I once had a friend visit from San Francisco and bring me some gifts of bottled Mexican hot sauces, on the assumption that such delicacies would be unavailable in Chicago. I told him thanks, dude, but there are actually more Mexican people in Chicago than there are people in San Francisco.
As an aside, the original Parker’s Barbecue in Wilson needs some better search engine optimization. If you Google “parker’s barbecue” the first hit as a place in Greenville also called Parker’s (with a much more user friendly web site), then you have to scroll past a bunch of copycats with names like “Parker’s Smokehouse” and “Parker’s Grille” and “Parker John’s Barbecue” before you get to the real, original Parker’s.
My God, Parker’s had become the NC version of Ray’s Pizza.
Oh, I see what happened, I forgot that what I actually Googled was “parkers barbecue online ordering”, as a was having trouble finding the link to order it. And when I did the link appeared to be broken.
If I just Google “parker’s barbecue” the first (sponsored) link is the Parker’s in Greenville, then oddly Parker’s Facebook page (for the one in Wilson), followed by the website for Parker’s in Wilson. So they’re still not the top link, but they do show up higher.
The hell you say. NY has an airy, pillowy, floppy crust, great in it’s own way, but unique. There’s a bunch of great pizza styles in the US that aren’t that. There’s also a bunch of crap styles that also aren’t that.
A woman I know always wanted to see Paris, but had never been outside of Pennsylvania. I encouraged her to travel and eventually helped her get a passport. When she returned, she told me she tried champagne for the first time and loved it. She gave me a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
The next time I saw her I thanked her for the champagne. I told her I liked it so much that I bought another bottle. She was shocked, and started crying. I eventually got her to explain that she didn’t think it was available outside of France and the bottle she gave me was carefully brought back from there.
When I was a kid, my father took some overseas trips involving a layover at Frankfurt. He would bring back a big Toblerone bar, which was nice. Now of course, Target sells it. Global commerce means that most everything is available everywhere but that also loses the specialness of bringing back something rare.
(Though there’s a short piece in the New York Times suggesting bringing back toothpaste from overseas trips, since the local brands aren’t available back home. So perhaps that sort of boring ordinary thing is the best thing to get.)
I sort of agree with both of you. I think of NY pizza as having a thin, foldable crust, but big puffy edges, and a patina of grease from the thin but high-fat cheese layer. The “average” American pizza has a somewhat thicker crust and a higher cheese-to-crust ratio.
But I don’t know that there is a “default” American pizza style. If I walked into a random American pizzeria that didn’t specifically describe itself as “XYZ Style”, I’d think the “average” style would be most likely on offer, but I wouldn’t be surprised to be served something close to NY style, or perhaps Midwestern tavern pizza (very thin, but crisp and nonfoldable, crust), or wood-fired Neapolitan style. I’d be somewhat surprised, but not shocked, to find that they dealt in Sicilian style or deep dish. OTOH, in NYC itself, I’d certainly expect to find NY style unless specifically told otherwise.
Sounds like the pizza from Costco. I don’t say that to be catty but because that literally describes the slice of pizza I had last night after my shopping.
When I was living in Montana, every time I came back home to Cleveland, I had to bring back a few bottles of ballpark mustard (the best mustard in the world, in my opinion, and the perfect complement to every form of sausage-inna-bun). Nowadays, of course, you can buy it online to be shipped anywhere, but I still don’t think you’ll see it in ordinary stores outside of the Cleveland area.