This, my local supermarket has the “normal” bread aisle that has all the bread dropped off from a bread truck and it’s your typical mass produced industrial bakery fare. But in the bakery section of the supermarket there are tons of good breads baked by the supermarket’s own bakery (I think they actually have one bakery that serves their stores in the area, but they make fresh deliveries to each store daily.) This stuff is way better than the “bagged sliced bread” you find in the bread aisle along with other cheap baked goods like Little Debbie and Hostess snacks. I’m not a bread guy, so I don’t know if this includes a type of bread people in this thread seem to insist is required for there to be “good bread” namely “hard bread”, but I do know I get a great marble rye from my supermarket or a French baguette. Again, I don’t eat a lot of bread, but I’ve had marble rye in a lot of places and the stuff in my local supermarket bakery is pretty good. Maybe to a bread connoisseur the difference would be immense. I mean I know I’ve had better marble rye in say, New York, but it’s not been so much better I’d consider it life changing.
This should largely be end of thread–it’s so patently false as to be ridiculous. McDonald’s has the worst hamburgers sold on a large scale in the United States. Even Wendy’s or Burger King put McDonald’s to shame in that category. but to say the hundreds and hundreds of restaurants in any major city that will serve a vastly better burger than McDonald’s essentially don’t exist, and that most people are eating burgers worse than a McD’s burger is ridiculously false.
McDonald’s does sell a lot of hamburgers, I even buy some occasionally. But I wager most people who are buying them will tell you if they wanted to they could’ve gotten a better burger. But even the fastest good burger takes ten minutes to cook. You can’t cook a burger any faster unless you do what McDonald’s does–take thin patties, cook them fast, and then leave them under a heat lamp. Nothing can taste good when it’s been sitting under a heat lamp for too long. If I don’t have 15-20 minutes to stop then I’m not in the market for a good burger. It’s similar to good pizza, you can get pizza that may or may not have been good that’s been sitting out for awhile in ready-to-go pizza places, or you can wait the 15-30 minutes it takes to cook a pizza. There are no magical forces in France or Italy that would allow them to cook a good burger in 2 minutes, for example.
I’d just like to point out that some of the Smithsonian museums have excellent, highly-regarded cafes, and the National Museum of the American Indian has a fantastic cafe featuring a variety of dishes inspired by native cuisine from all over the Western hemisphere. The American History Museum also features a cafe offering locally-sourced, organic, sustainable, made-on-premises, delicious foods (including an excellent ham-and-cheese-and-apple sandwich and terrific crab soup). AND at the Cooper-Hewitt museum you can visit an extremely well-regarded Italian cafe.
Well, I had to go out and get something (ok, TP if you really must know) and went to the closest spot. It was right next to the place I mentioned before for subs. I stopped in and placed my order and then went to pick up the TP. Circled back to pick up my sub and a salad. I asked and the bread was made from scratch at that location this morning. Got back home maybe 20 minutes after leaving.
The bread was far from being a wet baguette. It was freshly baked and nicely toasted. The rest that actually makes it a “sub” was a wonderful complement. The salad was all fresh with a house made buttermilk ranch. There was also a nice pepperoncini on the side along with some kettle fried chips.
Pretty darn convenient… and definitely not shitty as some have claimed it should be.
Oh, I wasn’t kicked out of the place for being obstreperous. They were a little concerned though that I was being magniloquent.
Getting back to the actual topic of this thread, I’ve heard from a couple of Chinese students at the university where I work that they were kind of grossed out by salad bars. China’s a big country so I don’t know if this is a regional thing or not, but they said that they weren’t used to eating uncooked vegetables and were also unfamiliar with typical American salad dressings. I got the impression that to them a salad bar seems like a bunch of random raw ingredients accompanied by a selection of mystery sauces.
I thought this was interesting because I would have (wrongly) assumed that a salad bar would come as something of a relief to a foreigner unfamiliar with American food – it’s easy to tell what everything is even if you don’t know the English names, you can pick only the items that you want, and it hasn’t been pre-seasoned.
I think part of what you are seeing is that US cities are not as residential as European cities.
Let’s look at DC, for example. In the 1968, DC was hit with devastating riots. The heart of the city was destroyed, and the most vibrant neighborhoods literally burned down. Some areas were not rebuilt for decades. For years, much of DC was a no-man’s land, with many areas directly adjacent to downtown being unsafe even in the day. Anyone who could moved to the suburbs. It’s only in the last 10 years or so that the affected neighborhoods have started to recover (and indeed, they have become the most vibrant areas.) But downtown remains devoid of residential space. Very, very few people live there. What little residential space there is is often part-time residences for wealthy people doing business who want to stay close to the office.
So if you don’t want to leave downtown, you aren’t going to have the same choices you wouldhave in a bustling residential neighborhood. The place is nearly a ghost town at night. It’s all basically lunch outlets for busy office workers or fancy restuarnts that people from the suburbs have “date night” in. This leaves tourists with few options, and the few places catering them definitely try to fleece them.
Go a bit further out (really, even just a bit further out- Penn Quarter has some decent eats) and you’ll have plenty of options. Go up to where people live- Columbia Heights for example, and you’ll have a bazillion choices from hipster-vegan craft cocktail bars to cheap and delicious ethnic food. Of course the best ethnic food in DC lies…in the suburbs.
But it’s not downtown, because that’s not where people live. We just aren’t structured like Amsterdam or Paris.
Chinese vegetables are traditionally fertilized with night-soil (AKA human waste.) This makes for efficient agriculture, but it means that it’s unsafe to eat vegetables raw. China has a strong tradition of cooking veggies over very high heat and peeling all fruit (even grapes are peeled.) It’s been done this way for so long that Chinese people don’t even think of uncooked vegetables as a possiblity- it’s kind of like how we’d look at being served a raw potato.
I’m not quite sure quite what “vegetable green” is–but green sorrel (a “red” one is around too) is quite common in many French recipes. In fact, laying a poached piece of salmon over a sorrel sauce created a sensation in the 1970s (the chef was a Troigros brother), and emblematic of the nouvelle cuisine. It’s sourness does go well with fish. Unfortunately it melts down almost instantly to an unattractive dull green mush.
This wouldn’t surprise me except you mentioned that they were university students, meaning that they’re younger, probably well-to-do, and should have broader experiences in life. Salad bars in western restaurant chains are pretty popular, and probably Pizza Hut comes to mind first. Even in Chinese restaurants these days – especially on the higher end – there are lots of salad (but not salad bar) options. The “typical” dressing seems to be a Thousand Island-ish type of thing.
even sven points out (rightly) some of the reasons why older folk dismiss raw vegetables. I had a home-cooked meal at a friend’s once, and the mother had this beautiful lettuce including the roots. We grated the roots and stir-fried them (a common enough dish), and I was horrified that they threw out all of the lettuce leaves! (I offered to make a salad and a nice dressing, but my friend talked me out of it.)
I do wash everything I intend to eat raw with a Mexican iodine wash that’s made for that purpose, because, well, there are similar hygiene issues in Mexico.
Yeah… Thinking back over the last 20 years, it seems to me that “shaw” was the word in the (pre-Internet) dictionary I consulted. Can’t remember when the first time I heard “savory” was, but it was after I bought … whatever it was.
Russian labels are sometimes hard to fathom: Back in Moscow, I have a bottle of chabrets, which I just looked up; according to the website I use, it’s thyme, which I know as tim’yan; IIRC, the first dictionary I used said either oregano or marjoram. * Dushistyi* is another word for what I think was either oregano or marjoram.
Tim’yan, BTW, should not be confused with* tmin*, which is caraway.
Cumin can be labeled* kumin*, zira, or (apparently) several other things.
I’m not sure you’re old enough to have spent time in those neighborhoods of DC in the era you’re talking about, but this is an exaggeration. I was there, I was also in the roughest parts of Baltimore and New Orleans when those cities were really bad (well, they’re both still pretty rough.) The concept that there were places you couldn’t walk around without being attacked paints a picture like these were communities but war zones. Even at their worst, they were never that. Even then the vast majority of crime targeted people involved in crimes themselves. Were muggings common place? Sure, but if you’re taking reasonable self-defense preventative steps like not walking alone at night in these neighborhoods you weren’t likely to run into trouble.
I know, right? Finally the sympathy I deserve!
More on the sorrel / savory saga (my part in it) –
Thanks ! Something I should have thought of for myself: up-thread, I posted about finding via Wiki, the Polish word for savory as per your post – and my suburb of Birmingham (England) has a remarkable number of Polish grocery shops. At the second of those which I tried, there were indeed packets of dried savory on sale; I duly got one.
Are you female? That makes a difference in where you feel safe.
I lived in Shaw a few years ago- not a long walk from downtown. Taxi drivers used to laugh driving me there, saying a decade ago I would have never entered it, much less lived there. My local husband says the same- his dad used to do work there when he was a kid and he wasn’t allowed to go with him.
And to be fair, I did see more than a couple mugging a out my windows.
Just three years from when I lived there, it’s literally wall to wall craft cocktail bars and fancy bistros. When I lived there my only food choices were fried chicken from the liquor store or bullet-proof glass Chinese. Now, I can have my choice of Hungarian tapas or artisan charcuterie. It’s crazy how much it’s changed in just three years.
Anyway, the particulars of DC history doesn’t matter. The point is that food sucks near the Smithsonian because nobody lives there. Nobody. I heard that Janet Reno once lived in a residential hotel nearby. But otherwise, it’s just not the kind of residential neighborhood that your find in a similar European downtown. We have a different history, different geography and different urban planning. That means our good food is in a different place.
I had to chime on this one,
In no universe does it take 15-30 minutes to cook a pizza. Even in my mundane oven at home it only takes 5 minutes. Certainly in the normal pizza places in Italy they consider them fast-food because it only takes a couple of minutes to assemble and a couple of minutes to cook.
The place I get pizza takes over 15 minutes, closer to 30. Add in the delay due to demand and it is an hour. The dough is made on site, pressed and tossed by hand, then toppings are applied in stages before and during the cooking process.
Their ovens are at different temperatures and the pizzas are moved back and forth by the pizza dude. When I holler back, “Hi, pizza dude” he glances over quickly and replies, “Can’t talk, kayaker, I’m a-makin the pizzas” (he isn’t Italian, so that much is just theater). Part of the cooking is done on a solid pan, part on a mesh pan, part pan-less.
Worth the wait, IMO, and worth the twenty five minute drive.
You’ve tried the rest . . .
Sicily is in Italy. Well, not in it, but you know what I mean. And they have thick pizza. It’s bread in a lot of respects (focaccia specifically). And it takes a lot longer than 5 minutes.
It consistently has the best kids’ meal toys, however.
A leaf vegetable. Think chard, spinach, dandelion greens, etc.