For the last total eclipse, we visited Lake Erie about 30 miles south of Buffalo, and I tried beef-on-Weck for the first time… I found it very disappointing. Dry roast beef on a dry roll, and that was it. Maybe I just had a bad example.
The noble geoduck of the Pacific Northwest. Pronounced “gooeyduck.” Not being a clam eater, I can’t speak to the taste.
Wait wait, are you saying the rainbow cookie is a lesser known food only local to NYC!? It’s sold in every supermarket, bakery, deli, that I’ve ever gone to in NYC and Long Island. I buy them like once a month, as a kid they were my favorite dessert. I have always thought it was just a standard bakery item.
Is the rainbow cookie not sold in other places? I’m honestly shocked at that.
Then what was your intention? Because the idea that jambalaya “isn’t really found elsewhere” is silly. You can find it anywhere. So either you’re giving a poor example (and I’m not the only one saying so) or you are suggesting that any jambalaya dish you find is “not a proper one” outside of New Orleans.
Any decent-sized grocery store will have something like this:
Popeye’s is a nationwide fast food chain. While they no longer serve it, for years they had jambalaya. Sit-down restaurants with Cajun food are pretty common all over the country, and they’re all going to serve jambalaya. It’s not something that’s obscure or hard to find at all.
Etouffee and po’ boys, granted those aren’t nearly as common and I’d concede those as being pretty good examples. But jambalaya is something you could find in a restaurant in any major city, most mid-sized cities, and any good-sized grocery store. It’s a pretty mainstream food item these days.
When I saw the picture with that cookie, I was just reminded of all the times I’ve eaten one as part of a cookie medley since I was a kid. And I live very far from NYC (other side of the country).
I suggest keeping it simple if you do: The sauce should just be mayo and diced green olives, a splash of brine to make it slightly runny. Maybe some garlic powder.
Then the best olive burgers have very little else on them to get in the way of the olive sauce. Maybe a slice of American cheese melted on the meat, maybe some shredded lettuce. But no ketchup, no mustard, no tomato, no pickles, no onions. You want the olive sauce to be the star.
Some of my best homemade olive burgers are just the sauce and the meat on a bun, with the sauce dripping onto the plate below as I eat it.
The kinds of lesser-known local foods discussed here is getting rather trivial if we start including not just pizza in rectangular shapes but even pizza that’s circular but cut up into square pieces. Things like pupusas, half-smokes, chicken booyah, garbage plates, muskrat casserole, kolaches, cassata cakes, etc. are interesting in that they are items that taste like nothing you’ve tasted before or puts together foods that aren’t put together anywhere else. But why is rectangular pizza interesting? It’s just food you’ve eaten a lot in a different amount. So would a restaurant that offers soft drinks only in 1.47609-ounce, 5.8910882-ounce, 67.4065891-ounce, and 6738761.48714096887440345-ounce sizes be interesting? Why is circular pizza cut into square pieces ineresting? That means that the pieces are various different sizes and the people sitting at a table will fight over which pieces they get.
hell yeah. I’d put the Romanburger up against any fast food burger in the country
FWIW, that was an option at Domino’s everywhere in the 1980s. I remember the order-takers symbol for it was a hash tag.
It’s still an option at Domino’s now. Just for fun, I logged into the Domino’s web site, started to do an order, picked “build your own pizza”, and then went through the list of options. Here is a screenshot just now from the site:
Pizzas have been square cut at Kukar’s House of Pizza in San Jose since the late 50s.
From your description, that sounds like a bad example. My wife is from Buffalo, and when we first visted her home town when we were dating almost 20 years ago, I went with the intention of trying every Buffalo wing I could. Then I discovered Charlie the Butcher and their beef on weck. It was the best pure beef sandwich I’ve ever had. Perfectly cooked medium-thick slices of beef with plenty of pink, juicy, a kaiser roll that’s been dipped in jus, studded with large salt crystals and whole caraway seed. Add a bit of horseradish on there and I was in heaven. It was my favorite food experience in Buffalo. (That and Ted’s hot dogs. Wings were in third place for me as far as Buffalo food goes. Still really good, but no weck or Ted’s.)
See, this is why:
I didn’t realize it was unusual until I went to college here in the Chicago area and a bunch of people from all around the States made fun of our weird “party cut” pizza. The circular-pie-in-square-cut seems to be most popular in the Midwest. St. Louis does it commonly. Chicago every tavern pizza place does it that way. That’s the default. I suppose you can ask for a pie cut on a thin crust here, but I’ve never seen it done with the local style of pizza (only places that do NY Style or similar.) You see it in Milwaukee, Minnesota, and I’ve seen it as far east as Columbus.
I guess there are pockets of places that do it square, too, but they seem to be the exception, not the rule, outside the Midwest.
I found some Charlie the Butcher’s photos from 2006 (the trip I mentioned):
That looks so freaking delicious.
Hey, I give! You’re right on all counts; it was a plot to undermine the board and all it stands for. ::falls on sword::
Not because it’s rectangular, but what makes the different types unique. Maryland style and St. Louis style pizzas might both be thin crust pizzas cut into approximately the same size squares, but they aren’t made the same way.
But the Maryland is a sheet-pan style pizza, right? Like a Sicilian or what I (and others) call a “grandma pie.” NEPA (Northeast PA) also has a lot of this sheet pan style, and Buffalo and upstate NY has that as an option too. I’d say sheet pan pizza is fairly common, with many differences depending on the area. We’re saying circular pizza in a square cut is somewhat regional. I see that Domino’s has it as an option, but I only see it regularly served this way by default in the locations I mentioned.
It’s sheet-pan style, but it’s thin crust. And it’s a flaky, pastry-like crust, not crispy.
Yeah, I’d be curious to replicate it as I saw your links above – the flakiness intrigues me. Sounds a good bit different than other sheet pan pies I’ve had.
Another hyper-regional style of pizza is Quad-Cities pizza:
There’s even a place that opened up in Chicago called Roots that specializes in it. The key features of it are the malt used in the dough, the use of crumbled Italian fennel sausage instead of chunks or slices of sausage, a pretty heavy blanket of cheese, and the oddball cut they do. They cut it in half, and then into strips. So you have one vertical cut, and then like 5 or 6 horizontal ones.
Whenever I’m in the area (I used to drive to Iowa City a few times a year), I try to stop by and get a pizza from Harris or Frank’s. The Wikipedia picture is terrible. Here’s a better one:
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Note the browned edges. That’s from the malt used in the dough. It gives the crust a bit of a sturdier character and nuttier taste.
I’ve also seen this cut elsewhere. There’s a place in NW Indiana that escapes my mind that cuts their pizza into strips like this.