To summarize, his point was that once a place is known for a “thing,” everyone thinks they’ve got it locked up and they no longer need to try. He specifically talks shit about wings in Buffalo and Cubanos in Tampa. There’s another show, I forget what it is, but the host goes to Houston (?) rather than New Orleans to get good cajun food because everyone in New Orleans feels unable to innovate, lest they commit culinary blasphemy by altering time-honored recipes for gumbo or whatever.
I can see where they are coming from; it can be easy to get lazy once your town is “known” for a specific dish or dishes and think yours is “authentic” just because you’re making it in that town, and at the same time it can be difficult to create something new because then you’re NOT being authentic and representing your town the way it’s “supposed” to be. I saw this firsthand in New Orleans when I visited last fall; it was almost impossible to find a restaurant that didn’t serve po’ boys, jambalaya, red beans and rice, or gumbo; it’s like everyone had no choice but to offer those things because that’s what the tourists show up wanting to order, no matter whether theirs was actually good or not. It was more obligation than love.
What do you think? Is regionality a good thing or is it an anchor around a region’s neck?
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regionality and adaptation lead to the creation of lots of new and interesting dishes. Purists can go take a flying leap. I’m far more concerned with whether something I’m eating tastes good than whether it meets your standard of being “correct.”
I think it’s a bit of both. I like regionality, and I most enjoy eating foods from the regions where they originated, using the local ingredients and the local cooking techniques and culture. That’s the biggest thing I love about traveling: discovering the local food and how they do things on their turf. I like the local purist quirks. I want to know what Buffalo wings in Buffalo taste like. I want to know what Nashville Hot Chicken in Nashville tastes like. I want to know what a Baltimore crab cake is like. It gives me a frame of reference. It may not be my favorite version of the dish, but at least I have an idea of what the originators of the dish were going for, and how it’s “supposed” to taste. That’s what makes it fun to me, that people have opinions, often strong ones, and defend them. Don’t take it too seriously, of course, it’s all in good fun, but I enjoy foods and places with a strong sense of identity.
That said, I love innovation and new and the new and interesting ways foods adapt when they migrate and cross cultures and geography. Different ingredients substitute for the traditional ones, cooking techniques are cross-pollinated, etc.
In other words, I embrace regionality, but also embrace experimentation and innovation.
Adaptation also leads to an amazing amount of crap as well. Classic dishes become classic for a reason. Screw with it too much and it’s a different (and likely inferior) dish.
I agree that any number of places produce inferior versions of said classics as well, usually through cutting costs on ingredients or corners on procedures. When every place in town makes the dish, you can’t use exclusivity to keep your prices up. Sturgeon’s Law inevitably triumphs.
Every time I’ve strayed significantly far from Philly (we’ll say, out of the North East), a “Philly Cheese Steak” is complete garbage.
You know what I can’t find,* at all*, anywhere close to me? Char Siu. Can’t find it at all, let alone bad Char Siu. This is all over the place in the West.
If those are caused by “regionality”, then yes, it ruins food, but as far as I know it could be the exact converse.
As a resident of the N.O. metro area … this seems to be a product of eating at restaurants located in the popular tourist areas. It’s very easy to get away from local cuisine here.
Oh, I’m certain it is, but I was there for a wedding, we were staying in Treme near Armstrong Park, and everyone except the marrying couple were from out of town so we weren’t going to go wandering around looking for other stuff; in fact we were very much into trying all of those things. The first thing we did after chucking our bags in the rental house was to walk over to NOLA Poboys on Bourbon St.
It’s just that I wasn’t ever sure whether what I was getting was some real shit, or some real shit, if you know what I mean. (I did enjoy my sandwich at NOLA Poboys)
Who put anyone in charge of determining it’s* not* inferior?
It is basically impossible for food tastes to be objective. I’ll grant you, there’s a lot of dishes that a lot of people love and a lot of people hate, but still, subjective.
Amen, brother! I was there for five days, and I had it up to here with that food by the time I left. A lot of it was, in fact, mediocre at best, and no better than what we can get here in Chicago.
Meanwhile I, also from Chicago, have visited few places where I’ve eaten as well as I have in New Orleans. I literally do not remember having a single bad meal there the two times (maybe ten days total) I was there. Now, granted, I didn’t venture far beyond the Creole food, the Southern food, the seafood, and the Italian food there, but, man oh man did I have a great time eating!
I don’t think so. Go to any town with a strong heritage of ethnic cooking and you’ll find a dozen neighborhood restaurants with a dozen different ways of making sauce, a dozen different types of marinade, a dozen different mixtures of the same spice palette and so on.
One place regionality shines is getting seafood near the ocean. It really is better. Food storage and transportation techniques have come a long way, but crabs from a shack in Maine are still going to be light years better than anything you’ll get at a Red Lobster in Missouri.
There used to be a NOLA restaurant here in Portland. It was crap. Then a native New Orleans dude and his wife opened a Cajun food cart here in the neighborhood. Hot damn, is it the real deal! He has his tasso and andouille and po’boy rolls sent here from home and once a year has a king cake sent. Has the full complement of hot sauces and a box of Zapp’s sitting outside the serving window. They do po’boys (including shrimp, oyster, catfish, etc.), muffaletta, etouffee, red beans & rice, jambalaya, creole, and gumbo. Tastes like I remember from my visits there outside the Quarter.
I’m glad you found a Creole food place that you enjoy up there Hasn’t that place once been featured on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives? Or maybe some other Food Network show? “New Orleans food truck in Portland, Oregon” rings a bell for me.
Regional food used to be regional by necessity - travel was not the easy option it is now, and communication was much slower and much less widely seen or heard. So the local food, the local beer, and so on, were partly specialties, but also they were more or less all you could get for something interesting or new in that area. Learning how to make the special items from some other place was desired (by some at least), but was harder to do because of travel and communication.
Today, with fast easy cheap transportation and with widespread instant communication including pictures and videos (and just about every person having a cell phone including a decent camera with them at all times), few local secret recipes can remain secret for long. Some explain that their local product simply can’t be duplicated - it wouldn’t taste the same without the local water, everything is done by hand on our traditional farms, our local breed of pigs eat tons of acorns from the local breed of oak trees, … I’m sure some of it is true, and I’m sure some of it is BS, but I can’t always tell the difference.
So, just how tied to the local area something is, can make a big difference. If the local product is a sandwich and I want to duplicate it, I’ll have to find or make the same bread, and find or make the same things to put inside, plus the correct method of putting it together. Maybe doable. If the local product is a cheese, I’ll need the same breed of dairy cattle, the same local pasture plants, the same local bacteria and fungi… hmmm, this one is tougher. Sometimes, close enough counts; other times, it’s just a poor imitation. And once in a LONG long while, the imitation turns out better than the original.
I think a lot of the producers of regional specialties feel threatened by how easy it has become for anyone to make what they’ve been making. There are several different ways they can react to that. And there are different kinds of imitators, too - from crooked shysters trying to steal profits, to mom or dad at home trying to copy that great fried chicken they had that one time.
Some regionality has been erased because everyone makes that dish now; some has been enhanced because people are hearing about new-to-them things they would never have heard of before; the pace of change and innovation has probably sped up because of modern convenience; some change is good, other change is bad; …
Who knows? Enjoy your food, and see if you can make it better than yesterday.
Some of the best pizza I’ve ever had was on Rampart across from Armstrong Park. Flooding from Katrina evidently forced them to move to Jefferson Parish.
My favorite example of this is the Cuban sandwich. I can get the real deal in Ybor City (Tampa), but I’ve been exposed to various poor imitations or, worse, artsy-fartsy versions, in places far from Florida.
Someday I’d like to have a plate of crawfish etouffée up here in the DC area that’s as good as what I had in NOLA.
Someday I’d like to be able to find a guava turnover of any quality up here. When you literally can’t find some of the cuisine of one region in another part of the country, I’d say regionality is still a thing.
Hasn’t that place once been featured on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives? Or maybe some other Food Network show? “New Orleans food truck in Portland, Oregon” rings a bell for me.