Fill in the blanks. “There are more ______ restaurants in my town of ______, __ than any other. _________ restaurants are second on the list. Third would be ______. There are practically no ________ places.”
For practical purposes, let’s ignore fast food chains, pizzerias, and sub shops. “Real” restaurants only, please. Examples might be:
Seafood
Mongolian BBQ
BBQ
Chinese
Thai
Italian
Irish Pub-style
In Boston, MA, the most ubiquitous types seem to be, in order:
Chinese
Italian
Thai-Indian-Irish (tie)
There are almost no French restaurants. There is only one German restaurant, and it sucks.
In my home-away-from-home of the Cape and Islands:
Seafood
Seafood
More seafood
Asian restaurants except for the occasional bad Chinese place are pretty much unheard of.
The one-pig town I live in is crawling with the standard “Come-in-and-drink-fancy-concoctions-and-eat-buffalo-wings-and-bring-all-your-friends” kinda places. Chili’s and those kind of places. Ho-fuckin’-hum.
“There are more **Indian ** restaurants in my town of **the neighborhoods of Rogers Park and West Rogers Park in Chicago **than any other. Mexican restaurants are second on the list. Third would be Thai. There are practically no German places.”
(The Reader only lists 3 Mexican and 2 Thai places, but that’s wrong, wrong, wrong!)
#1: Mexican. This includes Tex-Mex, “Interior” Mexican & places serving recent immigrants (& smart gringos.) Hardly a surprise, even though many are missing from the list. After all, The Great Robb Walsh is restaurant critic for The Houston Press. www.houstonpress.com/special/texmex.html
#2: “American.” A pretty generic category.
#3: Chinese. PLUS many Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, etc…
Sadly deficient in Kosher cuisine. Or Other cuisines, prepared Kosher.
Even in big cities, where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting haute cuisine, fast food, pizza, and subs dominate. “Forheretogo” is a more common term that “hello” around here.
Bridget Burke left out Italian. Houston is awash in Italian restaurants, even if you leave out pizza joints. It’s the cuisine most likely to run the gamut of price ranges.
We’ve also got lot of seafood. Many of our seafood restaurants are grim (e.g., the Landry’s family of crappy overpriced restaurants), but the seafood in restaurants that don’t explicitly specialize in it can be excellent.
There are more BBQ restaurants in my town of **Houston, TX ** than any other. Mexican restaurants are second on the list. Third would be seafood. There are practically no Polynesian places.
There are more Mexican restaurants in my town of Boise, Idaho, than any other. Chinese restaurants are second on the list. Third would be Italian or seafood. There are practically no French places.
Fill in the blanks. “There are more Italian restaurants in my town of Albany, NY than any other. Indian restaurants are second on the list. Third would be ‘American’ (steakhouses, etc.). There are practically no German places.”
When I lived in Manchester, NH, it seemed like there were a ton of bland “American” type places, many seafood restaurants, and a fair amount of Italian places. Pretty much no Mexican food, and what there was, sucked.
In Austin, TX, there are many, many, Mexican/Tex-Mex restaurants (whoda thunkit?), and BBQ places. Everything else is in good supply, also; off the top of my head, I’m not sure I could find a type of restaurant we have none of. Maybe German, but I know that there are towns not far away that have German.
“There are more Colombian restaurants in my area of South Florida than any other. Japanese restaurants are second on the list. Third would be Italian restaurants. There are practically no seafood places.”
There are more Mexican restaurants in my town of Fremont, CA than any other. Chinese restaurants are second on the list. Third would be Thai. There are practically no seafood places, which really bums me out. I guess the rest of the Bay Area has it covered so well we just don’t even bother.
In my big ol’ 8 square mile metropolis, we have four or five diners/coney islands, a plethora of pizza/sub/fast food joints and over a dozen bars, most with kitchens. We’re not so big on variety, unless you’re looking for a different place each night to get the same greasy american food.
However, within ten miles I’ve got plenty of choices, Chinese and Mexican places are the most popular, and I know at least one each German, Japanese, Mongolian, BBQ and Thai. Add in all the chain flair-wearing places within that same radius and one could probably go for weeks without cooking or repeating a visit.
I’d say burger joints, barbecue and Italian probably round out the top six, although with the exception of Dickey’s and Sonny Bryan’s, the DFW area seems kind of deficient in barbecue when compared to Houston or Austin.
“There are more seafood/fish restaurants in my town of Key Largo, FL than any other. Steak house restaurants are second on the list. Third would be classic diners. There are practically no Indian places.”
