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The Washington food scene gets some of its pizzazz from Philadelphians who have established outposts there (Stephen Starr's Le Diplomate, e.g.) or locals who recall that city and its food fondly (there's a chain of sandwich shops — I ate at its location on H Street NE*— where all the sandwiches are named for Philadelphia locations: Rittenhouse Square, Spruce Street, South Street, Bryn Mawr, and so on.) I should add that those who now rate Washington a level or two below this should come back in ten years or so. I've lived in Philadelphia for almost 40 years and can tell you that its amazing food scene now emerged over the last 25 years or so.
Following myself up because I now remember the name of that chain of sandwich shops:
If you look at its menu, you will note that all but two of its hoagies (a dead giveaway) and salads have names connected to the city of Philadelphia. The two exceptions are the California Avenue (a street that doesn't exist in the city, though you can find it in the borough of Lansdowne in the 'burbs; there is a borough named California in Pennsylvania that's home to one of the 14 former teachers' colleges that make up the State System of Higher Education) and the Memphis Raines, named for the hero of the 2000 reworking of one of my favorite 1970s B-movies, "Gone in 60 Seconds." (I'm a sucker for car chases, and the 1974 original has an epic one in which 53 cars get totaled in the course of the chase. It also ends with the protagonist ditching his wrecked Mustang at a car wash and grabbing the identical Mustang of a patron whose car was just emerging, dressed as a worker and telling the woman that they had to "re-wash" her car. The scene where his car emerges from the car wash to the horror of the duped patron is one of the funniest in the history of movie car chases.)
"South Deux," of course, refers to "Two Street" — the stretch of South 2d Street in Pennsport that's home to the clubhouses of most of the Mummers clubs that parade on New Year's Day.
*One more thing: the store on H Street NE is no more.
I'd like to opine that I think atadytic19 underplayed the African influence on Creole cuisine.
It struck me that someone who's Creole not only has European ancestry but also some African or Native ancestry.
And one of the signature Creole dishes — gumbo — takes its name from the Bantu word for the vegetable that's central to it, okra, which came here from there.
I didn't mean to underplay the African influences in Creole Cooking. In fact they were doing all the cooking.
I was just going through the progression of the term in American vernacular. Originally it meant an American born French person. The descendents of White French Colonists born in the New World.
The Mixing of races was more intricate in the Louisiana Territory than the English Speakers and the term came to mean someone who is mixed.
But this is a thread about food and rereading my post I agree that I should have gone more into the African influence on Creole Cooking. I made it sound really French when there are influences from Africa, other European countries and spices from Asia.
This article expands on what I was saying earlier about the diversity of New Orleans cuisine. If you really get to know the place you will realize how much more there is to New Orleans.
That article definitely doesn't do anything to show the diversity in New Orleans' restaurant scene. Just solidifies the opinion there's only creole food and Popeyes.
That article definitely doesn't do anything to show the diversity in New Orleans' restaurant scene. Just solidifies the opinion there's only creole food and Popeyes.
Frankly, the diversity of NOLAs food scene isn’t anything to write home about. NOLA is an excellent food city, just not because of that.
Sounds as good as any to me. I assume that on metrics 2 and 5, you mean that for a top ("exceptional") rating, you would find both outstanding white-tablecloth fine dining establishments and fantastic cheap eats in the area.
You got a good answer from atadytic19 on the distinction between Creole and Cajun, and my short answer to your question would have been "Lafayette and Lake Charles," but I'd like to opine that I think atadytic19 underplayed the African influence on Creole cuisine.
It struck me that someone who's Creole not only has European ancestry but also some African or Native ancestry.
And one of the signature Creole dishes — gumbo — takes its name from the Bantu word for the vegetable that's central to it, okra, which came here from there.
One of the best cheap meals I've ever eaten came from a Cuban buffet at 57th and Flagler streets in Miami. (I think its name translates to "The Palace of Juices.") I would never have found this place on my own; I was fortunate to have a fellow Philadelphia Gay Men's Chorus member who had lived in Miami along for our trip to the 2008 GALA Choruses Festival, and he took a bunch of us from several choruses to this place.
The funny thing is, much of the traveling I've done was to visit relatives and friends, and as a result, I have done a good bit less dining out than a typical traveler probably would have except in New York, where even the locals eat out a lot. I'll wager that fact is one of the reasons why New York's food and dining scene outranks every other in the country. As with so much else, it sits in a class by itself.
Having taken care of NYC, I'll now take a stab at the cities where I have eaten at least one meal out:
Exceptional: Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington DC.
Some notes on these:
The Chicago hot dog is one of those items that belong in the Cheap Eats/Street Food Pantheon.
Ditto the Philadelphia cheesesteak.
The best barbecue I've had outside my hometown of Kansas City was at a place in Houston's Montrose section. Something notable about Texas barbecue, which — unique among American barbecue styles — originated with the Germans who settled in the central part of the state, is that sausages figure prominently in it. That's the German influence at work, and none of the other major US barbecue styles feature sausages at all, or at least not to my knowledge.
Speaking of Houston, that's a city where I want to go back and dine out more. I was there for a family reunion, so the family fed me for most of the time I was there. But the couple of meals I did have at restaurants were first-rate. The city strikes me as not only very diverse but unusual in the way the various groups mix with one another, and I consider it very underrated. If only it weren't a drive-everywhere place with freeways full of Mario Andretti wannabes.
One thing that frosts me about many pricey restaurants is that they serve artfully presented food in tiny portions. The meal I had in one of Seattle's better fine-dining restaurants, however, not only tasted great and looked lovely but left me feeling sated afterwards. And Seattle is home to the only public market in the country that puts the Reading Terminal Market to shame, Pike Place Market, where Starbucks was first unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
The Washington food scene gets some of its pizzazz from Philadelphians who have established outposts there (Stephen Starr's Le Diplomat, e.g.) or locals who recall that city and its food fondly (there's a chain of sandwich shops — I ate at its location on H Street NE*— where all the sandwiches are named for Philadelphia locations: Rittenhouse Square, Spruce Street, South Street, Bryn Mawr, and so on.) I should add that those who now rate Washington a level or two below this should come back in ten years or so. I've lived in Philadelphia for almost 40 years and can tell you that its amazing food scene now emerged over the last 25 years or so.
Above average: Boston, Kansas City, LA, Miami, New Orleans, St. Louis, San Francisco.
Some notes on these:
Miami gets dinged for overpriced drinks. I didn't really sample the fine-dining scene there either.
San Francisco gets dinged for the not-all-that-hot quality of the cheap eats I had there. (One place I ventured into in Berkeley claimed to serve hoagies, but its definition of "hoagie" comports with no hoagie I've ever eaten in its home.) OTOH, one of the best fine-dining meals I've had anywhere was at a restaurant in Emeryville — which is in the East Bay.
Kansas City's reputation for BBQ overshadows the rest of its dining scene, which has more ethnic variety than I think outsiders think it has or most of its Central Plains neighbors have. And it was home to what I believe is one of the first, if not the first, fine-dining restaurants to showcase American regional cuisine, The American Restaurant in Crown Center. (It now operates as a function hall. It won a James Beard Award for its trend-setting style as well.)
I've had lots of good food in St. Louis but have yet to have St. Louis-style pizza with Provel cheese.
Given what I said about Pike Place above, I should at least give props to LA's Farmers Market for variety and quality.
New Orleans may be the best example in the country of a place that does one thing so well it elevates the entire food scene to the top ranks. Those who ding it for lack of diversity are IMO right in their assessment, but what it does have is consistently superlative, no matter where it is you're eating. And also IMO, our fast-food options have been made much better by New Orleans' contribution to the category, Popeyes.
Average: Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas.
No notes here except to say that I had a much better time in Columbus than I thought I was going to have overall; on the whole, my rating of its food scene aside, that city is also underrated.
Put me in the camp that also would rank Louisville Above Average, and Providence ditto. Providence may be the best of the "punches well above its weight" cities, or maybe tied with Kansas City for that honor.
I would also give Pittsburgh an Honorable Mention for one of the most distinctive local cheap-eats creations around, the Primianti Bros. sandwich.
And for all the times I've driven through Indianapolis, I have yet to stop to eat there.
I would try Yats, if passing through Indianapolis. It's a pretty good locally based Creole restaurant, where the food isn't too expensive. There are other good local places to eat in the Indy area, as well. But I'd need to do some googling, to refresh my mind on those places.
Personal issues. Wish I could be out in Vegas. Couldn't make the move, came very close.
Yeah, I'm very close to actually doing it but haven't pulled the trigger yet. In terms of food cities, I actually think Vegas is in or very close top tier. So many options for great fine-dining, Asian, Mexican, etc. And the cocktail scene is now one of the best in the country.
That article definitely doesn't do anything to show the diversity in New Orleans' restaurant scene. Just solidifies the opinion there's only creole food and Popeyes.
Not totally: you find mentions of Caribbean cuisine, and Haitian specifically, in the article.
But what the article does make clear is that the Creole tradition, fused with that of NOLA's long-established community of free African-Americans and spiced with a dash of Italian flair, is so hospitable to invention and innovation that it contains worlds within itself. Maybe one could say that New Orleans doesn't need that globe-trotting diversity because its native culinary tradition is so rich.
Well, now that I've plowed through that Eater guide to New Orleans, I figured I should offer you that site's similar guide to Philadelphia to showcase the opposite:
Where NOLA gets its deserved rep for the depth and inventiveness of its homegrown culinary tradition, as you will see from this guide, Philadelphia's food and dining scene has been enriched by the contributions of a United Nations of immigrants from abroad, all of whom have found fertile soil here.
You might also note the city's lemonade-from-lemons restaurant category, the BYOB. Those are thicker on the ground here than in most other cities because of Pennsylvania's one-step-above-Prohibitionist liquor laws, which in turn have led many restarateurs here to make a virtue out of necessity. Local diners get a break too at these places: Since they furnish their own wine, and there's no corkage fees at any of these places, they avoid the high markup most restaurants build into their alcohol prices and can enjoy great food for less than they would pay elsewhere.
I do note that many here find it hard to slot this city into any one tier, though, with the notable exception of GeoffD, just about everyone rates it Exceptional or Above Average. Dana Cowin, who edited Food & Wine magazine in the 1990s, gave a talk here somewhere around 1995 in which she attempted to make sense of this city's food scene. She noted that it had no top-flight institutions, establishments or businesses (I would like to suggest that her assessment gave the Readlng Terminal Market short shrift), but she concluded at the end that what made the city such a great place for foodies was because the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. She especially liked the atmosphere of experimentation and creativity surrounding those BYOBs.
I'd say that, with slight modifications, her assessment remains salient today. Philadelphia rates among the best food cities in America not because of any specific places (though it does have numerous standouts) but because of the entire ecosystem.
*I hope none of my Phillymag colleagues are lurking on this thread, for I've just slighted our own esteemed food-and-drink section, Foobooz.
Edited to add one dig: I must admit I got a chuckle out of GeoffD's relative downgrading of this city based on his European travels in light of public-TV travel-show host ("Places to Love") Samantha Brown's calling Philadelphia the most European city in America on a June episode of the public-radio travel program "Travel with Rick Steves." Here, give it a listen. (Steves himself is quite the Europhile.)
Last edited by MarketStEl; 07-18-2021 at 01:28 AM..
I don't get why people fixate on fine dining. DC is expensive and you typically get mediocre or watered down cuisines. Also, the number of widespread specialty cuisines are very limited- Salvadorean, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Korean--and with the exception of Ethiopian do not find them better than what I could get in California, New York, Texas, Washington, etc.
DC has a fair number gems but the general food scene is incredibly overrrated and overpriced for what you get. I couldn't care less about the number of Michelin restaurants.
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