The food at upscale restaurants is almost always great. The quality of the food, after all, is part of the attraction and they don’t skimp on expense.
That doesn’t mean that the best meal in town is the most expensive meal. You’ll often find some little neighborhood place where somebody’s grandmother is back in the kitchen making the best linguine with clam sauce in town or something like that.
But while these places may have great food, they’re not aiming for the same thing as the upscale restaurants we’re talking about here. Upscale restaurants combine great food with great service and great atmosphere (and high prices). It’s both a meal and a show. They’re designed to be impressive and sometimes that’s the experience you’re looking for.
I disagree. I think there area lot of upscale, overhyped restaurants out there. It’s an emperor has no clothes kind of thing. I think that’s especially true of an upscale restaurant that gets ‘hot.’ After a few months, they aren’t able to put out at the higher quantity while maintaining the same quality.
Yes, there can be too much hype. But I think it’s more a case of great food being overhyped as sublime masterpieces rather than mediocre food being overhyped as great. Take away the hype and these places are still serving great food.
That said, I’m not part of this scene so I may be missing the nuances. I don’t enjoy the upscale atmosphere so I’d rather get a great meal at a family-type restaurant than an equally great meal in an upscale restaurant. I prefer to relax around a meal.
You know when it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter what the meal costs or where its from or what celebrity chef cooked it, the next day you will be pooping it out.
Sydney, Nova Scotia? You might be on to something there (although I know what you meant). My experience with isolated Canadian cities’ food has been lacking at best. For example, North Bay, Ontario, just over the OP’s line of 50,000 population. I think their finest dining is the local truck stop. OK, I exaggerate, but this here restaurant, which started out as a place serving “the largest ice cream cones in the Bay”, appears to be the most upscale place in a casual search of the place. You can see the, um, stately facility in the background of the owners’ picture.
Sydney certainly has its fair share of pretentious and over-hyped ‘upscale’ restaurants. As indeed does Melbourne. But to suggest that Sydney - a city of 4.5 million or so people - hasn’t any high end restaurants at all is too silly even to be humorous.
A better comparison would be city proper size vs city downtown size. Detroit proper is 142 square miles and downtown is less than 1.4 square miles. All of the upscale restaurants are in downtown; the rest is basically a food wasteland. Barbecue shacks and greasy Koney Islands are everywhere, but I dare say not a single upscale restaurant. You will often find decent places to eat just across the city limits in the suburbs, but not in Detroit proper outside of the “green zone” next to the sports and casino complexes.
When I was growing up, Philadelphia had only one upscale restaurant (Bookbinder’s) and it served undistinguished English food. This has changed and they have some excellent restaurants now.
My next candidate also goes back a while (about 50 years), but Champaign-Urbana, IL, not only didn’t have any upscale restaurants, it didn’t even have any mid-scale ones. I tried the Chinese restaurant once and it was dreadful–the only Chinese restaurant I have ever eaten that I would so describe (although there was one in Tsukuba, Japan that came close, but they catered to ultra-poor Chinese workers). But getting back to Champaign-Urbana, I still recall taking an invited speaker to what was advertised as the best steak house in town. When I ordered a bottle of red wine, the waitress told me sadly that they none in the fridge. I don’t know if the worst part of this story was that she thought that red wine should be at refrigerator temperature or that a steak house with a wine list wasn’t actually ready to serve it. Of course, I told to bring it anyway.
My mom was in Champaign-Urbana for a business meeting some time in the 90s. She said that she went out with her coworkers for a drink after work one day, and the bar they went to was playing porn on the big screen TVs. I imagine my mom’s threshold for what constitutes porn might be a little lower than mine. But I still always think of Champaign-Urbana as a magical place where the bars show porn.
Stretching the definition of upscale here (or maybe compressing it), but the lack of a Michelin-starred restaurant in Manchester, UK, is the source of much angst for the professional footballers who infest the suburbs. Where are they supposed to eat?
3 million people in the wider metropolitan Manchester area - 100 great restaurants, but none that are recognised as truly top drawer.
That’s what I used to think, too. But, here in the Fort Worth area, my experience has been about 50/50. About half of the $100+ per couple meals we’ve had have been mediocre or downright bad.
The atmosphere and service have been there, but the food has been inconsistent. I used to assume that once you paid more than $100 per meal, you were always getting the good stuff.
Aboute three months ago, we spent $150 at one of the better rated steakhouses in Grapevine and, I kid you not, I’ve had better food at Denny’s.
I was cheering you on right up to that last sentence. Mother Bear’s has some of the best Pizza I’ve ever had. I still bring a couple back any time I find myself in that town. Mother Bear’s
:dubious:That sounds a little off, almost in the category of the Sydney guess above. Plus, at least the last time I was in Philadelphia, there were two different Bookbinders, each claiming to be the “original” in some way. :rolleyes: Unless one was upscale and the other wasn’t.
