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When I hear "we're a top foodie city", for me its like "did you know about our sidewalks and sewage system? We're really weird and quirky that way. Come check us out!"
It's actually one of the more ridiculous designations given that people visit a place a few times and eat and all of the sudden they are "experts" on the food scene there.
And even residents in large cities generally never visit more than a handful of the options in their own city.
So true…
I’ve traveled extensively for work both in the U.S. and abroad. The only places I can say I didn’t enjoy food-wise were Glasgow, Scotland (although the fish & chips were good) and London (at least until I went with one of my Chinese co-workers and she introduced me to Chinatown).
I will say that at least @As Above So Below has criteria that he has stuck with over a period of years, so I’ll give his opinion more weight than other casual travelers who are self-proclaimed experts.
Austin should probably be a top 5 or 6 foodie city. Seems like there's a restraunt or a food truck on nearly every corner. I do believe that nearly every kind of ethnic food you can think of is represented in Austin.
This same thing can be applied to this entire forum. Urbanity is subjective too.
To a lesser extent than food is, however. Even though I ding suburbanites who say they "live in the country" based on the fact that the suburban built environment is clearly anything but rural and thus falls on the "urban" side of the urban-rural land-use divide, I think that there is a broad general consensus on what differentiates an "urban" built environment from a "suburban" one — while admitting that there are many large cities whose residential districts on the whole look more suburban than urban and many American suburbs that have very walkable business districts reminiscent of those in classic American small towns, an urban form I consider in many ways ideal.
Now, having made it through 2foodtrippers' top-20 list:
They get points for elevating the roast pork Italian above the cheesesteak as Philadelphia's best sandwich. There are many right here who argue that it and not the cheesesteak should be the city's signature sandwich.
And despite what they said in the lead about not ranking cities solely on the strength of their signature cuisine, that's exactly what they did when they visited Kansas City — they ate nothing but barbecue (save for donuts, and the city has several good local donut shops; I still remember how one member of the choir at Grace & Holy Trinity (Episcpoal) Cathedral would stop at Lamar's on Linwood Boulevard to pick up dounts for rehearsal Sunday morning, and there was a great little donut shop near where I lived in Oak Park (KCMo, not Overland Park); sadly, both establishments are long since gone).
However, I totally agree with their assessments of the quality of the burnt ends at LC's* as well as the three places they single out as must-visits. But: They need to make Char Bar a stop on their next visit, experience (as I put it to a friend once) "what happens when you dress barbecue up in a dinner jacket and tie" by dining at Fiorello's Jack Stack (several locations throughout the Greater Kansas City area), and — just as someone doing a Philadelphia cheesesteak tour would make an obligatory stop at Cheesesteak Corner (South 9th Street and East Passyunk Avenue, where Pat's and Geno's duke it out on opposite corners) just to say they've been there even though both places have been eclipsed in quality, so anyone making a BBQ pilgrimage to KC should stop at Arthur Bryant's (1727 Brooklyn Avenue) and Gates' (six area locations, any of which will do, though the place at 1221 Brooklyn Avenue is (a) the chain's oldest location and (b) close to the one Bryant's location you should visit, and the one at Emmanuel Cleaver II Boulevard and The Paseo is the company flagship) so you can say you've been to the two legendary KC Q joints, the only ones with direct ties to Henry Perry, the Africxn-American chef who migrated from Memphis to Kansas City in 1921 and opened the city's first barbecue stand somewhere near 18th and Vine, the heart of the city's Black business district. Perry quickly made a name for himself, and the legend of KC Q was born there. Both Charlie Bryant, Arthur's dad, and George Gates, founder of Gates Bar-B-Q, did stints working for Perry before striking out on their own in the 1940s.
Coda: When I was a copy desk staffer and later summer reporting intern at The Kansas City Star — this was in the 1970s, before Joe's Kansas City (originally Oklahoma Joe's) took the town by storm — "Bryant's or Gates?" prompted arguments along the lines of "Catholic or Protestant?"
And footnote: When I was growing up there, one wag once wrote that the best dining-out experiences he had in Kansas City were dinners in other people's homes. The city's restaurant scene in the 1960s was nowhere near what it is now. But I was present for the event that many believe lit the transformative spark — the opening of The American Restaurant in Crown Center, Hallmark Cards' big urban-redevelopment project (larger than Rockefeller Center in size, and it had a residential component too) in 1973. The American Restaurant was one of the first in the country to elevate American cuisine to the status of fine dining, and its striking design has also endured the test of time: now a catering facility, it won a James Beard Award for the influence it had on restaurant design.
*My brother, who once again lives there, says to me that because burnt ends — which Bryant's originally gave away as a snack to customers waiting in line for their orders — have become so popular that many places now just serve cubes of brisket with no char at all and call these "burnt ends." LC's has managed not to succumb to this tendency. (And I think it's widespread: I had Q at a highly regarded place in Phoenixville Friday night — the place, run by a Northeast Alabama native, deserves its reputation and serves examples of all major Q styles save that of Texas (but including NE Alabama, where the unique white sauce is mayonnaise-based) — that consisted of outstanding ribs, tasty "BBQ fries" (French fries with BBQ sauce and meat, chicken in this case) and burnt ends that were sometimes burnt snd sometimes not.
I did find it interesting that one of the things 2foodtrippers said you "must eat in Kansas City" was Russell Stover chocolate.
Huh? Yes, the company is headquartered there (Swiss chocolate-maker Lindt bought it about 10 years ago but runs it as a standalone company) and it has stores in several Kansas City-area malls, but eating Russell Stover chocolate in Kansas City is akin to drinking Budweiser in St. Louis. It's not so much different from what you will get at your local drugstore or corner bar to make it worth seeking out in their respective hometowns.
(One of the members of the family that owned Russell Stover before selling it to Lindt was a classmate of mine at Pembroke-Country Day (now Pembroke Hill) School. We weren't that close as students there, but at our 40th reunion in 2016, he greeted me like a long-lost friend.)
Right, and you probably believe the culinary world begins & ends in NYC.
** MY ** favorite foods are Creole/Cajun, Southern cuisine, BBQ, Tex Mex, Caribbean, Asian, Middle Eastern, Central/South American, Indian. All found in abundance & authentic quality in Houston.
It’s amazing how the same cities always get all the praise on CD…mainly on the east coast, west coast, and in Texas. The rest of the nation— “fly-over country”— is teeming with culture, beauty, and great things to see and do, but it doesn’t often get noticed. Too many people on CD are busy praising the likes of Austin, Portland, etc. to notice.
That said, here’s something to chew on: Food & Wine readers chose St. Louis as one of the five best food cities, as well as “The next Great Food City.” https://www.ksdk.com/article/enterta...0-0d89593fb2f3
In addition, Forbes, Vogue, and Eater all took note this year of St. Louis’s amazing food scene.
How St Louis wasnt even mentioned on the OP’s list of foodie cities is beyond me.
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