This is not the dominant opinion of the internet or what was shared w/ me before heading to Europe. The old “what’s the difference between American beer and having sex in a canoe” joke is going strong. It’s absolutely that the beer itself is much better there.
Haven’t been to Ireland to see if Guinness there is actually better.
I had poutine three times in Quebec City. Once in a casual restaurant the old city, once at a chicken place (St-Hubert) and once in a family restaurant. This was about 12 years ago.
I decided poutine was not for me.
I had it at the factory in Dublin after a brewery tour. It’s the same as you can buy here at your local supermarket.
Could not agree more. American here, so usually can only have a Cuban if we vacation somewhere they’re legal. They’re…fine. They’re always super expensive in the touristy places I’ve purchased them (a small fortune if I get one with the ring gauge I prefer).
In blind taste tests there are any number of Australian Sparkling White Wines (not allowed to call them champagne!) that outperform celebrated French champagnes by large margins. And at a fraction of the price. I’m sure the same would be true of Californian versions.
French wine in general lives off reputation not actual quality.
I will agree that American mass-market swill is uniquely low in flavor and interest versus mass-market stuff in most of the rest of the world. A large fraction of Americans like mass quantities of unchallenging fare. And it’s hard to go broke giving all those customers what they want cheaply.
But guess what? The beer snobs, and beer connoisseurs, and just beer afficionados are not drinking the mass-market swill. And especially not in America.
Instead they’re drinking mainstream good stuff. And specialty stuff.
IMO with allowances for Americans’ more narrow and more trendy-driven tastes, the good American stuff can readily stand up to the good foreign stuff of the same general category.
My take on European beer is that there are styles that are just not made in America (or are not made with enough distribution to be readily available). Belgian dubbel or tripel, a hefeweizen, altbier, bock, bitter… tons of others. There may be a single product on the shelves/taps, but unless you want a good hoppy ale or mass-market lager, American options can be pretty limited. That is changing as regional brewers are canning lots of interesting beers that are available, but most of the shelf space is taken with variations on IPA/APAs. And, many of those regional brewery varieties come and go as they either go out of business or consolidate production to a narrower but more profitable list of beers.
Both of these have always let me down, even with very low expecations. The ceiling for ketchupy hot dogs or wetbrown fries is so dismally low that I get distracted by how good they’re supposed be that I lose sight of how bad they’ll probably be, which is a D+. In other words, every time I try poutine or currywurst is, at best, a longshot and the disappointment lingers longer than the hope.
Come to think of it, it’s similar to a scratchoff lottery ticket. I’ll sometimes get one or give one as a gift and it’s sort of fun, other people seem to love 'em, but I wish the money (or calories) had been put to better use.
Seconded. I visited Ireland on holiday for the first time this summer, with my partner and her mum, and they insisted (before we went) that the Guinness tastes better over there. Absolute old wives’ tale if you ask me. Also, Murphy’s is better. Guinness are just INCREDIBLE at marketing the stuff (a whole floor of the Storehouse tour is dedicated to their various forms of advertising, and that’s no surprise given its importance in its ubiquity).
I usually buy beer from a local brew-pub, and last week I stopped-in to pick out a few from the fridge. You are right about the shelf space. One of the brewmasters rang me up and we chatted for a few minutes, as he noticed I selected only non-IPA varieties. I told him I prefer non-IPA and even he said that’s his preference as well. But, I imagine the IPA craze hasn’t waned much and is still a major source of income, allowing them to produce other varieties in smaller volumes.
It still seems to be going strong here in the Midwest, too. I buy beer and liquor at Binny’s, a Chicago-area big-box liquor store; they have a huge beer selection, including a lot of small craft breweries as well as imports and the big brands; the selection of products from the smaller breweries is easily 40-50% IPAs. I’m not morally opposed to IPAs, but so many of them now are a matter of “just how damned bitter can we make this?,” which I find to be undrinkable.
Hence this snippet from my previous comment:
With double underlines and bold on the “trendy-driven”. 
We rugged individualists just love being in a huge herd steered by a couple of influencers.
Bleu cheese burgers. I love bleu cheese and burgers separately, so I expected to like it. Nope. The flavors seem to clash in a way I wasn’t expecting. It was edible, but I’d rather have had a plain burger or a regular cheeseburger.
Another cheese one comes to mind - cheese fondue. I had it many years ago when traveling in Europe, not sure which country - it may/may not have been Switzerland. Anyway, I had been wanted to try it to see what the fuss was all about. Had it with a bunch of other young folk because…it’s cheese fondue, and that’s what you do there! I was not all that impressed. I like good cheese, but the melted cheese seemed overly buttery/greasy and I think there was some sort of booze in it as well that made it sort of sickly tasting. Everyone else got sort of disgusted with it as well - there was still cheese left when we were all done. Not my sort of thing, I guess.
BTW, does anyone here have a fondue pot? We have one that gets very occasional use, either with oil for meat and vegetables, or chocolate as a fancy dessert for a party, but never cheese.
Here’s the thing about uni: it MUST be fresh. Doesn’t have to be ‘plucked from the ocean’ fresh, but once it starts to turn, boy howdy does it turn. I worked for a few years in a Japanese restaurant, and the owner used to wax lyrical about uni, how it “tastes like an ocean breeze.” Yeah, well, when you own the joint and get first crack at the day’s delivery, it does taste like an ocean breeze. Once it’s been sitting around for a couple of days, though, it smells like the mouth of the Tijuana River at low tide.
The one on Clark? I used to work there when they were called Gold Standard. I didn’t drink, myself, but I used my employee discount to assemble a Care Package shipped to my dad full of exotic beers.
I’m out in the suburbs; the locations I shop at are in North Riverside, and in Naperville (when I’m out that way, gaming with friends).
I have a soft spot for The Worm Ouroboros mostly because of memories of the time in my life when I first read it, but I agree that it has none of the philosophical depth and detail of Tolkien. And the nomenclature is just silly. But I still kind of enjoy it and reread it occasionally. There are a few points that really stand out, like the mountain climbing scenes, and the one great character in the book, Lord Gro.
I love Gormenghast though, at least the first two books. It’s a slow story, in which not much happens, but it’s peopled with such bizarre and unique characters that I still find it fascinating.
Holy cow, yes. The first time I read it, I wondered whether Brooks was going to get sued for copyright infringement. It’s the EXACT same story as LOTR, down to a cast of practically identical characters and literally identical scenes.
Yep.
I did finish the first one. But, yep.
I liked this one okay, but it sure isn’t a favorite. I suspect it’s higher reputation rests in part that it was at the forefront of the modern fantasy explosion that continues unabated to this day. British writers like Eddison, Tolkien, Peake and Lewis set the stage and as Tolkien exploded in popularity in popular culture in the late 1960’s, along came Bellairs in 1969 to scratch an itch. It’s fine.
More indifferent, myself. But really another yep.
Yeah, so I was simultaneously very offended and very mildly entertained by the Shannara books 
. The early ones anyway - I think I read the first ‘trilogy’, but there are now umpteen of them. Brooks appears to have gone full Xanth, good on him for the steady paychecks I suppose.
The first one is particular is such a blatant rip-off it’s really kind of appalling, I think I finished it almost as a grudging hate-read. The next two were slightly better as he started trying to build a slightly more distinct world (i.e. it’s all actually set in a post-apocalyptic Earth, who knew - it’s like a less wildly imaginative Land of Ooo from Adventure Time). They’re not good, but to teenage me they were sort of the equivalent of fantasy fast food. I’d rather read light tropey adventure bullshit like that, than sludgey stuff like Gormenghast (at least back then), even though I know and knew even then that the latter is unquestionably of superior quality.
It wasn’t on my “must do” list, but we had a family trip to Amarillo Texas. Of course we had to stop at the Big Texan Steakhouse. They were one of the first places to have “eat this five pounds of food in 30 minutes and it’s free.” I thought that it’s going to be a great steak, being Texas and all. What I got was a tough, leathery piece of shoe leather. Something about dry aging their beef, but it tasted like it was left out in the parking lot for two weeks.