A little off topic since gyros aren’t regional American, but I feel the same way if the gyro place has to drown the meat in tzatziki sauce, rather than using it as an accent.
On the beverage front, I just spent two weeks in Seattle… much of which was spent trying to instruct bartenders in how to create a Wisconsin Old Fashioned.
(Don’t even try. Order a Manhattan instead. Or ask for what a bar might call an Old Fashioned… and just tell yourself you ordered whisky and bitters.)
The owner/brewer at a nearby brewery is an Old Fashion aficionado. Once a week they have Old Fashions as a special. I love watching them being made. The torch they use on the orange peel is cool.
It’s Badger-Staters who don’t know what an Old Fashioned is, not the rest of the country. Kindly keep your deviant drinks to yourselves.
But then, I drink red beer, so my opinion is…suspect.
What is Red Beer?
{As opposed to a nice Irish Red Ale?}
Cheap American mass market swill and tomato juice. A poor interpretation of a michelada.
So Bud & tomato juice.
I’m trying to imagine what that tastes like. I just can’t.
Started drinking them back in the days when I still “worked” the family farm in Kansas every summer. Definitely an acquired taste.
If you live in Chicago or New York, the first thing on your list should be … PIZZA.
This summer, I was in Mackinaw City visiting the island and visiting the upper peninsula. The choices of cuisine were, to put it mildly, pretty limited, but we were told that there was a place called, Nonna Lisa’s Italian Restorante that has, and I quote, “pretty good pizza”. My God, it tasted like someone poured a can of store bought pizza sauce over disc of cardboard. 
Tastes delicious. I’ve always called them a red eye and never had a bartender not know what it was.
The torch alone says they care about their drinks.
WHERE IS THIS? I must try it. I do have Old Fashioned-loving realtives in Pittsburgh, if it’s near there…
Allusion Brewing in Vandergrift, PA.
They brew very good beer. Despite being in a small town, they’ve won numerous awards.
Try their fudge pizza next time! ;-D
…
I live in area of the Midwest where “regular” pizza would probably be considered something like a thin Donatos (just the most popular chain mostly with this style) with no crust, cut into rectangles (which people insist on calling squares for no good reason) where it’s basically a cracker with a little sauce that serves as a delivery vehicle for as much pepperoni as possible. I actually belong to an online local pizza afficionado group, and anything that’s more regular (IMHO, compared to New York style, specifically) is derisively referred to as “looks like Little Caesars,” anything somewhat more NY style (sorry a lot of regular style pie cut pizzas can’t be served on a paper plate and folded and eaten while walking) “Papa Johns,” anything with less than 2lbs of toppings better not cost more than $12 because you are getting ripped off, and there better not be anything resembling pizza dough in a… pizza. Even back home on the East coast, I would say maybe 1/3-1/2 at most of regular pizzas are substantively NY style, and I’m not from NY. I did grow up with the expectation pizza was made with dough, pie cut, you could buy a slice and walk around eating it.
In my experience, most of the time any rectangles are just hastily and lazily cut squares. Not an actual intent to create rectangles.
Maybe.
But if you start with an e.g. 12"x18" square pizza pan and cut it into 4x4 sub-units, they’ll each be 3x4" Plus/minus any inaccuracy in cutting.
No one but a Philistine would cut a circular pizza into square / rectangular hunks.
Plenty of Philistines around then, AFAICT.
(Can’t say I really care. The pizza tastes the same either way.)
Thought for a second I’d wandered into the “pizza cut into … ?” thread.
(Can’t be arsed to find a link. Maybe Discourse will do it automatically.)
I grew up about a twenty minute walk from the Blackstone hotel in Omaha NE. This is the home of the Reuben sandwich, where Reuben Kulakofsky concocted the sandwich for his poker buddies in the late 1920’s It is not dependent on some odd, esoteric ingredients only available in the dark of the moon while in view of Farnam Street. It is a simple sandwich.
It is corned beef, sauerkraut, Russian dressing and Swiss cheese on rye bread lightly grilled until the cheese starts to melt. Easy peasy.
Restaurants seem to love to substitute thousand island for the Russian dressing. Some will even sub it coleslaw in place of the sauerkraut. Once I even ordered it and got a ham, turkey, thousand island, coleslaw and American cheese on wheat toast. Tasty sandwich but not a Reuben.