So, let’s say someone from out of your region is coming for a visit. This is the first time they have been to your city. What foods do you feel really represent your local cuisine. What does your city do better than a lot of other places?
Since I live in a small city outside of Seattle I’ll stick with Seattle:
Seafood - This is the biggie. Fresh seafood, salmon to die for, dungeoness crabs, any other wonderful varieties of sea life.
Indian food - Some of the best Indian food I’ve ever had and the best I’ve had in the US can be found in Seattle.
Thai food - As I mentioned with Indian food, it’s hard to find a place in the US that does it better.
So what are your locations and your votes?
Of course. (Texan vegetarian here - at least in most of the Texas big cities, the BBQ restaurants have vegetables. As opposed to Memphis, where they deep-fry the salads).
In Dallas, Three Forks is a good up-scale steakhouse. Mouth-watering down-home cooking can be found at Celebration on Lover’s Lane, and the best Mexican food you have ever tasted is at Monica’s on Main Street, downtown.
Both Fotos and I are originally from Stratford, CT - home of the famous “Windmill Hot Dogs”. They have been written up in the NY Times food section, the Boston Globe food section, the LA Times food section, and food sections from around the country (Frank was in Miami once, when someone asked him if he knew where this place was - it was an article about the Windmill in the Miami Herald!)
The dogs are good. They’re made by Hummel using a special recipe. They’re cooked on a flat-top grill on a toasted bun. Basic toppings include kraut, relish, mustard, bacon, onions, ketchup and chili. You can get beer there, too
On the downside, it’s a little dive in the seedier part of town. With the execption of lunchtime and dinnertime, the patrons are mostly pensioners nursing a shot of 4 Roses with a short draft, or bikers fighting over the pool table. Why people will take bus trips from NYC and Boston to this roach trap in the middle of a run-down industrial area is beyond me.
But, the dogs are good. When we lived there, we went a lot. Now that we live 30 miles away, we only go there when we visit his daughter and grandson, who live a couple of blocks away.
If Nashville has one food to truly call it’s own it’s gotta be “Hot Chicken”. This, for the uninitiated, is fried chicken spiced so hot that it burns twice. The gold standard for hot chicken has long been “Prince’s”, my grandmother talks about waiting in line for a hot chicken sandwhich at 3am on a friday night WAY back. We have alot of other good food of many different kinds but hot chicken is uniquely sorta a Nashville thing.
Boston is the place to come for clam chowder and baked beans. Lobsters are also a good bet here, but I’m guessing that Maine has more of a claim to them than Boston.
I live in the land of miso, and so I think a few local miso specialities would be in order.
Dote-ni
Maybe not to everyone’s liking, but great winter food in my opinion. Beef and konyaku slowly simmered in a miso stew, finished off with a dash of shichimi for a little spicy taste.
Hooba miso
Traditionally, this was a way to use up left overs. Typically includes shiitake or maitake mushrooms, green onions, tofu, sometimes beef, mixed with miso, and warmed up in a magnolia leaf over charcoals. Picture
Gifu prefecture is exceptionally landlocked and so it’s not terribly famous for its sea fish. However, river fish is excellent, the king being the small ayu. The best way to eat these small wonders is to cover them in salt and roast them over a camp fire. Hmmm Hmmm.
You wouldn’t want to leave before trying Hida-gyu, one of Japan’s grand-cru beef.
Central Pennsylvania is home to two forms of native cuisine.
First, as an appetizer, we’ve got the best damn snack food anywhere. This is a state built on snack foods. We’ve got chip makers, candy makers (heck, Hershey’s chocolate is a local product), snack-cake makers, and it’s all wonderful. Give me a bag of Grandma Utz’s BBQ chips over Lay’s any day.
Second, we’ve got diner food. As far as I’m concerned, breakfast was invented in PA. I’ve never had a bad breakfast meal since I’ve lived here. Recently, while having breakfast with Airman and Zappo, I learned that scrapple isn’t bad. Mmmmm… good stuff.
Diner food isn’t fancy food by a long shot. You’ll find the same basic items: Breakfast (Eggs, bread, meat, potatoes, coffee), hamburgers, sandwiches, maybe salads, chicken dinners, steak dinners, fish dinners, that kind of thing. Often, the dinners are of the “meat and three” variety, meaning you’ll get meat and three vegetables.
Kansas City, Missouri: BBQ and steaks. And down in our Southwest Boulevard area, we have many excellent Mexican restaurants. But mostly, yep, BBQ and steaks.
