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Originally Posted by genoobie
Depends on what you are looking for.
1) If you want really good mexican food, wait until you visit texas again.
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Other cities Buffalo's size throughout the Northeast have decent Mexican food. Let's face it; the reason Mexican food is so rare and so mediocre on Buffalo is because the region has
almost no Mexicans, and that's not hyperbole.
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2) There's always Toronto about 1.5 hours away...
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But I thought Buffalo was the "20 minute city?"
Again, those living in other metropolitan areas of the same size don't have to resort to road trips to find decent ethnic cuisine and casual dining. For example, those living in Louisville, Kentucky aren't told by homers/boosters that "there's always Cincinnati" - there's enough interesting dining options to keep people from hitting the Interstate.
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3) If you like diners there are plenty to choose from. Be adventurous.
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There's about as much diversity among diners in Buffalo as there are among Chinese restaurants. Decent breakfast, mediocre everything else, souvlaki, Friday night fish fry. Adventurous is going to Pho '99 in a nice car.
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4) Williamsville is probably not the place to find good dining. Lots of family types who don't dine out with much frequency (the house poor crowd).
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Horsehockey! It's certainly not as interesting as the city/Elmwood Village/downtown/North Buffalo scene, but compared to other 'burbs, it's a dining mecca. Williamsville doesn't have the abundance of red sauce you'll see everywhere. However, there are more interesting ethnic options because 14221 is one of the region's most diverse Zip codes; It's home to a lot of doctors, educated professionals, UB professors, and the like, a large number being immigrants to the US. Korean, Vietnamese, Indian from all regions, Iranian, Middle Eastern, Japanese, Jewish deli, Russian, and so on, along with the usual red-sauce Italian, tavern (both "Janice-Okun-likes-it ye-olde-coloniale-house" and blue collar-style), Greek, and so on.
In the Buffalo area, if you're craving Indian food, odds are you're going to be going to Amherst/Williamsville or downtown Niagara Falls. There's also some decent upscale casual dining options (800 Maple, Black & Blue, JoJo, etc), though not as much as one might expect from a middle/upper-middle class area.
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5) Individual tastes are very different. If I were to think of a place right this second to take my kids, they dig Vietnamese food and Pho '99 is good and reasonably priced.
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And the problem, as what's being expressed in this thread, is that there's a disconnect between the growing variety of those individual tastes, and the restaurants that are out there to serve them LOCALLY. You still have to drive to Toronto, Cleveland, Rochester or even little Ithaca to find much of the kind of dining any other city Buffalo's size would have.
Back to Pho '99 - I grew up around the block from there, from when I was an infant in the 1960s to when I landed my first real job out of college in the late 1980s. Up until that time, Kensington was a vibrant lower-middle-clas neighborhood. No more. I've walked around "bad" neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, the East Side of Cleveland, and much of the East Side of Buffalo. However, I'm very much on edge whenever I find myself back in Kensington. Pho '99 serves decent hole-in-the-wall Vietnamesse, but it's a ROUGH neighborhood now. It doesn't have the urban prairie blight of much of the East Side, but there's a lot of gang activity. However, kudos for bringing your kids down there; seriously They shouldn't be raised in a bubble.
Ultimately, why is there a lack of variety in Buffalo's dining scene? I blame it on:
1) Unique but ossified local culture, which still has a strong blue collar influence despite the loss of heavy industry through the years.
2) Large percentage of residents over 55 compared to other cities.
3) Very large Italian/Sicilian-American population.
4) Not many young educated professionals compared to peer cities. Again, it's changing for the better, but slowly.
5) Not many new migrants to the region from both within and outside of the US compared to peer cities, although that is also changing.
6) Generally poor "second wave" black population (e.g. poorer, less-educated migrants from rural Mississippi and Alabama that moved north during WWII and afterwards, as opposed to the more educated and wealthier "first wave" migrants that moved from more urban Southern cities before WWII), who lack the capital or know-how to open decent BBQ and "comfort food" restaurants outside of the low-rent East Side.
7) Those from ethnic groups outside of the Big Three either don't open restaurants outside of their enclaves, or don't open restaurants period.
8) Mid/high-end chains avoid Buffalo or arrive very late not because of strong local competition or anti-chain sentiment as many believe, but because of strict site selection rules, distance from commissaries, demographics, and greater ROI with investment in other markets, among many other factors.
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