I was going to chime in on this as well. There was a place in Portland that made the real deal and they got my dime on many occasions. Here in MN, it’s a barren wasteland for cheesesteak. I tried the “cheesesteak” at one sandwich place and it was a horrifying mess of inedible overkill.
Really? I have to disagree, as I’m originally from the NYC metro area and I’ve found the dynamic described above to be the exact opposite of my observations.
We all called it just pizza, or even just pie. The only time I saw the term “New York Style” bandied about was by pizza places using the term in an attempt to establish authenticity bona-fides in other parts of the country, or other people outside the NYC area doing the same. Indeed, seeing a pizza place in the NYCMA touting itself as “New York Style” would be sneered at as being touristy and of inferior quality.
Being away from that area for decades, I might hear ex-NY-ers describe pizza from there such as “from back home”, or somesuch thing, but never the cliche term “New York Style” ( sorry, can’t figure out how to put a little “TM” next to that term, but I wish I could )
TrademarkTM use <sup>TM</sup>
or use : tm : without the spaces for 
That may be because so-called New York style is the default American style of pizza, though New Haven style is clearly better.
Thanks. 
Alas, missed the edit though.
I think authenticity is overrated, anyway. I live in a city that has more Japanese restaurants than it has Japanese people. Mathematically speaking, there’s no way the vast majority of them are “authentic”; a lot of them, however, are delicious.
What I expect from a restaurant is, basically, reasonable suspension of disbelief. I want to eat food that tastes good and could be authentic, if I don’t examine it too closely. That’s enough for me.
This. I’m from South Texas. Here in Corpus Christi we have authentic taquerias on almost every other corner. Not all of them are good, but they are authentic. Just a few hundred miles north, in Austin, they have a place called Torchy’s. They make good tacos, but they aren’t authentic Tex-Mex.
As far as authentic but not good, there’s a local Japanese restaurant, run by first generation immigrants from Japan, that serve terrible sushi. It’s authentic, but it also happens to be awful.
Thoughts on a couple of things:
First, NM Mexican food, it really depends on where you’re going of course. Places that cater to locals run the gamut of cheap-filling-no frills that while better than Taco Bell are all about stuffing you fast, to local ingredients cooked with care and pride (sublime), to fine ingredients cooked to the tastes of tourists / upscale gringos and made to look beautiful on a plate (not bad but boring). I lived for 12 years (6-18 in Las Cruces) and 2 years in Albuquerque. The places you went with friends and family were very different from places you took out of town guests! 95% of the places that had mariachis were right out!
I agree in Texas, Mexican food is -highly- variable, but as a rule of thumb, the farther from Kansas/Panhandle beef country, the better it was. I hate El Paso like the plague, but it had good Mexican food. Lubbock and Amarillo though, -shudder- no, just no. Galveston, Houston, Corpus Christi all had solid Mexican food, although again, had to head away from the main tourist drags for the best stuff.
As for Austin, I do love a lot of the food there, but will agree that Torchy’s is absolutely fine, but not authentic, for whatever value you want to use for that term. It’s much more about selling interesting combos with funny names, and as they’ve hugely expanded the chain, lost a lot of the “Keep Austin Weird” elements in favor of increased profitability. But it isn’t bad tacos by any means.
Back to regional/specialty food.
My biggest grief is New York (or east coast) style deli. My father spent years in Philadelphia, Massachusetts, and New York, but moved us to Las Cruces right before I turned six for various reasons. He raised me with a love of Jewish / New York style deli that has stuck with me all my life, but there was -one- place in Cruces that did it to within his tolerance, and almost even place in the Southwest is at best a pale imitation of what the great delis of the coast manage. And we won’t even talk about fast food / fast casual delis - they aren’t horrible, if you set your expectations appropriately, but just a nope for me.
Another regional thing from my NM days is green chile cheeseburgers. You have to understand, it’s an assumption there that every place will have this, even McDonalds does so. But outside of NM, it’s less common, and is likely to be defined as throwing pickled jalapenos on a burger, or some sort of chili sauce on a burger. It offends me at almost a cellular level, so I have to make my own, or to make sure to get a fix on my drives to visit family once every year or so.
New York City has more mediocre to bad pizza per capita than any other place on earth. There are so many that you can still find many fantastic places. My Italian heritage makes me want to say that the decline of NYC pizza is because the immigrants who started it moved out. I know that’s not the only reason. I do know for sure that you can easily find better pizza in New Jersey than you can find in the by the slice places in NYC.
A few months ago I discovered a Nigerian restaurant that I thought was a real hidden gem in the food court of an otherwise dying mall (I wrote about that trip to the mall in the “How are your local malls doing?” thread that I don’t feel like searching for right now). Later I went and looked at their Yelp reviews. You could almost predict whether a review would be positive or negative based on the reviewer’s avatar. If the reviewer was white, the review would invariably be something like “This was my first time trying Nigerian food. Wow, what amazing flavors!” If the reviewer was black the review would usually range from “Meh. It’s nothing special” to “I’m from Nigeria and this was nothing like real Nigerian food.” Now the people running the stall did appear to be immigrants; the woman who served me had a thick Nigerian accent. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they adjusted the spices to cater to local tastes.
This thread reminds of things I miss about our neighborhood in Portland: first, the aforementioned cheesesteak joint. Then there was the pizza joint that served either by the slice or by the 18" pie. All the local NYC expats proclaimed it to be the real NY pie deal. Best pies I’ve ever had. Then there was the mom/pop Indian couple that opened a food cart, serving freshly cooked Indian dishes and not dumbing them down for the American palate. Most of the ethnic food places I’ve been here have been worse than mediocre, with a couple of standout exceptions like the arepa place (Hola Arepa) not far from here, and an Asian place that got mention in the NYT recently (Gai Noi).
That’s reasonable, and I think I feel the same way. If you order a regional dish outside of said region, one you’ve always wanted to try, and it tastes yummy to you, nothing wrong with that.
But if you’re familiar with the dish, and you’re jonesing for one, beware the “Authentic Philly Cheesesteak” on the menu in Des Moines.
That’s the first way anyone’s ever described “authentic” cuisine that makes sense to me. I don’t have that kind of attachment to many foods, but I do to things like, say, buttermilk biscuits. And if you serve me a buttermilk biscuit that’s not flaky and tangy and buttery, but is closer to a muffin or brioche or even a scone, I’ll be unhappy. Doesn’t matter how tasty it is, I wanna be able to split it with my fingers and put a sausage patty or butter and honey on it and have a delicious sandwich.
This one is a little hard to parse… New York City is where you get good bagels, but a Manhattan Bagel is a pathetic one? And yes, I do get that NYC is a big place with lots of variation, but it still sounds odd.
Sure, that I could buy. And if it were just New Yorkers saying “Man, you can’t find any pizza around here as good as the stuff from X place back home”, well, maybe it’s true and maybe it’s not, but that’s just a matter of taste. But so often, you’ll see New Yorkers saying “You can’t get New York pizza anywhere else”, and when you ask them what constitutes “New York pizza”, they’ll tell you that it has tomato sauce and cheese on it (with the cheese on top of the sauce!), or that you can hold a slice of it in your hand, or something similarly generic.
What’s New Haven style?
A Neopolitan-style pizza, with a thin, crispy (even charred) oblong crust, cooked in a hot oven (traditionally coal-fired), and on which mozzarella cheese is an optional (not automatic) topping.
New Haven-style pizza is thin crust and often (though not always) cooked in a coal-fired oven. There is often a bit of char and the pizza tastes a bit chewy. Traditionally, it might not even have mozzarella cheese on it.
I lived in Philadelphia for a few years and the best cheesesteaks were at a little shop in Upper Darby. Their cheesesteaks were the only good thing about living there.
“Manhattan Bagel” was a terrible chain that was trying to pass off a roll with a hole as a Bagel. Out of the West Coast you’ll see places like East Coast Pizza or NY Pizza. Same idea. Advertising and not reality.
And then there’s the Gino’s vs. Pat’s debate. Pat’s is (probably, arguably) the “original” cheesesteak, and it’s really good, but it’s also noticeably different from the cheesesteaks you’ll get at almost any other place in the Philadelphia area.
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen the “Manhattan bagel” chain in Ohio. We do have bagel chains of various degrees of quality, as well as one-off local places. The largest chain is probably Einstein Brothers, which I’m told by bagel aficionados isn’t very good.
Einstein Bagels wasn’t good and they didn’t last long around here, but they were better than “Manhattan Bagel”.