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> Wow you're really passionate about your cheese huh? :) Living in the Bay Area makes foodies out of people ;) Don't get me started on my sustainable seafood,

• aznpwnzor 8y ago
  > Living in the Bay Area makes foodies out of people ;) Not trying to antagonize here, but mainly wondering if you have a nuanced reason? The consensus is generally that the Bay Area doesn't have very good food, without even adjusting for the cost of living.
  • davidgay 8y ago
    > The consensus is generally that the Bay Area doesn't have very good food What? Exhibit A: http://www.berkeleybowl.com/ http://www.berkeleybowl.com/ Exhibit B: http://cheeseboardcollective.coop/ http://cheeseboardcollective.coop/ [exhibits C through Z on demand] I haven't seen better grocery or cheese stores anywhere else in the US, or in Switzerland (there's stores with some better cheeses, but nothing with the range and variety).
    • Fins 8y ago
      I've seen as good or better grocery or cheese shops in Chicago, but as much as I dislike SFBA for variuous reasons, there's no shortage of good (if usually vastly overpriced) restaurants.
    • thatfrenchguy 8y ago
      Ever been to France ? A normal middle class supermarket has more diversity than any place in the US :-/
      • anyfoo 8y ago
        Ever been to Berkeley Bowl? I have French family, so I have been there a lot (grew up in Germany, though). French supermarkets are astonishing (especially compared to Germany), but Berkeley Bowl really is something else.
      • yhoneycomb 8y ago
        I find it pretty hard to believe that France would have even 1% the amount of Asian food that I can find in southern California grocery stores.
        • hokkos 8y ago
          There is some big supermarket specialized in Asian food, 11000 products form 100 countries : https://www.tang-freres.fr/produits-asiatiques/ https://www.tang-freres.fr/produits-asiatiques/
      • davidgay 8y ago
        Growing up, it was sometimes hard to know which part of the woods was in France and which in Switzerland. So yes, I have been there, a few hundred times. You, clearly haven't been to those places I listed or you wouldn't have made that statement (and yes, Berkeley is atypical for the US).
  • rdl 8y ago
    57 Michelin starred chefs, and the US's premier wine region, plus lots of cheese/beef/specialty food producers. Also, pretty amazing ethnic food, particularly Mexican and Asian (of all types). Maybe second to New York for restaurants, but per capita pretty much on top. California is the best produce region of the country, so there are better ingredients within 4 hours of SF than within 4h of NYC. NYC might win for European haute cuisine and for long-established restaurants. https://sf.eater.com/maps/san-francisco-bay-area-michelin-restaurants-stars-2019 https://sf.eater.com/maps/san-francisco-bay-area-michelin-re... (More 3-starred restaurants than NYC)
    • fcarraldo 8y ago
      I would argue that Los Angeles might possibly have San Francisco beat, just slightly, but the Michelin Guide hasn’t given stars in LA for over a decade. Still, it’s no where near New York, and per capita, SF is easily top of the list.
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      • rdl 8y ago
        LA has gotten a lot better over the past 10y compared to SF's rate of improvement, and is way bigger in population. I think LA has more innovation happening (especially food trucks, weird fusion cuisines, etc.) because you can take risks there. Portland is great, too, for similar reasons. All of them (and probably >10 more cities in the US) have world-class food across multiple cuisines.
  • pmalynin 8y ago
    Compared to the shithole I moved from it has the best food ever (perhaps after NY)
  • NikolaNovak 8y ago
    Interesting, as member of the Great White North (Toronto, Canada), the perception we have here, is that Bay Area has some of the best cuisine in USA. Still from hearsay / general perception, others would be NY City and New Orleans. More importantly, and again talking stereotypes in the spirit of original post, the image of a young, hip silicon valley operative certainly includes the aura of foodiness
  • danans 8y ago
    Well, whether or not one agrees that it's the best food, I think the Bay Area does have some of the most incredible variety of food in the US, definitely compared to where I grew up in the Midwest.
  • anyfoo 8y ago
    I moved to the Bay Area from Europe, and it far surpassed my expectations. There is amazing food here. It might not be as easy to get “proper bread” (from a European point), but it’s definitely possible, and the astonishing variety on food in general makes up for it.
    • masonic 8y ago
      New Seasons had really good breads. Too bad that it was poorly run, and the Sunnyvale store failed in less than a year.
      • anyfoo 8y ago
        Oh yeah, there are places where you can get good bread. The problem is more, as you almost prove the point by recommending me "a place" to get bread, is that good, freshly baked bread is something you expect to get from the bakery at the corner, usually just the closest one, at least in Germany. It's a very mundane thing there. Overall, I'm very happy with the food options in the Bay Area, though.
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  • kelnos 8y ago
    What consensus are you referring to? The Bay Area has fantastic food, many critically-acclaimed restaurants & chefs, and some of the best locally-grown produce and ingredients in the country. Not saying it's the best; I would certainly rate NYC higher (and with more of long tail cuisine-wise), and would give some other cities a leg up for narrower categories (e.g. LA's Korean food destroys SF easily). But... "the Bay Area doesn't have very good food"... I'm entirely baffled by that statement.
    • scottlocklin 8y ago
      I think Bay Area is pretty good for US, and as someone said, you get a lot of variety there, but US food is not real good on a world scale. Mostly because of a lack of indigenous cuisine style; almost everything in the US is imitative of some other ethnic cuisine, and the ingredients just ain't gonna match, even if they're comparable in quality (which is rare). Many of the classic Bay Area foodie places were also super overrated; I always thought Chez Panisse was mediocre, and relatively unknown places nearby (La Limes) were actually better. There were a few real treasures though: I'll miss Aki-san at Sushi Sho.
  • rconti 8y ago
    Yes, you are trying to antagonize. For any average non-foodie person such as myself, the selection of any major metropolitan city (quality, variety, diversity of ethnic origin) is far more than sufficient. If you're trying to make some obscure, excessively-specific, metric-based argument based on number of stars and specific obscure cuisines that are missing to satisfy the extreme foodie, that's also trying to be antagonistic, because it's aimed at an exceedingly narrow audience.
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  • hedora 8y ago
    Food in south bay isn’t nearly as good as in SF or east bay (on average), though it is improving rapidly. I think it because South Bay consciously decided to be car-centric, but East Bay and SF decided to focus on public transit. The latter approach creates more of a critical mass for competitive restaurants. In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of decent little downtown areas that are walkable, and have higher end food, but they’re tiny compared to Berkeley’s gourmet ghetto / downtown, or Downtown Oakland’s Lake Merrit area (and SF blows all that out of the water). Downtown San Jose may end up eventually being competitive with the rest of the region, but it was a ghost town at night 10 years ago, so it’s still getting bootstrapped. All of the examples cited in the other responses are decades-old establishments. Anyway, Silicon Valley has a reputation for expensive, mediocre food, but that’s comparing to SF and East Bay which are both quite good.
• kannanvijayan 8y ago
  > They were also super-frugal, so perhaps there is some truth to what you are saying, but really, to this day, they have a very simple mental model of cheese, so they don't know (or care to know) what they are missing. I immigrated from India to North America very young (in elementary school), but this was true for me as well, and it took a long time for me to _understand_ cheese and its varieties. I'd expand on that and say that the same held true for bread, jams and jellies, and cured meats as well. My mental model of cheese was "gummy plastic Kraft slices", and I didn't eat much of those because they didn't provide much in the way of taste. My mental model of bread was "gummy white wonder-bread". My mental model of jams and jellies was some generic bottle of smuckers strawberry. My mental model of cured meats was some oversalted hunk of ham. Mental model of syrup was a bottle of Aunt Jemimah's. It was a full 15 years of living here before it dawned on me the rich variety of tastes and textures that comprised these foods, and how they could be combined and incorporated into meals. Most of that I owe to eating (out of a sense of obligation) home-made high-quality food prepared by people who had invited me to their homes. Even then, it took a few years until I put two and two together and made the connection that somehow _these people_ were making delicious things out of these foods, and I was somehow not encountering them myself in my own choices. When I finally burst through to the other side of that, it was a revelation. Cheese was cheddar and jack and gouda and brie and oka and all sorts of other wonderful tastes and textures. Bread was rye and sourdough and pumpernickel and calabrese. Jams were rhubarb and black currant and ginger and marmalade. Cured meats were kolbasa and proscuitto and genoa and soprasatta. Syrups were maple and molasses. In my childhood days in India, we would sometimes go out and buy exotic "western" food from the store - and this was before India's markets had opened up - so what you were able to obtain were all these singular examples - Wonderbread white, some generic paste of a jam, some processed cheese. We would eat these and the novelty would hold my interest, but at the back of my mind I felt a bit sorry for those westerners. "This is all they subsist on?" I would wonder.. "how sad". That implicit bias stayed with me as a child, even after I came over, and influenced my choices in food. Even with all the opportunity to sample a broader range of examples, one must _motivate_ oneself to do so. You have to go out of your way to go to a cheese shop, and try a few, and experiment with them. Why do that when you have already made up your mind that there is nothing more there than what you have already seen? It was a revelatory event when I finally understood what I was missing, and how I had ended up in that circumstance, and how my biases had guided me into a constrained existence where I had denied myself exposure to these wonderful things. I take it as a lesson learned, more generally, about prior biases and how they can influence my choices so that I mold my own environment to be blind to things I could otherwise have experienced.
• PopeDotNinja 8y ago
  > simulated meat preferences. I wonder if someone will ever come up with simulated carbs, without using artificial sweeteners, made from meat & fat. Imagine simulated bread made from 100% chicken.
  • didgeoridoo 8y ago
    Google “fathead dough” :)
  • bjterry 8y ago
    I bought a personal pizza at the grocery store with a substitute crust made of chicken meat. It was awful. I think it was something like this: https://www.realgoodfoods.com/product/mixedcases/ https://www.realgoodfoods.com/product/mixedcases/ I assumed that the crust would be more bread-like, but somehow made with some chicken meat. It was more like a flavorless thick circular slice of chicken breast with pizza toppings.
  • masonic 8y ago
    Cauliflower is a popular substitute for mashed potatoes ("fauxtatoes"). There is also a retail-available cauliflower frozen pizza brand at Sprouts -- both pizzas and crusts-only for homemade pizzas.
  • dagw 8y ago
    Shrimp pasta (made by making dough out ground up shrimp mixed with transglutamate) was a thing in foodie circles for a while (personally I never tried it).