My experience in France and Italy vs. the US is that when you get out of the big towns to smaller villages, the US can't compare. Paris, Rome, and New York may be the same (or close to the same), but a town of maybe 100,000 in upstate NY can't compare to a similar sized town in France or Italy.
I live in Sacramento, and a good comparison might be to Bolgna/Modena/Parma. Balsamic, prosciutto, parmasean- we have nothing over here that can compare. But our produce generally stands up and our immigrant food (around me we have strong Mexican, Vietnamese, and Cantonese spots) is way better. Nate's analysis seems right on actually.
Your experience in France and Italy is probably visiting tourist towns in France and Italy, not actual small towns where real people live. Does a small tourist town in France have better or worse food than Saint Helena California? Does declining rural town in France have better food than a declining town in Indiana?
I wrote a follow up comment to clarify. A summary is that I have a Cave that I live in in Montrichard in the Loire Valley. The largest city in the area has a population of less than 150K while Montrichard is about 3K. I am in France for about 4 months out of the year. The food in both towns are cheaper than restauants in St. Helena (looking at menus) including several Michelen Gourmand and a 1 star restaurant. The local wines are also much less expensive
Let me add another comment. In my area of the Loire Valley we have 30+ Michelin Gourmand restaurants and at least 1 restaurant with 1 star. These are in an area with a radius of about 50 miles. Now we have a lot of tourists, both the normal kind and people from other EU countries on vacation (don't come in August as that is when France is on Vacation so there are more visitors and many restaurants are closed because they are on vacation also). That said, I looked at some menus for Syracuse in upstate NY and for a couple of smaller towns in Northern California and as a general rule prices for food (including the Michelin Gourmand restaurants) were lower than any of the better restaurants in the cities that I looked at and the wine was much cheaper (I compared the prices of local wines (California or New York) to local Loire Valley wines. I am from Seattle and spend about a month there each year. The food is good and more varied than France. But the French restaurant try to be too fancy and are not as good as their French counterparts. French cooking everywhere but France seems to ignore the simple meals of Steak and Frys, Braised Lamb shanks, fresh water fish, or nice beef stew. They don't look fancy, but they are just good to eat.
Yeah I can believe that France does French food better than the US. But the US probably does [every other cuisine] better. And personally, I don't like French food (yes I have spent time in France. I don't like French food in France either).
Small town USA in the middle of the country I would agree but upstate ny has pretty good food from the diversity of immigrants if you know where to look and you also have wine and micro brew country.
Many communities in upstate NY (Finger lakes, Hudson valley) have incredible food and would definitely be comparable or better to similar sized cities in France/Italy/Spain.
I would say London beats NY - has the same variety and more.
Every cuisine possible and often available within 10 minutes from multiple locations.
NY is very Manhattan and ( Brookyln) centric.
London has over 100 suburbs that offer more than a lot of cities, plus the West End, Financial district, Canary Wharf, Kensington, Chelsea, Knightsbridge Shoreditch.
I love NY - but London just has more going on. The Meat Packing district would be pretty insignificant area in London.
I think London and NYC are pretty comparable on item 1, but I much prefer NYC over London for item 5. If you walk into a random restaurant in NYC, it’s liable to be pretty good, whereas you really need to be picky in London. But the good places are similarly good.
Plenty of Europe cities have an equal number of different cuisines within walking distance pretty much anywhere in the city. Think of London and Amsterdam for example. Somehow you’re not accounting for that in you article.
But they're generally bad versions of that cuisine. Despite the high number of Vietnamese apparently living in Germany the pho I had at a greatly reviewed Berlin Viet restaurant was an atrocity.
Some British friends wanted to go for Mexican in London. Oh, please.
I live in the UK, and spend about a month per year in different cities in the US for work.
The only cuisine that I can get a better version of in the US is Mexican.
Try any Indian, Thai, or pretty much any other cuisine and the versions of that cuisine that I’ve had in the US are all worse than what I generally get in the UK or Amsterdam.
It’s true that Berlin is a less international city than London and Amsterdam though.
Funny, because I struggled to find any decent food in NY, LA, SF, Pittsburgh, Seattle.
“I think … are all going to be pretty dodgy in London.”
Sounds like you haven’t tried. I can assure you they’re not.
Amsterdam is full of amazing Indonesian restaurants. Pretty hard to find in the US.
I’m quite into Georgian cuisine (the caucasus country, not the US state). Plenty of great options in Amsterdam and London. Tried one Georgian place in Palo Alto and another one in NY recently, both pretty dubious quality.
Tried the supposedly best pizza place in SF (4.9 Google rating, recommended many times on Reddit). Turned out to be comparable to an average London or Amsterdam pizza place at best, getting nowhere near the better ones.
"Funny, because I struggled to find any decent food in NY, LA, SF, Pittsburgh, Seattle."
This seems crazy to me. The only places in the US where I've really struggled to find good food during a brief visit were all in Florida outside the Miami area. (Living in some of these places would be a different matter, though.) And I've been to multiple mid-sized cities in the Midwest.
The food in London is amazing. I do think regional Chinese is better in NYC (Queens), of course BBQ is much better in the American South, and Central and South American food is much better in many places in the US compared to London.
Amsterdam? Where food goes to die--you gotta be kidding. They do make good sandwiches.
The Asian food in Paris is usually quite mediocre, at least at places where non-Asians eat. And let me tell you about the Tex-Mex place we took shelter in from a storm. About as bad as it gets.
One thing I will say is that your list of American cities with great food skips out on places with excellent but regional cuisines, such as Albuquerque. This is mostly to say how much I miss New Mexican food after moving away.
This raises a good point - there are still plenty of regional versions of international cuisine in the US too - I missed California style Mexican food when I lived in Texas, I now miss parts of Tex-Mex now that I’m back, and when I drove through NM on a cross country drive in 2020, I made sure to stop for some green chile!
There is a bit of a logical fence when an American and an European talks about food
The American could mention how the US is very varied because it has a lot of good Thai, Japanese, Mexican etc, and that is true. But for an European is a bit odd, because we cannot understand how a Thai food can be "American"
We have foreign restaurants in Europe (only in big and medium cities, and never in great quantities apart from London or other globalised places), but nobody consider that food part of our tradition and included in the package of "our good food".
You included an image of Tagliatelle al Ragú from a trattoria of Modena. Well, the ragù of Modena is not the same of the Ragú of Bologna, and, while you could in theory eat a very good ragù of Bologna somewhere else outside of Bologna, would still considered "foreign", in Modena or else where in Emilia-Romagna.
That is part of the point though - in the US, that’s so core to the definition of what food is available that we’d never consider excluding it from a conversation about where you can get the best food.
> OK, you really do need to have a slice of pizza, though.
The primary food advice I would give to a visitor to NYC is that they should on no account get pizza. 'New York Style' pizza is distinguished from other styles primarily by having crust which is completely awful. Dry, jagged, and flavorless; New York crust exists purely to hold the sauce and toppings, unlike good pizza (Chicago foremost) where the crust is tasty in its own right.
I hadn't spent much time in the city, so until recently I thought it might just be out of city imitators screwing it up. But I tried slices and, unlike the bagels, there was nothing special about them that mini-chains on the West Coast haven't duplicated.
The funny part about NY pizza is that there are so many bad restaurants in NYC that don't make it properly. Proper NY pizza is excellent, with a long-fermented, well-seasoned, delicious crust. Brooklyn/grandma pizza is excellent. In my opinion, both are better than Chicago pizza, by a lot (and I really like Chicago pizza).
Yeah, if you don't think NY pizza is good, that's because you haven't gone to the right places. But there is an awful lot of mediocre-to-bad pizza in NY. And because NY pizza is so famous, I think a lot of visitors assume you can just walk into any random slice shop and get good pizza, then walk away disappointed when they're given poorly-flavored glop.
All American pizza is disgusting. Sloppy and greasy. Horrifying to think that someone could recommend American pizza while on holiday in Italy. They should expel him at once.
I think if you asked a reasonable person without context or further detail ‚what country has the best food‘ definition 4 is instantly what they assume you’re asking.
It is for this reason I find the discussion quite tiring. It is only through really breaking the question down into many different questions that have more nuance can you ever hope to get a result where America has a chance of winning.
But you’ll note people (besides Nate) who make the claim that America has the best X or better X than Y are not saying it with nuance or trying to be specific, they’re just being provocative to get clicks. They know definition 4 (or 5) is what people think they’re saying but when confronted and the argument gets heated they shift their goal posts and/or specify that they actually meant something different to the common understanding of what words mean.
i think you’re generalizing too strongly from your own intuitions here, i have no dog in this fight but my interpretation was always something closer to 1 and am pretty surprised other people thought it meant 4
Yep, always 1. This is one of my favorite topics of conversation, and everybody always talks about 1. People also will talk about the produce at individual grocery stores, but not nearly as much, and not so much in comparison to other cities.
Generally, I abide by the maxim that there is no accounting for tastes. De gustibus non est disputandum! To put a finer point on it, I think it's always a blunder to defend taste intellectually. No one is ever persuaded, everyone gets offended, and for what? Matters of taste are definitionally of little to no consequence. Unless you're looking for engagement (which a blogger might be!), avoid making arguments about taste and try to trick your enemies into having to defend their tastes.
That being said, thank you for thinking through this carefully. I personally came to the same conclusion. As for the US, If you're 1) in NYC or SF, 2) care enough about food to have favorite food bloggers, 3) are willing to schlep to wherever the great food is (QUEENS) you're eating ridiculously well. For me, the only places that compare in the world are Singapore and Tokyo.
A great write up! I've generally found LA/NYC to have better 'high effort' food than SF, but lower average food. Food in France, even selected at random, is obviously very good, but I also can't name an actually bad sushi or kbbq place in SF (there are some bad Thai restaurants, but you have to get unlucky). I think SF might edge out France then if you don't consider price and strongly weight diversity on definitions 4/5.
I agree that I wouldn't put Boston on that list, but I might put Boston/Cambridge/Somerville/Brookline on it (you could almost leave Brookline out, but you'd miss out on a few gems).
But, overall. The diversity of food offerings in Paris and Marseille are at least as good as any city in the U.S. and in my opinion, their own regional food shuts down almost anything in the U.S. (exempting only southern barbecue).
Nate's defining "city" as "metro area," so for Boston that would include Cambridge, Somerville, etc.
As someone who moved to Boston from NYC a few years ago I do think (metro) Boston is an underrated food town. It's definitely not top five in the US, but the latter end of the top ten doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
The best food in most of the country is rarely to be found in something resembling a traditional restaurant, but rather working-class cafeterias in a run-down strip-mall (and if the rest of the strip-mall has been torn down and the cafeteria is still there, there's a reason), or sold out a shack in somebody's backyard (or even door-to-door - ah I miss the city I lived in with door-to-door tamale vendors), or sold at church functions.
The best Mexican food I've ever had was at a Chinese buffet, which is where all the local Mexican people ate; there were lots of "Mexican" restaurants in the area, mind. (Actually, there had been -one- decent Mexican restaurant, but it changed ownership, moved out of the run-down building it had been in that only locals knew about, and stopped making Mexican food in favor of "Mexican" food.)
People who sell food based on the food, no surprise, make better food than those who sell food based on other qualities. This is true of fast food, which often sells food based on the quality of the speed with which it can be provided - but it is equally true of restaurants, which sell food based on things like the quality of the decor, the service, the location, and the exclusivity (or sense of exclusivity) of access. You dismiss fast food - but if you're doing that, I have to ask whether you are dismissing it in a meaningful manner if you don't also dismiss restaurants themselves, which after all are, like fast food, an emphasis on something other than the food itself.
Restaurants are soulless, the food bland; in the "best" restaurants, I've frequently found the "chefs" priding themselves on taking top-quality ingredients and doing as little as possible to them. Give me a cook who turns the lowest-quality ingredients into gold; that is far more magical, and is central to most of the cuisines of the world. "Ethnic cuisine" made from top-quality ingredients is, in many respects, a forgery of the real thing, devoid entirely of magic.
Now, granted, maybe it isn't precisely meaningful to dismiss restaurants in places like NYC - it's somewhat harder to sell burritos out of your back yard there, not least because I suspect the city would frown upon that sort of thing. But by the same token, if we are going to include restaurants in NY, I think you kind of have to include at least some fast food in other places; try a Dairy Queen in Oklahoma or Texas sometime, it is a radically different kind of animal to the Dairy Queen the rest of the country gets (if they don't have mashed potatoes and tacos both on the menu, or some other food that you find yourself surprised to see there and the menu kind of looks like the cook is just making stuff up, it isn't a "real" Dairy Queen). Or I guess hit up a Bojangles in the South - I'm not particularly a fan, it's the wrong kind of Southern food with the wrong kind of gravy as far as I'm concerned, but some people insist it's amazing.
You spend time saying that you have to do a particular thing to get good food in NYC - you can't just wander into a random restaurant and expect good food. The same principle, that you must eat as the locals eat, is true everywhere else! It's not the same everywhere, and if you try to go to a "restaurant" as you know it in most of the country, you'll likely as not end up in something only one step removed from a chain.
But if you're passing up the chain restaurants - well, if you're ever in the part of the country they started, try eating there. Like Dairy Queen, sometimes the experience will be radically different (and sometimes it won't - not every Dairy Queen in Oklahoma or Texas is a "real" Dairy Queen, and it's entirely possible in the many years since I've last been that there aren't any "real" Dairy Queen locations left). It isn't "fast food" that is the problem, any more than it is "restaurants" that is the problem, or even "chain restaurants" - the problem is that the local magic doesn't export. I've encountered a few pizza places that import water from NYC to make "New York Pizza". My experience: The pizza is terrible. Maybe New York is the best at pizza, maybe not - I have no dog in that race. But you can't export the magic that makes New York pizza good, because the most important part of that magic is that New Yorkers won't eat bad pizza just because it is called New York Pizza, and will tell each other which pizza places make the real stuff. (Leaving the other pizza places to subsist on tourists who come away wondering why New York City thinks it's any good at pizza)
Also, I love this in the link about food: "Many of your best individual meals will come in small towns that have single specialties, such as 'roast chicken,' etc. Parts of Texas and Louisiana and New Mexico excepted, America does not really have anything comparable to this phenomenon.". I've been across the country, and -everywhere- has their own distinctive regional dishes, and they're rarely hard to find if you don't limit yourself to restaurants.
But if you do limit yourself to restaurants - then you aren't eating as the locals eat, so it shouldn't surprise you if everything is kind of the same everywhere. In Michigan, for example, you might find smoked whitefish in a restaurant, and it might even be good, if quite overpriced. But you're unlikely to find a pasty worth the name, even in the parts of the state famous for them.
Eat as the locals eat; don't try to eat like a New Yorker when you're in New Orleans, you're just going to find a pale imitation of New York, instead of the vibrant food culture underneath.
Might make more sense to look a metric of the breadth of the foreign born population versus absolute numbers - eg Miami has a lot of Cuban born immigrants and excellent Cuban food but relatively poor Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Thai or French food because of relative scarcity of immigrants from those places. This is where super diverse cities like NY, LA, SF, Chi and LV shine (my personal top 5 US food cities, in some order).
I think there is at least one more sense of how good a country's food is:
If you arrive in the early evening in a random small town that has two or three restaurants, how good is the food you'll get, on average - taking into account both how good the small-town restaurants are, and how easy it is for an outsider to work out which one is best.
In France, or Italy, you can hire a car, drive around visiting places, pick any random town, find somewhere to stay and a very decent-quality meal. In the US, you're much more likely to be looking at having to eat fast food.
I spend a lot of time in Loire valley. The largest city is Tours with a population of under 150,000 people. In the area we can have a meal (entree, main dish, and desert) for under 30 Euros per person in most restaurants with the cost of wine at also less than 30 Euros per bottle. These are not chain or fast food restaurants. There are chain and fast food restaurants but their prices (and quality of food) are generally lower. I live in a village of about 3000 people 25 miles from Tours and prices there are a little lower than Tours for both food and wine and the quality is just as good. I looked around for a town in Northern California with about the same population as Tours and about the closest I could find was Chico. The food prices were higher (starter, main dish, and desert combined) and the wine prices were about double.
I live half time in Paris, half time in San Francisco. It's not even close (but you have to know the places in Paris that aren't on the various American guides). Saying that you can eat better in the US stems from the same delusional American exceptionalism as claiming that the US is a perfect democracy and citizens of other countries don't have the same rights, freedoms, and protections as those in the US.
A great read. The one critique would be this is a very Westernized view. I would highly recommend including Tokyo into the mix (I'm biased as I'm from Japan).
My experience in France and Italy vs. the US is that when you get out of the big towns to smaller villages, the US can't compare. Paris, Rome, and New York may be the same (or close to the same), but a town of maybe 100,000 in upstate NY can't compare to a similar sized town in France or Italy.
Please visit Northern California before generalizing like this.
I live in Sacramento, and a good comparison might be to Bolgna/Modena/Parma. Balsamic, prosciutto, parmasean- we have nothing over here that can compare. But our produce generally stands up and our immigrant food (around me we have strong Mexican, Vietnamese, and Cantonese spots) is way better. Nate's analysis seems right on actually.
Your experience in France and Italy is probably visiting tourist towns in France and Italy, not actual small towns where real people live. Does a small tourist town in France have better or worse food than Saint Helena California? Does declining rural town in France have better food than a declining town in Indiana?
I wrote a follow up comment to clarify. A summary is that I have a Cave that I live in in Montrichard in the Loire Valley. The largest city in the area has a population of less than 150K while Montrichard is about 3K. I am in France for about 4 months out of the year. The food in both towns are cheaper than restauants in St. Helena (looking at menus) including several Michelen Gourmand and a 1 star restaurant. The local wines are also much less expensive
Let me add another comment. In my area of the Loire Valley we have 30+ Michelin Gourmand restaurants and at least 1 restaurant with 1 star. These are in an area with a radius of about 50 miles. Now we have a lot of tourists, both the normal kind and people from other EU countries on vacation (don't come in August as that is when France is on Vacation so there are more visitors and many restaurants are closed because they are on vacation also). That said, I looked at some menus for Syracuse in upstate NY and for a couple of smaller towns in Northern California and as a general rule prices for food (including the Michelin Gourmand restaurants) were lower than any of the better restaurants in the cities that I looked at and the wine was much cheaper (I compared the prices of local wines (California or New York) to local Loire Valley wines. I am from Seattle and spend about a month there each year. The food is good and more varied than France. But the French restaurant try to be too fancy and are not as good as their French counterparts. French cooking everywhere but France seems to ignore the simple meals of Steak and Frys, Braised Lamb shanks, fresh water fish, or nice beef stew. They don't look fancy, but they are just good to eat.
Yeah I can believe that France does French food better than the US. But the US probably does [every other cuisine] better. And personally, I don't like French food (yes I have spent time in France. I don't like French food in France either).
The food you get in rural France/Italy gets better the further you are from Tourist towns.
Small town USA in the middle of the country I would agree but upstate ny has pretty good food from the diversity of immigrants if you know where to look and you also have wine and micro brew country.
Many communities in upstate NY (Finger lakes, Hudson valley) have incredible food and would definitely be comparable or better to similar sized cities in France/Italy/Spain.
I would say London beats NY - has the same variety and more.
Every cuisine possible and often available within 10 minutes from multiple locations.
NY is very Manhattan and ( Brookyln) centric.
London has over 100 suburbs that offer more than a lot of cities, plus the West End, Financial district, Canary Wharf, Kensington, Chelsea, Knightsbridge Shoreditch.
I love NY - but London just has more going on. The Meat Packing district would be pretty insignificant area in London.
Can't take this comment seriously if it doesn't mention queens
Queens >> Manhattan
I think London and NYC are pretty comparable on item 1, but I much prefer NYC over London for item 5. If you walk into a random restaurant in NYC, it’s liable to be pretty good, whereas you really need to be picky in London. But the good places are similarly good.
Occasionally visitors to London don't realise the variety and depth of interesting areas
They normally focus on the West End/the centre. But there are just so many vibrant interesting areas all with their own restaurant scene.
Nowhere else has the range.
Plenty of Europe cities have an equal number of different cuisines within walking distance pretty much anywhere in the city. Think of London and Amsterdam for example. Somehow you’re not accounting for that in you article.
But they're generally bad versions of that cuisine. Despite the high number of Vietnamese apparently living in Germany the pho I had at a greatly reviewed Berlin Viet restaurant was an atrocity.
Some British friends wanted to go for Mexican in London. Oh, please.
I live in the UK, and spend about a month per year in different cities in the US for work.
The only cuisine that I can get a better version of in the US is Mexican.
Try any Indian, Thai, or pretty much any other cuisine and the versions of that cuisine that I’ve had in the US are all worse than what I generally get in the UK or Amsterdam.
It’s true that Berlin is a less international city than London and Amsterdam though.
Yeah, sorry, I think the Asian food outside of Indian are all going to be pretty dodgy in London.
Funny, because I struggled to find any decent food in NY, LA, SF, Pittsburgh, Seattle.
“I think … are all going to be pretty dodgy in London.”
Sounds like you haven’t tried. I can assure you they’re not.
Amsterdam is full of amazing Indonesian restaurants. Pretty hard to find in the US.
I’m quite into Georgian cuisine (the caucasus country, not the US state). Plenty of great options in Amsterdam and London. Tried one Georgian place in Palo Alto and another one in NY recently, both pretty dubious quality.
Tried the supposedly best pizza place in SF (4.9 Google rating, recommended many times on Reddit). Turned out to be comparable to an average London or Amsterdam pizza place at best, getting nowhere near the better ones.
"Funny, because I struggled to find any decent food in NY, LA, SF, Pittsburgh, Seattle."
This seems crazy to me. The only places in the US where I've really struggled to find good food during a brief visit were all in Florida outside the Miami area. (Living in some of these places would be a different matter, though.) And I've been to multiple mid-sized cities in the Midwest.
Pizza is definitely not SF's strongest suit (which place was it, btw?), and European food is not America's strongest suit.
Indian food in UK is great. Chinese food is.. okay. London is a pretty good food city overall, though!
The food in London is amazing. I do think regional Chinese is better in NYC (Queens), of course BBQ is much better in the American South, and Central and South American food is much better in many places in the US compared to London.
Amsterdam? Where food goes to die--you gotta be kidding. They do make good sandwiches.
The Asian food in Paris is usually quite mediocre, at least at places where non-Asians eat. And let me tell you about the Tex-Mex place we took shelter in from a storm. About as bad as it gets.
One thing I will say is that your list of American cities with great food skips out on places with excellent but regional cuisines, such as Albuquerque. This is mostly to say how much I miss New Mexican food after moving away.
This raises a good point - there are still plenty of regional versions of international cuisine in the US too - I missed California style Mexican food when I lived in Texas, I now miss parts of Tex-Mex now that I’m back, and when I drove through NM on a cross country drive in 2020, I made sure to stop for some green chile!
There is a bit of a logical fence when an American and an European talks about food
The American could mention how the US is very varied because it has a lot of good Thai, Japanese, Mexican etc, and that is true. But for an European is a bit odd, because we cannot understand how a Thai food can be "American"
We have foreign restaurants in Europe (only in big and medium cities, and never in great quantities apart from London or other globalised places), but nobody consider that food part of our tradition and included in the package of "our good food".
You included an image of Tagliatelle al Ragú from a trattoria of Modena. Well, the ragù of Modena is not the same of the Ragú of Bologna, and, while you could in theory eat a very good ragù of Bologna somewhere else outside of Bologna, would still considered "foreign", in Modena or else where in Emilia-Romagna.
That is part of the point though - in the US, that’s so core to the definition of what food is available that we’d never consider excluding it from a conversation about where you can get the best food.
> OK, you really do need to have a slice of pizza, though.
The primary food advice I would give to a visitor to NYC is that they should on no account get pizza. 'New York Style' pizza is distinguished from other styles primarily by having crust which is completely awful. Dry, jagged, and flavorless; New York crust exists purely to hold the sauce and toppings, unlike good pizza (Chicago foremost) where the crust is tasty in its own right.
I hadn't spent much time in the city, so until recently I thought it might just be out of city imitators screwing it up. But I tried slices and, unlike the bagels, there was nothing special about them that mini-chains on the West Coast haven't duplicated.
The funny part about NY pizza is that there are so many bad restaurants in NYC that don't make it properly. Proper NY pizza is excellent, with a long-fermented, well-seasoned, delicious crust. Brooklyn/grandma pizza is excellent. In my opinion, both are better than Chicago pizza, by a lot (and I really like Chicago pizza).
Yeah, if you don't think NY pizza is good, that's because you haven't gone to the right places. But there is an awful lot of mediocre-to-bad pizza in NY. And because NY pizza is so famous, I think a lot of visitors assume you can just walk into any random slice shop and get good pizza, then walk away disappointed when they're given poorly-flavored glop.
I don't assume that except when New Yorkers tell me it is true, which is basically always.
All American pizza is disgusting. Sloppy and greasy. Horrifying to think that someone could recommend American pizza while on holiday in Italy. They should expel him at once.
I think if you asked a reasonable person without context or further detail ‚what country has the best food‘ definition 4 is instantly what they assume you’re asking.
It is for this reason I find the discussion quite tiring. It is only through really breaking the question down into many different questions that have more nuance can you ever hope to get a result where America has a chance of winning.
But you’ll note people (besides Nate) who make the claim that America has the best X or better X than Y are not saying it with nuance or trying to be specific, they’re just being provocative to get clicks. They know definition 4 (or 5) is what people think they’re saying but when confronted and the argument gets heated they shift their goal posts and/or specify that they actually meant something different to the common understanding of what words mean.
i think you’re generalizing too strongly from your own intuitions here, i have no dog in this fight but my interpretation was always something closer to 1 and am pretty surprised other people thought it meant 4
Yep, always 1. This is one of my favorite topics of conversation, and everybody always talks about 1. People also will talk about the produce at individual grocery stores, but not nearly as much, and not so much in comparison to other cities.
For me usually 4, probably because I and many of my friends are avid cooks.
Generally, I abide by the maxim that there is no accounting for tastes. De gustibus non est disputandum! To put a finer point on it, I think it's always a blunder to defend taste intellectually. No one is ever persuaded, everyone gets offended, and for what? Matters of taste are definitionally of little to no consequence. Unless you're looking for engagement (which a blogger might be!), avoid making arguments about taste and try to trick your enemies into having to defend their tastes.
That being said, thank you for thinking through this carefully. I personally came to the same conclusion. As for the US, If you're 1) in NYC or SF, 2) care enough about food to have favorite food bloggers, 3) are willing to schlep to wherever the great food is (QUEENS) you're eating ridiculously well. For me, the only places that compare in the world are Singapore and Tokyo.
A great write up! I've generally found LA/NYC to have better 'high effort' food than SF, but lower average food. Food in France, even selected at random, is obviously very good, but I also can't name an actually bad sushi or kbbq place in SF (there are some bad Thai restaurants, but you have to get unlucky). I think SF might edge out France then if you don't consider price and strongly weight diversity on definitions 4/5.
I agree that I wouldn't put Boston on that list, but I might put Boston/Cambridge/Somerville/Brookline on it (you could almost leave Brookline out, but you'd miss out on a few gems).
But, overall. The diversity of food offerings in Paris and Marseille are at least as good as any city in the U.S. and in my opinion, their own regional food shuts down almost anything in the U.S. (exempting only southern barbecue).
Nate's defining "city" as "metro area," so for Boston that would include Cambridge, Somerville, etc.
As someone who moved to Boston from NYC a few years ago I do think (metro) Boston is an underrated food town. It's definitely not top five in the US, but the latter end of the top ten doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
The best food in most of the country is rarely to be found in something resembling a traditional restaurant, but rather working-class cafeterias in a run-down strip-mall (and if the rest of the strip-mall has been torn down and the cafeteria is still there, there's a reason), or sold out a shack in somebody's backyard (or even door-to-door - ah I miss the city I lived in with door-to-door tamale vendors), or sold at church functions.
The best Mexican food I've ever had was at a Chinese buffet, which is where all the local Mexican people ate; there were lots of "Mexican" restaurants in the area, mind. (Actually, there had been -one- decent Mexican restaurant, but it changed ownership, moved out of the run-down building it had been in that only locals knew about, and stopped making Mexican food in favor of "Mexican" food.)
People who sell food based on the food, no surprise, make better food than those who sell food based on other qualities. This is true of fast food, which often sells food based on the quality of the speed with which it can be provided - but it is equally true of restaurants, which sell food based on things like the quality of the decor, the service, the location, and the exclusivity (or sense of exclusivity) of access. You dismiss fast food - but if you're doing that, I have to ask whether you are dismissing it in a meaningful manner if you don't also dismiss restaurants themselves, which after all are, like fast food, an emphasis on something other than the food itself.
Restaurants are soulless, the food bland; in the "best" restaurants, I've frequently found the "chefs" priding themselves on taking top-quality ingredients and doing as little as possible to them. Give me a cook who turns the lowest-quality ingredients into gold; that is far more magical, and is central to most of the cuisines of the world. "Ethnic cuisine" made from top-quality ingredients is, in many respects, a forgery of the real thing, devoid entirely of magic.
Now, granted, maybe it isn't precisely meaningful to dismiss restaurants in places like NYC - it's somewhat harder to sell burritos out of your back yard there, not least because I suspect the city would frown upon that sort of thing. But by the same token, if we are going to include restaurants in NY, I think you kind of have to include at least some fast food in other places; try a Dairy Queen in Oklahoma or Texas sometime, it is a radically different kind of animal to the Dairy Queen the rest of the country gets (if they don't have mashed potatoes and tacos both on the menu, or some other food that you find yourself surprised to see there and the menu kind of looks like the cook is just making stuff up, it isn't a "real" Dairy Queen). Or I guess hit up a Bojangles in the South - I'm not particularly a fan, it's the wrong kind of Southern food with the wrong kind of gravy as far as I'm concerned, but some people insist it's amazing.
You spend time saying that you have to do a particular thing to get good food in NYC - you can't just wander into a random restaurant and expect good food. The same principle, that you must eat as the locals eat, is true everywhere else! It's not the same everywhere, and if you try to go to a "restaurant" as you know it in most of the country, you'll likely as not end up in something only one step removed from a chain.
But if you're passing up the chain restaurants - well, if you're ever in the part of the country they started, try eating there. Like Dairy Queen, sometimes the experience will be radically different (and sometimes it won't - not every Dairy Queen in Oklahoma or Texas is a "real" Dairy Queen, and it's entirely possible in the many years since I've last been that there aren't any "real" Dairy Queen locations left). It isn't "fast food" that is the problem, any more than it is "restaurants" that is the problem, or even "chain restaurants" - the problem is that the local magic doesn't export. I've encountered a few pizza places that import water from NYC to make "New York Pizza". My experience: The pizza is terrible. Maybe New York is the best at pizza, maybe not - I have no dog in that race. But you can't export the magic that makes New York pizza good, because the most important part of that magic is that New Yorkers won't eat bad pizza just because it is called New York Pizza, and will tell each other which pizza places make the real stuff. (Leaving the other pizza places to subsist on tourists who come away wondering why New York City thinks it's any good at pizza)
Also, I love this in the link about food: "Many of your best individual meals will come in small towns that have single specialties, such as 'roast chicken,' etc. Parts of Texas and Louisiana and New Mexico excepted, America does not really have anything comparable to this phenomenon.". I've been across the country, and -everywhere- has their own distinctive regional dishes, and they're rarely hard to find if you don't limit yourself to restaurants.
But if you do limit yourself to restaurants - then you aren't eating as the locals eat, so it shouldn't surprise you if everything is kind of the same everywhere. In Michigan, for example, you might find smoked whitefish in a restaurant, and it might even be good, if quite overpriced. But you're unlikely to find a pasty worth the name, even in the parts of the state famous for them.
Eat as the locals eat; don't try to eat like a New Yorker when you're in New Orleans, you're just going to find a pale imitation of New York, instead of the vibrant food culture underneath.
Might make more sense to look a metric of the breadth of the foreign born population versus absolute numbers - eg Miami has a lot of Cuban born immigrants and excellent Cuban food but relatively poor Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Thai or French food because of relative scarcity of immigrants from those places. This is where super diverse cities like NY, LA, SF, Chi and LV shine (my personal top 5 US food cities, in some order).
I think there is at least one more sense of how good a country's food is:
If you arrive in the early evening in a random small town that has two or three restaurants, how good is the food you'll get, on average - taking into account both how good the small-town restaurants are, and how easy it is for an outsider to work out which one is best.
In France, or Italy, you can hire a car, drive around visiting places, pick any random town, find somewhere to stay and a very decent-quality meal. In the US, you're much more likely to be looking at having to eat fast food.
This depends a lot on tastes. I hate MacDonalds, but I hate it less than I hate French food, so by this metric I would certainly choose the USA.
See the works of Jane & Michael Stern and Calvin Trillin who write about authentic local cuisines.
I spend a lot of time in Loire valley. The largest city is Tours with a population of under 150,000 people. In the area we can have a meal (entree, main dish, and desert) for under 30 Euros per person in most restaurants with the cost of wine at also less than 30 Euros per bottle. These are not chain or fast food restaurants. There are chain and fast food restaurants but their prices (and quality of food) are generally lower. I live in a village of about 3000 people 25 miles from Tours and prices there are a little lower than Tours for both food and wine and the quality is just as good. I looked around for a town in Northern California with about the same population as Tours and about the closest I could find was Chico. The food prices were higher (starter, main dish, and desert combined) and the wine prices were about double.
The euro has fallen from $1.60 to parity. France is on sale.
I live half time in Paris, half time in San Francisco. It's not even close (but you have to know the places in Paris that aren't on the various American guides). Saying that you can eat better in the US stems from the same delusional American exceptionalism as claiming that the US is a perfect democracy and citizens of other countries don't have the same rights, freedoms, and protections as those in the US.
A great read. The one critique would be this is a very Westernized view. I would highly recommend including Tokyo into the mix (I'm biased as I'm from Japan).