On the radio I heard them talking about Chicago’s upcoming restaurant week, and one person said “Chicago’s restaurant community” was “second to none.”
I rarely eat out, and when I do, not at pricey/hip eateries, but my impression is that such a statement was unabashed and unwarranted local boosterism.
So, those of you who follow such things, what one US and non-US city would you contend has the “best restaurant community” (however you interpret that)? I presume it means "has the most, most diverse, and highest quality restaurants - possibly at all price levels.
If at all possible, I’d prefer that folk not overly qualify their votes. No “East Bumfuck is unsurpassed if you like trans owned barbecued egg shops.”
In my ignorance, I’d probably offer New York and Paris.
It’s hard to beat the quantity and diversity of restaurants in Los Angeles. In my travels I was most impressed by the choices available in Berlin and Mexico City, even more so than London . Admittedly, I haven’t spent enough time in places like New York or Paris to fairly judge them.
I’d give it at least a B+. When Saveur did their first issue singling a city back in 2007 and their restaurants and cuisines, they picked Chicago(land), so we got that going for it. (A slice of Burt Katz’s [RIP] pizza from Burt’s Place in Morton Grove was the cover, with the headline " Chicago! From delectable deep dish pizza to cutting-edge restaurants, discover why the Windy City is America’s new culinary star")
I wouldn’t quite put it at A tier overall, but for certain cuisines, it fits the bill.
I also feel like this question has gotten less interesting over the last 30 years as global cities have gotten “efficient” in their restaurant scene relative to the local income distribution of the population. The minimum bar has gone up a lot as cities have homogenized around a core set of global cuisine, done acceptably anywhere you go.
To the extent that most travellers notice a difference, it’s because they’re arbitraging their home earnings against local spending. They’ll rave about how great a city is because they’ll be eating every night at a restaurant that the average denizen would reserve for a monthly special treat.
I feel like the 90s/early 00s were the peak time when the above question would have been the most meaningful. Now, any city with an airport that sees more than 10M passengers a year, you can eat pretty well in without much effort.
Chicagoan here. I don’t think we’re “second to none” but we’re certainly NOT B-grade when it comes to diversity. We are known as a city of neighborhoods, and you’d be hard pressed to name a cuisine that isn’t represented by our restaurants. We got Afghan, Ethiopian, Nepalese, Russian, Soul, Nigerian, Iranian, Vietnamese, Peruvian, Cuban, Jamaican, and those are just what I can think of around my usual haunts which by no means covers the whole city, never mind the suburbs.
Calvin Trillin, author of American Fried, Alice, Let’s Eat and Third Helpings about adventures in dining out, described being asked by non-New Yorkers, “How can you live there?” and replying “We like to eat.”
Can’t find Hungarian food here for like a decade or more. So that’s one that I’ve always looked for. I’m almost surprised as Hungarian food fits with old school Chicago fare, lots of meat, potatoes, starches. The Epicurean Hungarian and Paprikash were the last two restaurants around here. I just recently discovered some Georgian places that I’ve been looking ages for out in Wheeling, but that’s a little bit of a haul from where I’m at in the city. Same with Burmese, but there’s a place out in Wheaton that has that. (At least I think it’s still there.) Wish there was a place with New Mexican cuisine. Not sure I’ve seen Bengali food around here
It’s interesting, because DC’s food scene was pretty bad 15 years ago. Much much better in the last 10 although the most disappointing meal of my life was in a Michelin star restaurant in DC.
Chicago is a great restaurant city. “Best in the world” is an exaggeration, but perfectly fine to call out the food scene in describing the city.
Ya know, thinking about it, I’ll upgrade it from B+ to A-. It’s not NYC level, but hardly anything is. I’m happy with all we’ve got, especially our various Mexican foods and Mexican regional specialties. Far better than anything I’ve had in NYC (with good reason, given the two cities’ population) and I’ve even preferred it to anything I’ve found out West, at least in terms of variety.
If having rich international-cuisine options is de rigeur, though … New Orleans suffers a bit. We’ve got “the basics” of non-Western-European cuisine – Mexican/Central American, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern/Greek, Indian, Thai. I don’t know if Vietnamese counts among “the basics”, but we have lots of good Vietnamese. And of course very good French and Italian food, plus a smattering of Iberian Spanish places.
We just started getting Ethiopian and Colombian places. Only two apiece, I think.
We have practically none of:
Korean
Burmese
German
Eastern European
Scandinavian
Bengali would be mixed in with “Indian”, I think – our Indian places are essentially pan-Indian.
Now, of course, New Orleans and south Louisiana’s home-grown cuisines makes up for a lot.
Toronto is pretty damn good with a vibrant immigrant community - more than 50% of Torontonians weren’t born here.
I live in mid-town Toronto and there are probably 50 sub-national - I mean Punjabi instead of Indian, Tuscan rather than Italian - restaurants within a 15-20 minute walk of my house.