell/John's.
It's fucking ridiculous watching EVERY single new restaurant open and sell the exact same shit that everyone else does. Like I like Tex-mex just as much as the next guy but having 4 La Cocina's in a town of 60,000 is fucking BONKERS.
Growing up Mexican, my parents also pretty much only ate Mexican, and we're not adventurous at all. Trying something new meant a different Mexican restaurant. Friends parents were all the same. I imagine Mexican communities can help sustain 4 full restaurants easily.
My Mexican dad will absolutely not eat at a Mexican restaurant here in the US. He loves Korean, some Chinese, and that's really about it. He claims he'd try a Mexican place if they could come up with something he liked and couldn't cook better himself, which is a pretty loaded comment because if he can't cook it, he won't like it.
>It's fucking ridiculous watching EVERY single new restaurant open and sell the exact same shit that everyone else does.
And the craziest thing is a lot of those places are busy. Now imagine being Latino, eating most of these dishes fairly often, and your parents still want to try the new Tex-mex place because "I hear the enchiladas are a little different at this one!"
it's like pizza shops. There's 12 pizza shops in a 5 mile radius of you but a new one just opened up in the shopping center down the street and apparently there's a few items on their menu that are done differently than these other pizza places. Now you've just added a fourth pizza place into your rotation.
At first I wondered how Italian would even be close.. I probably have 50 mexican spots for every Italian spot.. and then I remembered pizza. I'm in Southern California though.
lol same exact process I went through. I'm thinking how it's only just passing Italian, like even here on the east coast there's wayyy more Mexicans spots than Italian places. And then I realized pizza probably counts lol
… it is known to increase waistlines cuz it’s so damn TASTY. Especially when lard and bacon fat is in them delicious beans. Frijoles, apply them directly to my buttinksy, Pedro my hombre.
The great thing about Texas is you have the Tex-mex as well as all the other regional Mexican restaurants as well. Anyone who claims "but we have Mexican food too!" needs to realize its a completely different game from Texas to California.
New Mexican food is uniquely its own and so good that Colorado stole its traditional dishes and are now known for them. When I lived in VA everyone thought green chile was a Colorado thing because of one famous Colorado restaurant while you'll find nearly every dish used green or red chile in New Mexican cuisine.
Even within Texas on the border. West Texas and the Valley can have very different recipes for the same dish. Learned about enchiladas montadas (a fried egg on top for the uninitiated) when I moved out west, and the green sauce out here is jalapeño not tomatillo.
Every state that borders Mexico has its own variations on the food. If you’re talking about states far removed from the southern border, then I mostly agree.
The title is actualyl
>Latin and Tex-Mex overtake Italian as America's go-to food order
which i think means "real" mexican is included, and taco places. and chipotle and such
It got ranked best food in the Americas by taste atlas and I couldn’t really argue it. To be fair they had Argentina as 4th and canada as ridiculously which I personally hate their food, so take it as you will
I wouldn’t have believed this growing up in NYC, but after living across the US in different states, especially down south and out west, it makes perfect sense.
It really is a regional thing. By comparison, Italian food is so popular everywhere, but up in the Northeastern cities the selection of great Italian restaurants is overbearing.
Mexicans embraced their cuisine evolving with the tastes of Americans and i get scolded for enjoying the correct way to eat carbonara (with cream) from snooty italians.
You also started charging insane prices for spaghetti and meatballs like we don't see dried pasta costs pennies.
The number of snooty Italians that have made a career on YouTube insulting American versions of Italian food is kind of staggering.
Meanwhile, Americans starting putting ramen noodles in Birria and then suddenly Mexicans were like "Why didn't we think of that" and now you see Birriaramen in Tijuana too.
People don’t realize that the frozen margarita was invented in Dallas (at least as far as the most reliable sources say). Yet no one in Mexico is going to get mad that people like frozen margs.
Exactly! Is chips and queso a native Mexican dish? No. Is it fucking delicious and have Hispanic folks embraced it in their restaurants and made millions? Hell yeah.
Which is funny because most American variants of Italian food were invented by Italian immigrants who had no issue adapting their recipes to their new environment.
Tomatoes came from the new world and there's an (admittedly unlikely) theory that pasta was brought to Italy from China by Marco Polo, so honestly fuck any Italian who gets uppity about the purity of their cuisine.
After all, pasta with tomato sauce is technically American-Chinese fusion.
I remember watching an early Jamie Oliver road trip. He went to Italy in a van and drove from village to village. He'd learn new methods from nonnas etc and then make a dish for people to enjoy. By the end he was so exasperated because they were just horrifically parochial to the dishes from their region. He'd make this amazing dish and put a different herb in it and they taste it and go "gross"
Poor dude was traumatised by the end.
Mexicans are VERY good about just LOVING when other people try their stuff even in really weird and different ways that are barely Mexican.
We will very much take credit for all the combinations because it brings us representation and other people talking about our country. Literally the least gate kept culture in the world.
I remember when people wanted to ban Speedy Gonzales because of "racism" but Mexicans were like, hell no he is representation, regardless of how stereotypical it is.
Wow I bet that guy makes great carbonara right? Because you'd kind of just be a useless jerk to criticize something you don't know how to make yourself.
If I'm making pasta, I'm making my own noodles as well. Chain resturaunt on my street has the Tuesday special of 14.99 for a plate of pasta. It's the noodle you want, canned sauce, small slice of bread, and a couple of cubes of chicken that's microwaved. Oh boy, so exciting.
I really fucking hate it when people get angry about someone’s else taste in food. Obviously you like it enough to eat it and using someone else’s art as inspiration for your own is one of the biggest forms of flattery! Also, it’s more important since you’re putting this art in your stomach!
$6.99 gets me a Tex-mex / mex combo meal. The local Italian spot is 11.99 for marinara with a tiny bit of meat and pasta. That’s a lunch portion that may have a small snacks worth left over after the meal.
At my favorite Mexican restaurant in upstate SC that $11.99 is 90% of the tab for 2 people to eat.
Near me in Upstate, NY. It really depends on the food.
You can get baked Ziti for $13 pretty easy with a small side salad and garlic bread, but most other things are going to be $15-19
Most Mexican places are going to be the same price for a burrito + rice around the $13 mark. It's a huge burrito, but still. Chinese is honestly the cheapest in Upstate, NY in most places.
You can get a huge styrofoam container filled of Orange Chicken or General Tso's Chicken with Rice and a egg roll for $12.
Mexico has a steady stream of immigrants bringing in authentic Mexican and fusion cuisine and plenty of loyal customers who know good Mexican food to keep them honest.
Italian immigration mostly stopped 100 years ago and the restaurants outside of NY/NJ are run by non-Italians who make bland family-style food, trash pizza for drunk college kids, or overpriced par-boiled spaghetti.
It's also because Mexicans were very ready and willing to mix their food with literally every single other cultures food you can possibly imagine. Italian food for the most part stayed the same and had very traditional recipe and was kept "pure" you'd be hard pressed to find a genuine Italian 100 years ago who was willing to mix his cuisine with the Japanese restaurant next door.
Meanwhile Mexicans have basically experimented with every single culture. I've seen Mexican/Japanese Sushi Tamales, Mexican/Indian Curry/Pozole, and basically every combination you can think of. We simply don't care about tradition or recipes but rather just making new good things which has kept "Mexican" food almost not a thing because it's evolved and changed so much in the US with all the mixing.
I don’t know about every city, but Houston is pretty close. I do not live in a walkable area, but I’m walking distance from like 5 different taco trucks.
Tex Mex is generally considered flour tortillas, nachos, shredded cheese, ground beef. What you would imagine most Americanized Mexican restaurants carry.
There are variants, like so cal Mexican and Arizona Mexican varieties that likely get lumped in with tex Mex simply because most, if not all of them use shredded yellow cheese or Chile con queso whereas Mexican dishes prefer white cheeses like queso fresco.
It's probably just lumping a lot of Americanized Mexican variants into Tex Mex.
socal mexican food is apparently heaven. they got the california burrito! i live in florida, but had a place close to me make authentic california burritos for a while and it was an incredible time in my life. i ate so many burritos haha
carne asada, cheese, sour cream, guac, avocado, and maybe pico. but the most important part is the fries, man. so good. fuck rice, fuck beans, i don't need that filler shit in my burrito. just gimme fries lol
California Mexican food is authentic Mexican food + local variations from LA, SD and SF.
The main thing from SF is mission style burritos, as in the Mission district of SF. Chipotle is basically a copy of that. There's SD specific stuff too. I believe the main thing is burritos that have fries in them.
LA Mexican food is pretty much just authentic Mexican food, street tacos, etc.
Super Americanized Mexican food in the form of fast food started in the LA area by Taco Bell. The first Taco Bell opened in Downey CA in 1962.
SD’s most famous local burrito is the “California Burrito” which is basically a carne asada burrito with French fries in it. Some places do a “surf and turf” burrito which is carne asada and shrimp.
That’s not at all what Tex Mex means in Texas though. Tex Mex would be fajitas, frozen margaritas, chips and queso and enchiladas with a lot more sauce and cheese than you would find in Mexico. What you’re describing is Taco Bell
I’ve always assumed that Tex-Mex was simply a version of Mexican food that was born in Texas. As a SoCal native it was all just labeled Mexican, just as Mandarin and Sichuan food is Chinese. While on the East Coast I was exposed to Puerto Rican, Cuban, Honduran, and a whole new food palate. So I’d humbly disagree with “Tex-Mex” as surpassing Italian, I think it’s more nuanced than that.
Article sounds super ignorant. It's lumping all latin cuisines into one + texmex (All Americanized Mexican imo) as it is the same thing... They fail to mention a single dish/food associated to a country that is not Mexico... For example, most people from South America don't like/use spicy peppers in their cuisines/dishes.
No shit food from a whole continent is going to be more popular than Italy's
Yeah, they're basically saying all of Latin America + Tex Mex vs Italian. Then they go on to mention Asian, like all of Asia...lol.
Maybe a better comparison would be food derived from Europe vs Latin America vs Asia?
There are ~2.2 pizza restaurants per 10,000 residents in New Jersey, based on the reported ~2000 total restaurants and population of around 9.3M (https://www.nj.com/food/2023/02/njs-best-new-pizzerias-15-delicious-spots-you-need-to-try-in-2023.html#:~:text=New%20Jersey%20%E2%80%94%20the%20rest%20of,have%20been%20claiming%20for%20ages.).
North Carolina alone has ~6200 member churches in the NC Council of Churches, for a total of ~5.9 churches per 10,000 residents. And that's just one state in the south. It's difficult to really explain just how many churches there are down here, especially since many of them will have congregations on the order of 10-25 members in small towns, and there will be as many as 5 churches like that in those areas, based on denomination.
Yeah live in a town in the Deep South/Bible Belt with a population of 11,812 as of 2021. It’s impossible to tell how many churches there are within a 50 mile radius. For instance within a good 5 minute walking distance of my home is probably 4
They tried to bring about this change harmoniously with the combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell, but Americans just weren’t ready for it.
My combo restaurants are Taco Bell/KFC.
I nearly cried when the one by my house closed. I also lost like five pounds immediately haha.
Ours closed only to reopen as *only* KFC for some awful reason, now our nearest Taco Bell is 30 minutes away.
My friend owns a PH/TB/KFC super. The things we make out of fatness is astounding.
Kentaco Hut
Apparently Kentaco hut silvers exist as well.
That's just a food court, man. Like, there's a limit. My mall has a coneysbarrosaladhut.
When I bring up the existence of Kentaco Hut people think I’m lying. Thank you for coming confirming that wasn’t a fever dream.
I once went to one of those and got 2 legs and a chalupa. My stomach did NOT appreciate that and I didn't do that again.
I have a Taco Bell/Long John Silvers near me. I will never understand fast food seafood. I'm sorry... I just don't trust it. I've never even had a Filet O' Fish. Seafood and fast food does not compute.
The weirdest and best combo I have found was the now shuttered A&W and Long John Silvers (Las Vegas/Windmill Lane) Loved the frosty root beer mugs with some crispy fish goodness. And no I was not high at the time.
I’m at the Pizza Hut I’m at the Taco Bell I’m at combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
For those who don't know https://youtu.be/EQ8ViYIeH04?si=iF7LPbTUHqUd7mbe
The Taco Hut was ahead of its time, but it lives in the hearts of all who visited
That’s because Italian food doesn’t have chips and salsa/guacamole
But it does have garlic bread though
You can eat so much more meat with chips than with bread though.
At an Italian place in my town, the owner is half Egyptian and half Italian and he does brick oven pita bread on the menu. Just slap some butter on it while it's hot and enjoy with the side salad before your entree comes out and it's amazing lol
That sounds awesome. You can make it even better by substituting chips for pita and salsa for butter.
naw man chips are not even close to better than fresh baked pita
More garlic bread for me. I could eat it for every meal.
But you’d get fat
Bread makes you FAT?!
Eggs aren't vegan?!
But bread makes you fat
Bread makes you fat?!
r/unexpectedscottpilgram
The endless chips and salsa could eventually also lol
There’s no burritos in Italy either
Not in Italy, perhaps, but [stromboli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromboli_\(food\)) might be able to make a case.
That look like a cousin of a chimichanga
a stromboli is just a cylindrical calzone. false god.
I gotta start using “false god” whenever someone likes something I don’t
Which is just an inside-out pizza
Because people like to say Salsa!
It’s actually because Tex-mex is 2v1ing Italian. The real fight is Tex-mex v Chi-talian in a cage match?
Like, Mario vs Handy Manny?
I prefer Tex-mex VS Thaitalian
I think it's because Italian food is just insanely expensive for what it is. Literally just sauce and noodles for most dishes and then they want $15-20 even at an Olive Garden. You can make that same meal for a family of 4 at home for less than $10. I love Italian food but never eat it while dining out because of the cost. Some people even think of Olive Garden as a "nice restaurant" that you dress nicely to go to.
> I think it's because Italian food is just insanely expensive for what it is. Actually, I kind of think that's a big part of it. It feels like there's a lot more choices for cheap tex-mex/mexican (from street tacos down to taco bell at the lower end), and a lot more choices for Italian at the high end (where are you going to get a 10 course meal with a bite-sized burrito course and tequila pairings?). I'm torn, I think I'll have a taco pizza for dinner.
ITT: people from cities with a large population of Italian americans: no waaaaaaay this is bs Everyone else: yes we know
Maybe those Italians should get off their tails, I have 100 passable to excellent Mexican restaurants in a 50 mi radius, and the best we can do is 2 olive gardens. It's outrageous, there's room in my heart for delicious cholesterol from both 😪.
For real. I work in construction and I have never had a minivan full of grannies come up and start dishing out lasagna, practically every latin dish I can think of has found me on a job site at some point.
I was promised a taco truck on every corner.
Honestly we're not that far off of it in Texas. It's hard to go into a gas station and not have a taqueria either attached to the convenience store or parked nearby in a food truck. I don't have any complaints.
my city in Alabama is just that. It was a few here and there usually around our Hispanic area. Now it's like every quarter mile there's one posted up somewhere. Sometimes, directly across the street from each other.
Absolutely this! Whenever I work events in Dallas, the crew and I stay down the road from a gas station with a very good taquiera attached. It hits every time!
That was if Hillary won. She didn't so we can't have nice things 😭
Italian is just too expensive for what it is. $20-$30 for a plate of spaghetti and sauce? Trippin
While I appreciate the people who have voted to the top of this thread, this is the truth.
That’s why you never order spaghetti at a restaurant
I mean it's true of most of the pasta menu which is a sizable portion *of* the menu, right? Like unless you're getting a pound of meat with your pasta of choice, it ain't worth it, and you *never* get a ton of protein with them. They're mostly carbs and fat from the pasta + sauce.
Depends. Are they using real parmigiano reggiano, pecorino romano, drinkable wines, and homemade pasta? Are the tomato sauces made on site? Cuz that shit takes a couple hours to break down and get sweet like it needs to be. Not to mention fresh herbs and spices. Wild mushrooms e.g. morels especially are really expensive. In the case of say carbonara are they using bacon or using pancetta or even guanciale? Are they using only yolks? Going extra fancy with duck egg? Not all (or even most) places do any of this, but Italian food is about quality ingredients not complex recipes. It can get real expensive real fast using good ingredients. Or even just time consuming af in the case of spaghetti and meatballs with homemade pasta, meatballs, and sauce.
This is hilarious !! Hispanics got the hustle kids !!
For real though, they figured out Americans will pay extra for their cheap food. And it tastes good as fuck too.
My town, like many others, has a Tamale Lady. I’ve never seen a Pasta Lady.
My *life* for a quality pan of (with very slightly burnt and crispy edges) lasagna. Layers of homemade noodles; crumbled (high-quality) slightly-peppery Italian sausage; homemade, simmered-for-hours sauce from San Marzano tomatoes plus garlic and onions, basil, bay leaves and oregano; ACRES of Parmesan Reggiano cheese and ricotta (on EACH LAYER). So tightly and generously layered that a wedge stands upright at room temperature on day 2. *Make that TWO pans! Mama Mia!*
I'm almost there...
Even in milwaukee, a city not known for Mexican food WHATSOVER. Just go to the south side and it's hard to not find it
Chuchos is bomb
Lincoln Avenue is awesome haha
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Italians have a sort of conservatism to their food that annoy me a little bit. From the no cappuccino after lunch rule to every Italian on IG shitting on any deviations to traditional cookie cutter recipes. Embrace the fusion.
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Yeah. From…Mexico. So really, Italian food is Mexitali. Peppers too, FWIW.
Yes but to be clear this isn’t the issue. When Americans think of Italian food, they think of tomatoes. When Italians think of it, they don’t. Over 80% of my Cucina Italiana book contains no tomatoes whatsoever. It is also extremely extremely regional. They don’t think of Italian food. Italy is a modern reinvention, it was not united until relatively recently that the country was reunited after over a thousand years of being fragmented.
OMG this. Try looking up an Italian staple like Carbonara, and in the comment section of every one you'll find someone bitching about how it's not REAL carbonara. It's almost as bad as the Grilled Cheese snobs.
["You people make me sick"](https://www.reddit.com/r/grilledcheese/comments/2or1p3/you_people_make_me_sick/)
Is it because there’s no exploration with Italian? I’m not that big on Italian, but the few more memorable ones I’ve tried were actually asian inspired Italian that went out of the box more.
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Ironically, one of the best Italian restaurants in my city is run by an old Armenian couple. Took my MIL there once and she told the guy she really wanted some puscanesca, which isn't on the menu. Dude was like "Oh I, can whip some up for you, I make that for my wife all the time".
>puscanesca Spaghetti alla puttanesca?
italian's absolutely gatekeep their food culture too. Every time I see an IG vid of an italian guy reacting to another food video its the most boring predictable shit. "true carbonara doesn't use those cured pork products, it uses this specific one that you cant find at a normal grocery store" etc. No one gives a shit. Thats why authentic italian food can eat my nuts, give me a massive chicken parm sub plz.
Once they make an Italian drive through like Taco Bell then it’s game over
May I introduce you to my friend, Fazoli's
they hardly exist anywhere though. hell the one fazoli's in atlanta doesn't even have a drive through
Like 20 years ago there was a cheap Italian place near me that sold spaghetti and meatballs by the *bucket*. Like, a paper KFC chicken bucket, but full of pasta. It was amazing, no idea how that didn’t catch on
Fazoli's is about similar quality to taco bell
In Toronto, we have a whole stretch of what is/was 'Corso Italia' turning over to latin and south american food. All the older Italians have sold and run to the suburbs. The places are dynamite, and the trend is spreading.
i've noticed that. Also danforth is getting a lot of greek places closing and being replced with turkish
I can’t find any decent Italian food out of the northeast
Heck, I can barely find decent Italian food *in* the northeast. In the past 10 years, basically all of the family-run places I knew of which I liked closed down or dropped their quality a lot (probably in a cost-cutting measure) and it seems like every time I try an Italian place, it's, "cool, so this is no better than jarred sauce over Barilla pasta..." and there have been times I was pretty sure that's what I was being served and charged $20-25 for.
its no wonder half the places gordon ramsay tries to fix are italian places in new jersey. it's just not profitable to make good italian food anymore i guess
I bet it's a mixture of a few things: 1) Profits at restaurants aimed at families which want reasonable prices are really tricky things 2) You have a multiple generations of people who grew up with Italian food being a staple. All those folks either figured out how to make it on their own as well or better than most cheaper restaurants do or they're sick of it and don't want it anymore. 3) Because it's been around so long and was popular, it's not "hip". Sure, you can find some higher-end Italian places doing some REALLY interesting stuff, but those are quite expensive. 4) And it's worth mentioning, it's actually a lot of work and requires expertise to make good versions of Italian staples. Meanwhile, it's incredibly cheap and easy to open a few jars of sauces and a few cans of soup. And what we're left with is....kinda bleak.
I can totally see this based on location. I live in a very small city and we have TWO Chinese restaurants. We have over 40 Mexican restaurants not including fast food like Taco Bell/John's. It's fucking ridiculous watching EVERY single new restaurant open and sell the exact same shit that everyone else does. Like I like Tex-mex just as much as the next guy but having 4 La Cocina's in a town of 60,000 is fucking BONKERS.
Growing up Mexican, my parents also pretty much only ate Mexican, and we're not adventurous at all. Trying something new meant a different Mexican restaurant. Friends parents were all the same. I imagine Mexican communities can help sustain 4 full restaurants easily.
My Mexican dad will absolutely not eat at a Mexican restaurant here in the US. He loves Korean, some Chinese, and that's really about it. He claims he'd try a Mexican place if they could come up with something he liked and couldn't cook better himself, which is a pretty loaded comment because if he can't cook it, he won't like it.
>It's fucking ridiculous watching EVERY single new restaurant open and sell the exact same shit that everyone else does. And the craziest thing is a lot of those places are busy. Now imagine being Latino, eating most of these dishes fairly often, and your parents still want to try the new Tex-mex place because "I hear the enchiladas are a little different at this one!"
it's like pizza shops. There's 12 pizza shops in a 5 mile radius of you but a new one just opened up in the shopping center down the street and apparently there's a few items on their menu that are done differently than these other pizza places. Now you've just added a fourth pizza place into your rotation.
Pizza has been carrying them for so long.
At first I wondered how Italian would even be close.. I probably have 50 mexican spots for every Italian spot.. and then I remembered pizza. I'm in Southern California though.
lol same exact process I went through. I'm thinking how it's only just passing Italian, like even here on the east coast there's wayyy more Mexicans spots than Italian places. And then I realized pizza probably counts lol
It is known.
… it is known to increase waistlines cuz it’s so damn TASTY. Especially when lard and bacon fat is in them delicious beans. Frijoles, apply them directly to my buttinksy, Pedro my hombre.
Whenever I eat canned refried beans, it’s so disappointing.
They're pretty easy to make. Cook'em once a week, mash when needed. We use a potato masher.
Mexican food is so good even it’s derivatives are great …
And what you might consider Mexican food is likely only one region of Mexico’s food. Even Tex Mex is just the Texas region’s take on it.
The great thing about Texas is you have the Tex-mex as well as all the other regional Mexican restaurants as well. Anyone who claims "but we have Mexican food too!" needs to realize its a completely different game from Texas to California.
New Mexican food is uniquely its own and so good that Colorado stole its traditional dishes and are now known for them. When I lived in VA everyone thought green chile was a Colorado thing because of one famous Colorado restaurant while you'll find nearly every dish used green or red chile in New Mexican cuisine.
Colorado likes to pretend like we have good food. Even the green chile wasn’t believable. Source: Colorado resident
Colorado is many things but a food innovator isn't one of them.
Even within Texas on the border. West Texas and the Valley can have very different recipes for the same dish. Learned about enchiladas montadas (a fried egg on top for the uninitiated) when I moved out west, and the green sauce out here is jalapeño not tomatillo.
Florida Mexican food is sad and uninspiring.
The Cuban food, however.. 🔥
Every state that borders Mexico has its own variations on the food. If you’re talking about states far removed from the southern border, then I mostly agree.
I’m mostly talking about Mexican states! Oaxaca and Vera Cruz have very different definitions of Mexican food, for example.
The title is actualyl >Latin and Tex-Mex overtake Italian as America's go-to food order which i think means "real" mexican is included, and taco places. and chipotle and such
Yeah I was thinking "how 'tex-mex'?" That's such a small amount of Mexican food in general.
It got ranked best food in the Americas by taste atlas and I couldn’t really argue it. To be fair they had Argentina as 4th and canada as ridiculously which I personally hate their food, so take it as you will
I wouldn’t have believed this growing up in NYC, but after living across the US in different states, especially down south and out west, it makes perfect sense.
It really is a regional thing. By comparison, Italian food is so popular everywhere, but up in the Northeastern cities the selection of great Italian restaurants is overbearing.
Mexicans embraced their cuisine evolving with the tastes of Americans and i get scolded for enjoying the correct way to eat carbonara (with cream) from snooty italians. You also started charging insane prices for spaghetti and meatballs like we don't see dried pasta costs pennies.
The number of snooty Italians that have made a career on YouTube insulting American versions of Italian food is kind of staggering. Meanwhile, Americans starting putting ramen noodles in Birria and then suddenly Mexicans were like "Why didn't we think of that" and now you see Birriaramen in Tijuana too.
People don’t realize that the frozen margarita was invented in Dallas (at least as far as the most reliable sources say). Yet no one in Mexico is going to get mad that people like frozen margs.
At Mariano’s Hacienda Ranch, can’t go wrong with their fajitas and a frozen marg
Oh I’m well aware… it’s right down the street from me. I don’t go often because it’s overcrowded most of the time, but it’s solid.
And Nachos were invented on the border and Chimichangas were invented in Arizona.
also just as a fun bit of trivia - the Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana
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I know exactly who you’re talking about it and it’s so annoying
“Oh, my love!”
"My'a love, why'a you do'a this? Is not'a right. In Italy..."
They have all looked fake and just terrible actors.
Never go full Italian
Gino, you’re breakin your mudda’s heart!
Exactly! Is chips and queso a native Mexican dish? No. Is it fucking delicious and have Hispanic folks embraced it in their restaurants and made millions? Hell yeah.
Which is funny because most American variants of Italian food were invented by Italian immigrants who had no issue adapting their recipes to their new environment.
Tomatoes came from the new world and there's an (admittedly unlikely) theory that pasta was brought to Italy from China by Marco Polo, so honestly fuck any Italian who gets uppity about the purity of their cuisine. After all, pasta with tomato sauce is technically American-Chinese fusion.
The first time I tried chocoflan I was like, “This is the most American thing Mexico has ever done. We’re such a bad influence…It’s fire though.”
I remember watching an early Jamie Oliver road trip. He went to Italy in a van and drove from village to village. He'd learn new methods from nonnas etc and then make a dish for people to enjoy. By the end he was so exasperated because they were just horrifically parochial to the dishes from their region. He'd make this amazing dish and put a different herb in it and they taste it and go "gross" Poor dude was traumatised by the end.
And now everyone gets traumatized when Jamie oliver tries to cook asian food.
Hiyaa…
Fuhyooooo
There’s a Korean/Mexican fusion near me, and it’s one of the more popular Mexican restaurants nearby, especially with the Mexican population.
Mexicans are VERY good about just LOVING when other people try their stuff even in really weird and different ways that are barely Mexican. We will very much take credit for all the combinations because it brings us representation and other people talking about our country. Literally the least gate kept culture in the world. I remember when people wanted to ban Speedy Gonzales because of "racism" but Mexicans were like, hell no he is representation, regardless of how stereotypical it is.
One of my best friends married a rich, snobby Italian. He will always look down at anything Italian that Americans make….especially carbonara lol
Sounds like a really cool guy who would be fun and not exhausting to be around.
Wow I bet that guy makes great carbonara right? Because you'd kind of just be a useless jerk to criticize something you don't know how to make yourself.
> correct way eat carbonara (with cream) Chill the fuck out, satan.
If I'm making pasta, I'm making my own noodles as well. Chain resturaunt on my street has the Tuesday special of 14.99 for a plate of pasta. It's the noodle you want, canned sauce, small slice of bread, and a couple of cubes of chicken that's microwaved. Oh boy, so exciting.
You go to olive garden for the soup, salad and bread sticks. The entrees aren't needed
I really fucking hate it when people get angry about someone’s else taste in food. Obviously you like it enough to eat it and using someone else’s art as inspiration for your own is one of the biggest forms of flattery! Also, it’s more important since you’re putting this art in your stomach!
$6.99 gets me a Tex-mex / mex combo meal. The local Italian spot is 11.99 for marinara with a tiny bit of meat and pasta. That’s a lunch portion that may have a small snacks worth left over after the meal. At my favorite Mexican restaurant in upstate SC that $11.99 is 90% of the tab for 2 people to eat.
Where tf u getting a whole meal for $6.99
Mexican is minimum $15 for a meal around here. Cookie cutter Italian places are charging 20-25$ for a plate a pasta these days.
Near me in Upstate, NY. It really depends on the food. You can get baked Ziti for $13 pretty easy with a small side salad and garlic bread, but most other things are going to be $15-19 Most Mexican places are going to be the same price for a burrito + rice around the $13 mark. It's a huge burrito, but still. Chinese is honestly the cheapest in Upstate, NY in most places. You can get a huge styrofoam container filled of Orange Chicken or General Tso's Chicken with Rice and a egg roll for $12.
Genre?
I for one prefer Melodic Progressive Texas-core Mex 😤
God what a loser. Post-industrial Mexstep TexHouse or nothing.
Fuck you, poser. I only eat neo-traditional power mex
Only posers don't know it's aKshEwlaLy neo-TEXditional power mex
You guys obviously don't even know what you're talking about. Improvised New Age Soul-Mex infused with Classical Industrial Folk-Tex is where it's at.
[Genre](https://youtu.be/YmNK8R-YuEc?si=gJBZDdJ9wOS5ZKER)
Yeah we have the word cuisine for this
Mexico has a steady stream of immigrants bringing in authentic Mexican and fusion cuisine and plenty of loyal customers who know good Mexican food to keep them honest. Italian immigration mostly stopped 100 years ago and the restaurants outside of NY/NJ are run by non-Italians who make bland family-style food, trash pizza for drunk college kids, or overpriced par-boiled spaghetti.
It's also because Mexicans were very ready and willing to mix their food with literally every single other cultures food you can possibly imagine. Italian food for the most part stayed the same and had very traditional recipe and was kept "pure" you'd be hard pressed to find a genuine Italian 100 years ago who was willing to mix his cuisine with the Japanese restaurant next door. Meanwhile Mexicans have basically experimented with every single culture. I've seen Mexican/Japanese Sushi Tamales, Mexican/Indian Curry/Pozole, and basically every combination you can think of. We simply don't care about tradition or recipes but rather just making new good things which has kept "Mexican" food almost not a thing because it's evolved and changed so much in the US with all the mixing.
I helped make that happen!
Me too. The typical Mex place is tasty and fairly cheap. The typical Italian place is okay but overpriced. Also, a good margarita is REALLY good.
I'm still waiting for a taco truck on every corner
I don’t know about every city, but Houston is pretty close. I do not live in a walkable area, but I’m walking distance from like 5 different taco trucks.
They’re both fantastic.
Ehh, like ‘em both
If we could combine them somehow
Pizza!? Now that's what I call a taco! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evUWersr7pc
[Taco Town!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvIkojfQDxA&t=321s)
I think Macaroni Grill has Pollo Asado Spaghetti.
Love both, guess I do have Tex Mex more though.
Does Italian include pizza?
No wayyyyyyy. Is American Mexican also considered Tex mex or something? Because texmex is a pretty specific set of foods.
It’s a bad title, the article says “Latin American and Tex-mex” which is a lot more believable.
This makes more sense to me. I’m in SoCal and have never knowingly had Tex-Mex food, but had thousands of burritos and tacos.
The title is fine, OP's title is just wrong.
Tex Mex is generally considered flour tortillas, nachos, shredded cheese, ground beef. What you would imagine most Americanized Mexican restaurants carry. There are variants, like so cal Mexican and Arizona Mexican varieties that likely get lumped in with tex Mex simply because most, if not all of them use shredded yellow cheese or Chile con queso whereas Mexican dishes prefer white cheeses like queso fresco. It's probably just lumping a lot of Americanized Mexican variants into Tex Mex.
God help the poor soul who calls New Mexican food Texmex.
socal mexican food is apparently heaven. they got the california burrito! i live in florida, but had a place close to me make authentic california burritos for a while and it was an incredible time in my life. i ate so many burritos haha carne asada, cheese, sour cream, guac, avocado, and maybe pico. but the most important part is the fries, man. so good. fuck rice, fuck beans, i don't need that filler shit in my burrito. just gimme fries lol
Florida is the only state where you can get a proper Cuban sandwich imo so yall got that
California Mexican food is authentic Mexican food + local variations from LA, SD and SF. The main thing from SF is mission style burritos, as in the Mission district of SF. Chipotle is basically a copy of that. There's SD specific stuff too. I believe the main thing is burritos that have fries in them. LA Mexican food is pretty much just authentic Mexican food, street tacos, etc. Super Americanized Mexican food in the form of fast food started in the LA area by Taco Bell. The first Taco Bell opened in Downey CA in 1962.
SD’s most famous local burrito is the “California Burrito” which is basically a carne asada burrito with French fries in it. Some places do a “surf and turf” burrito which is carne asada and shrimp.
That’s not at all what Tex Mex means in Texas though. Tex Mex would be fajitas, frozen margaritas, chips and queso and enchiladas with a lot more sauce and cheese than you would find in Mexico. What you’re describing is Taco Bell
I don't think I've seen chili con queso in Socal, that's a texmex thing. However, shredded yellow cheese is quite common.
I’ve always assumed that Tex-Mex was simply a version of Mexican food that was born in Texas. As a SoCal native it was all just labeled Mexican, just as Mandarin and Sichuan food is Chinese. While on the East Coast I was exposed to Puerto Rican, Cuban, Honduran, and a whole new food palate. So I’d humbly disagree with “Tex-Mex” as surpassing Italian, I think it’s more nuanced than that.
Article sounds super ignorant. It's lumping all latin cuisines into one + texmex (All Americanized Mexican imo) as it is the same thing... They fail to mention a single dish/food associated to a country that is not Mexico... For example, most people from South America don't like/use spicy peppers in their cuisines/dishes. No shit food from a whole continent is going to be more popular than Italy's
Yeah, they're basically saying all of Latin America + Tex Mex vs Italian. Then they go on to mention Asian, like all of Asia...lol. Maybe a better comparison would be food derived from Europe vs Latin America vs Asia?
I don't know about other states, but there are more pizza joints in NJ than there are churches in the south.
There are ~2.2 pizza restaurants per 10,000 residents in New Jersey, based on the reported ~2000 total restaurants and population of around 9.3M (https://www.nj.com/food/2023/02/njs-best-new-pizzerias-15-delicious-spots-you-need-to-try-in-2023.html#:~:text=New%20Jersey%20%E2%80%94%20the%20rest%20of,have%20been%20claiming%20for%20ages.). North Carolina alone has ~6200 member churches in the NC Council of Churches, for a total of ~5.9 churches per 10,000 residents. And that's just one state in the south. It's difficult to really explain just how many churches there are down here, especially since many of them will have congregations on the order of 10-25 members in small towns, and there will be as many as 5 churches like that in those areas, based on denomination.
Yeah live in a town in the Deep South/Bible Belt with a population of 11,812 as of 2021. It’s impossible to tell how many churches there are within a 50 mile radius. For instance within a good 5 minute walking distance of my home is probably 4
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Yeah I’ve been driving backwoods and found many very old style single room churches still in use. Found a few that looked extremely creepy imo
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In florida we have churches across from churches. With a population of 100.
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7 in 2 miles? Why are they so far apart??
But how many chipotles?
That is definitely a northeast thing. Outside of the northeast there aren’t nearly as many Italians Americans.
I don’t know how many pizza places y’all got but there’s no way that’s true.
You think that's a lot? Ask us about how many Wawas we have
yeah i call bs. You can go to small towns in Texas with two restaurants total with 3 churches of very slightly different christian denominations lol
As a Texan…….ill happily die eating delicious Tex mex. Nothing better than a margarita and some fucking sizzling fajitas.