Around here, it’s a bit tough to find things that aren’t national chains.
We’re overrun with TGI Friday, Chili’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Longhorn, Outback, and so on. Every other exit off the freeway seems to have two or three of these and a business-class hotel such as a Marriott Courtyard. Bland, Blah and Boring!
One thing that really threw me was that it’s impossible to find a Slurpee here. The closest 7-11 is 140 miles away. So, I have to make do with Icee.
For Polish(ish) in DC, there is, of course, Domku in Petworth, the food is good, but the portions are small, the owner is a bitch and the crowd is hipster. It’s a few block from my house and I lived in Eastern Europe, so I want to like it, but I just can’t.
Also, there is the Serbian Crown (or Crown of Serbia, I can never remember which) out by Wolf Trap in VA, they have good Ukranian/Russian food.
Good cannolis are pretty hard to find outside the Northeast.
Good Sweet Tea.
Oh, some of the big fast food chains have started to put Sweet Tea on their menus, but it’s not *good *Sweet Tea. It’s obviously from a mix, and has a weird off taste (preservatives, I’m guessing.)
I hear there are some good real bagels to be found (and I bet **pulykamell ** or **MikeG **can tell me where), but I haven’t found them on my own.
Other than that, it’s Chicago, so you can find everything somewhere!
No Dunkin’ Donuts. 
Please, take some of ours!
It’s not preservatives, it’s the powdering process. It’s instant tea with sugar. Nobody at a chain has the patience to make real Southern sweet tea.
I’m in NYC and have a heckuva time trying to find hash browns. Breakfast and brunch here seems to come standard withhome fries. Even frozen hash browns are absent from most grocery stores!
Your first link is so very unrelated to hash browns. Maybe you meant these, as opposed to the potatoes in your second link. I’ve found that in San Fran, it’s a crap shoot as to which ones you get at a diner. I’ve also had both when living in NJ, I’m sure that someone in the city would serve them…
Joe
Our hash browns look different.
If you have a Dairy Queen, try the Mr. Misty–it’s like 3x the price, but it’s so good it’ll make you forget that Slurpees ever existed.
This is also what “hash browns” means to me. What wheresgeorge04 linked to I would call a type of rösti.
To me, both are “hash browns.” While I know the word rösti from my reading of cookbooks (and since beet rösti are one of my favorite uses of beets), I’d be surprised if one in a hundred Americans knew that word.
The regular kind or extra sugar?
You guys are accustomed to patty-formed hash browns which are the industrialized version. Rösti is absolutely a form of traditional hash browns, or vice-versa if you like. The incorporation of bacon, onions, or cheese, for example, would be entirely comfortable to Americans familiar with scattered hash browns; we might also use peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms or ham.
The local grocery store near me that clearly is catering towards the local Hispanic population has no chocolate. Well, they do have baking chocolate. And they do have what looks like homemade candy of various sorts at the checkout. But there’s no aisle with typical commercial candy of any kind. No candy bars. No chocolate bars. No twizzlers. No M&Ms. None of that. Had me quite befuddled.
It may be extinct. It’s hard to imagine a food, especially a bacteria, going extinct, but what is sold as Liederkranz today is quite possibly not the real thing.
I agree that normal is in the eye of the beholder, so here is the stuff I think of as “normal” that we can’t get:
Good fish sauce(cheap stuff only here)
Good corn on the cob(for all but 1 month of the year, anyway)
I’m not sure of which “chains” you speak, but if it’s McDonald’s that you are referring to, I’m pretty damn sure that they brew their tea and sweeten it the the old fashioned way… as a matter of fact I can’t see any chain using “powdered” tea in any case for reasons of both economy and quality. If they can brew coffee, they can brew tea…
And McDonald’s has a very clean and obviously fresh taste to their tea, so if you are referring to their tea as having “preservatives” or any tea, outside of canned as containing “preservatives” then there is something wrong with your taster. What possible preservatives would it need if it were from a powdered mix? It’s tea and sugar!
My understanding from an employee is that McDonald’s sweet tea arrives at the restaurant locations as a bagged liquid concentrate, with the on-site preparation being limited to dilution and icing. I checked the McDonald’s site, and they say nothing about the preparation–the word “brewed” is not used–so I conclude that if it’s not actually powdered and preserved, it’s not exactly fresh either.
