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> food or retail scene In my experience this is becoming less and less true, smaller cities are really catching up, it's not 2010 anymore. My pet theory is tha

> food or retail scene In my experience this is becoming less and less true, smaller cities are really catching up, it's not 2010 anymore. My pet theory is that social networks like Instagram have done a good job spreading fashion and food experiences/expectations that were previously exclusives to big city centers.

coredog64 6y ago
If you have to eat outdoors, a mobile restaurant (aka “food truck”) can recreate a good portion of the experience anywhere. As one example, NYC opens Governor’s Island to the public for only part of the year. Food service comes in the form of a “food court” made up of a bunch of food trucks/container kitchens.
mercutio2 6y ago
I keep reading people make this claim. I haven't found it to be even remotely true for the food my family is inclined to eat. Every time I've gone to visit hip small college towns for the last 5 years, I've eagerly sought out the talked-about eateries, and they were all... distinctly mediocre compared to NYC or Bay Area or LA food. You still can't find anything but Americanized Asian food, even the California-cuisine upscale places are decidedly mediocre, and the food trucks are... fine. Certainly, it's better than it was at the margin, but it really depends on what your baseline is.
- rcpt 6y ago
  It's true that you can't buy a whole jackfruit at the grocery store in most of the US but I've always been able to find good restaurants of some variety with minimal effort. It's real hard to justify SF prices based on food options.
  - gmadsen 6y ago
    depends on your priorities. I would rather have nice restaurants than a nice apartment or house. I've lived in a culturally devoid suburb, where the options are fast food, or chain restaurants, and it affected my quality of life substantially.
    - rcpt 6y ago
      Not everything outside SF is a "culturally devoid suburb"
      - kelnos 6y ago
        No, and I think it's uncharitable to assume that's what the parent is suggesting. But even if we expand the statement to "outside a major city" or even "outside a major metro area", I think a lot of places are culturally devoid suburbs (though I probably would have picked a nicer way of putting it). I would wager that the majority of suburbs in the US don't have much variety in cuisine, and while communities will certainly have a few stand-out restaurants, there will also be a lot of mediocre fast food, fast casual, and pizza shops. I grew up in places like that, some of my family lives in places like that, and some friends who used to live in cities, but moved out for more space, also live in places like that. Get too far outside Seattle, Portland, the SF bay area, greater LA, Chicago, Boston, NYC, DC, Austin, Dallas, Nashville, and even many smaller cities, and there really isn't much to write home about when it comes to food. And for some of those cities, "too far outside" can be as little as a half hour drive.
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  - mrgordon 6y ago
    I often end up spending more for distinctly worse food in other American cities. It is sometimes hard to swallow paying premium prices for food and then immediately realizing after the first bite that the ingredients are subpar or there is more focus on making it Instagrammable than actually delicious From that perspective, eating out in SF always felt like a good deal because for $15 you can get some truly exceptional farm to table food.
- api 6y ago
  Try Asheville, NC
- jkachmar 6y ago
  Lots of people like to believe this but it really, really isn’t true. Los Angeles and New York City have a substantially larger cultural footprint than other cities. Even though the variety of food, music, etc. is growing quickly elsewhere, it’s really not the same.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Yeah. The problem is that food is not something you can do remote, and so specialized chefs and specialty ingredients need clusters of people to be profitable to sell.
- irrational 6y ago
  My baseline is grilled cheddar cheese on plain white bread with Campbell's Tomato Soup is the greatest food ever invented. I once went to a work lunch at one of the city's most raved about restaurants. I ordered the grilled cheese and tomato soup. That was when I realized that I really am not a food connoisseur. How can something so simple as grilled cheese and tomato soup be so thoroughly ruined, just in an effort to make it fancy?
  - ryan_lane 6y ago
    You can't serve something like that at a restaurant and make it in a plain way, because it's something that basically everyone can make at home for really cheap. People are looking for an interesting take on something like that in a restaurant, which isn't going to fit what you want. That's a poor choice to judge a restaurant on. You need to base your judgement on things you can't or won't cook at home because it takes too much time, is too complicated, or uses ingredients that are difficult to get.
    - sidlls 6y ago
      Sometimes people just want to go have a get-together including well-trod "comfort food" style means, but with someone else (the restaurant) doing the cooking and cleanup. I don't go to restaurants to be entertained by the food or "impressed" by the "creativity" of the chef, and I'd wager neither do most people.
      - dylz 6y ago
        Then you're looking for the equivalent of a solid takeaway place, not somewhere where you go for the "experience" and "gastronomy"
        ghaff 6y ago
        Or just about any diner.
        sidlls 6y ago
- opportune 6y ago
  I’m honestly surprised so many people put Bay Area/SF food on the same scale as NYC and LA. It only makes sense when you consider top-tier fine dining (like, Michelin star(s)) IMO. For middle-tier dining I think SF and the Bay Area don’t even come close to either of those cities. In fact I think those hip young college towns are much better, in my experience. It’s just that it’s going to be a different set of foods: more barbecue, Mexican, Central European, soul food, and less asian/what I would call “California health” foods.
  - apeescape 6y ago
    Agreed, I feel like SF restaurants are relatively pricey, so in order to get the good stuff you'll have to pay a lot more than in many other places in the world.
    - baskire 6y ago
      Sf has some great hole in the wall places that aren’t too expensive. E.g. Tonga room isn’t that badly priced Dropping 50$/person on dinner & drinks in sf isn’t that much money when your rent is 50x+ that figure.
      - noobermin 6y ago
        This is enough to say that then it isn't comparable. "There exists" is only a useful quantifier in mathematics. "There exists" better food elsewhere if you idk pay a world reknown chef to cook you a meal herself for $5000.
      - staticautomatic 6y ago
        A bar inside the Fairmont hotel could hardly be described as a “hole in the wall”
      - nostrademons 6y ago
        Tonga room is a terrible example because, as someone else mentioned, it's a bar in the Fairmont. If you want a great literal hole in the wall, try Yamo in the Mission. Burmese food, grand total of 6 seats (all at the bar) in the restaurant, and the entire kitchen is right in front of you. $6 entrees.
- WWLink 6y ago
  > You still can't find anything but Americanized Asian food Anecdotally, I moved from the bay area to somewhere near los angeles a while ago, and the americanized chinese food here sucks compared to what I could get in the bay area. And it costs twice as much! :(
  - cworth 6y ago
    Try the San Gabriel valley.
jzoch 6y ago
As everyone else is echoing - really not true. I grew up in Orange County which, for a suburb, has really good food options. Tons and tons of restaurants and a lot of people accustomed to nice things. The difference in food options between SF (where I am now) and OC (or LA vs OC) is absolutely astounding. Its really not even close. Its gotten better but large cities are still orders of magnitude better.
- vikiomega9 6y ago
  Are there specific cuisines? The Indian options are pretty bad imo, there are a few good places but overall not as good as the South Bay.
- gautamcgoel 6y ago
  Just to make sure I understand, your saying you have better options in LA and SF than in OC? Couldn't quite make out from your comment.
- runT1ME 6y ago
  I live in OC now, and have traveled quite extensively as well as spent time working in the Bay. While lacking in Michelin star restaurants (only a handful) it is otherwise phenomenal when it comes to options and quality, even compared to bit cities. Now bars/nightclubs/music venues are where it is sorely lacking.
- onecommentman 6y ago
  Did you mean to write “much” instead of “orders of magnitude”? If not, please provide support for even a single order of magnitude compared to OC. Sincerely, the League for Reducing Hyperbole on the Internet PS: “Everybody else”, “absolutely astounding”, “its [sic] really not even close”...sit down and have a nice glass of warm milk and think about what you wrote. :-)
- unishark 6y ago
  LA itself is mostly suburb too though.
scsilver 6y ago
I think this is really true. Ive been getting great coffee and food in the smallest towns, tourist towns albeit, but metropolitan level fanciness on a gateway town to capital reef NP is impressive. I can get my fancy latte's in almost every nook in america, some might be closed on sundays though.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  I would say the presence of anything nice at all and the number of choices has really dramatically improved across the country. The quality is what it is, but at least someone is trying to give you something interesting to do. Or at least that was the case in 2019. I really hope we return to valuing in-person interaction when it's safe to do so.
gmadsen 6y ago
Sorry but this is wrong. Food scenes require diverse cultures. Small town USA doesn't have 50+ ethnic groups making restaurants downtown
- porknubbins 6y ago
  By this metric food scenes can only exist in 2-3 cities in the US (or world for that matter). I think food scenes that do one or two things well are totally worthwhile and a huge improvement over bland suburban chains.
  - Daishiman 6y ago
    Effectively, there's never more than a dozen cities, tops, in any country in the world where you can get close to top-level food quality, and even so that applies only for a few genres of food.
    - tchaffee 6y ago
      Except for Italy, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Thailand, and many other countries where you can find top quality food in thousands of small towns and out of the way places. So probably not a great rule to go by.
      - howlgarnish 6y ago
        You can get top-quality Japanese food in thousands of small Japanese towns, and top-quality Thai food in thousands of small Thai towns. However, rest assured you will have a very hard time finding (say) Mexican in either. The only places in either country where you have a genuinely cosmopolitan food scene are Tokyo and Bangkok respectively.
        freeone3000 6y ago
        What is top-quality American food, and where do you find it?

coredog64 6y ago

If you have to eat outdoors, a mobile restaurant (aka “food truck”) can recreate a good portion of the experience anywhere. As one example, NYC opens Governor’s Island to the public for only part of the year. Food service comes in the form of a “food court” made up of a bunch of food trucks/container kitchens.

mercutio2 6y ago

I keep reading people make this claim. I haven't found it to be even remotely true for the food my family is inclined to eat. Every time I've gone to visit hip small college towns for the last 5 years, I've eagerly sought out the talked-about eateries, and they were all... distinctly mediocre compared to NYC or Bay Area or LA food. You still can't find anything but Americanized Asian food, even the California-cuisine upscale places are decidedly mediocre, and the food trucks are... fine. Certainly, it's better than it was at the margin, but it really depends on what your baseline is.

rcpt 6y ago
It's true that you can't buy a whole jackfruit at the grocery store in most of the US but I've always been able to find good restaurants of some variety with minimal effort. It's real hard to justify SF prices based on food options.
- gmadsen 6y ago
  depends on your priorities. I would rather have nice restaurants than a nice apartment or house. I've lived in a culturally devoid suburb, where the options are fast food, or chain restaurants, and it affected my quality of life substantially.
  - rcpt 6y ago
    Not everything outside SF is a "culturally devoid suburb"
    - kelnos 6y ago
      No, and I think it's uncharitable to assume that's what the parent is suggesting. But even if we expand the statement to "outside a major city" or even "outside a major metro area", I think a lot of places are culturally devoid suburbs (though I probably would have picked a nicer way of putting it). I would wager that the majority of suburbs in the US don't have much variety in cuisine, and while communities will certainly have a few stand-out restaurants, there will also be a lot of mediocre fast food, fast casual, and pizza shops. I grew up in places like that, some of my family lives in places like that, and some friends who used to live in cities, but moved out for more space, also live in places like that. Get too far outside Seattle, Portland, the SF bay area, greater LA, Chicago, Boston, NYC, DC, Austin, Dallas, Nashville, and even many smaller cities, and there really isn't much to write home about when it comes to food. And for some of those cities, "too far outside" can be as little as a half hour drive.
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- mrgordon 6y ago
  I often end up spending more for distinctly worse food in other American cities. It is sometimes hard to swallow paying premium prices for food and then immediately realizing after the first bite that the ingredients are subpar or there is more focus on making it Instagrammable than actually delicious From that perspective, eating out in SF always felt like a good deal because for $15 you can get some truly exceptional farm to table food.
api 6y ago
Try Asheville, NC
jkachmar 6y ago
Lots of people like to believe this but it really, really isn’t true. Los Angeles and New York City have a substantially larger cultural footprint than other cities. Even though the variety of food, music, etc. is growing quickly elsewhere, it’s really not the same.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Yeah. The problem is that food is not something you can do remote, and so specialized chefs and specialty ingredients need clusters of people to be profitable to sell.
irrational 6y ago
My baseline is grilled cheddar cheese on plain white bread with Campbell's Tomato Soup is the greatest food ever invented. I once went to a work lunch at one of the city's most raved about restaurants. I ordered the grilled cheese and tomato soup. That was when I realized that I really am not a food connoisseur. How can something so simple as grilled cheese and tomato soup be so thoroughly ruined, just in an effort to make it fancy?
- ryan_lane 6y ago
  You can't serve something like that at a restaurant and make it in a plain way, because it's something that basically everyone can make at home for really cheap. People are looking for an interesting take on something like that in a restaurant, which isn't going to fit what you want. That's a poor choice to judge a restaurant on. You need to base your judgement on things you can't or won't cook at home because it takes too much time, is too complicated, or uses ingredients that are difficult to get.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    Sometimes people just want to go have a get-together including well-trod "comfort food" style means, but with someone else (the restaurant) doing the cooking and cleanup. I don't go to restaurants to be entertained by the food or "impressed" by the "creativity" of the chef, and I'd wager neither do most people.
    - dylz 6y ago
      Then you're looking for the equivalent of a solid takeaway place, not somewhere where you go for the "experience" and "gastronomy"
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Or just about any diner.
      - sidlls 6y ago
opportune 6y ago
I’m honestly surprised so many people put Bay Area/SF food on the same scale as NYC and LA. It only makes sense when you consider top-tier fine dining (like, Michelin star(s)) IMO. For middle-tier dining I think SF and the Bay Area don’t even come close to either of those cities. In fact I think those hip young college towns are much better, in my experience. It’s just that it’s going to be a different set of foods: more barbecue, Mexican, Central European, soul food, and less asian/what I would call “California health” foods.
- apeescape 6y ago
  Agreed, I feel like SF restaurants are relatively pricey, so in order to get the good stuff you'll have to pay a lot more than in many other places in the world.
  - baskire 6y ago
    Sf has some great hole in the wall places that aren’t too expensive. E.g. Tonga room isn’t that badly priced Dropping 50$/person on dinner & drinks in sf isn’t that much money when your rent is 50x+ that figure.
    - noobermin 6y ago
      This is enough to say that then it isn't comparable. "There exists" is only a useful quantifier in mathematics. "There exists" better food elsewhere if you idk pay a world reknown chef to cook you a meal herself for $5000.
    - staticautomatic 6y ago
      A bar inside the Fairmont hotel could hardly be described as a “hole in the wall”
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      Tonga room is a terrible example because, as someone else mentioned, it's a bar in the Fairmont. If you want a great literal hole in the wall, try Yamo in the Mission. Burmese food, grand total of 6 seats (all at the bar) in the restaurant, and the entire kitchen is right in front of you. $6 entrees.
WWLink 6y ago
> You still can't find anything but Americanized Asian food Anecdotally, I moved from the bay area to somewhere near los angeles a while ago, and the americanized chinese food here sucks compared to what I could get in the bay area. And it costs twice as much! :(
- cworth 6y ago
  Try the San Gabriel valley.

jzoch 6y ago

As everyone else is echoing - really not true. I grew up in Orange County which, for a suburb, has really good food options. Tons and tons of restaurants and a lot of people accustomed to nice things. The difference in food options between SF (where I am now) and OC (or LA vs OC) is absolutely astounding. Its really not even close. Its gotten better but large cities are still orders of magnitude better.

vikiomega9 6y ago
Are there specific cuisines? The Indian options are pretty bad imo, there are a few good places but overall not as good as the South Bay.
gautamcgoel 6y ago
Just to make sure I understand, your saying you have better options in LA and SF than in OC? Couldn't quite make out from your comment.
runT1ME 6y ago
I live in OC now, and have traveled quite extensively as well as spent time working in the Bay. While lacking in Michelin star restaurants (only a handful) it is otherwise phenomenal when it comes to options and quality, even compared to bit cities. Now bars/nightclubs/music venues are where it is sorely lacking.
onecommentman 6y ago
Did you mean to write “much” instead of “orders of magnitude”? If not, please provide support for even a single order of magnitude compared to OC. Sincerely, the League for Reducing Hyperbole on the Internet PS: “Everybody else”, “absolutely astounding”, “its [sic] really not even close”...sit down and have a nice glass of warm milk and think about what you wrote. :-)
unishark 6y ago
LA itself is mostly suburb too though.

scsilver 6y ago

I think this is really true. Ive been getting great coffee and food in the smallest towns, tourist towns albeit, but metropolitan level fanciness on a gateway town to capital reef NP is impressive. I can get my fancy latte's in almost every nook in america, some might be closed on sundays though.

jrumbut 6y ago
I would say the presence of anything nice at all and the number of choices has really dramatically improved across the country. The quality is what it is, but at least someone is trying to give you something interesting to do. Or at least that was the case in 2019. I really hope we return to valuing in-person interaction when it's safe to do so.

gmadsen 6y ago

Sorry but this is wrong. Food scenes require diverse cultures. Small town USA doesn't have 50+ ethnic groups making restaurants downtown

porknubbins 6y ago
By this metric food scenes can only exist in 2-3 cities in the US (or world for that matter). I think food scenes that do one or two things well are totally worthwhile and a huge improvement over bland suburban chains.
- Daishiman 6y ago
  Effectively, there's never more than a dozen cities, tops, in any country in the world where you can get close to top-level food quality, and even so that applies only for a few genres of food.
  - tchaffee 6y ago
    Except for Italy, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Thailand, and many other countries where you can find top quality food in thousands of small towns and out of the way places. So probably not a great rule to go by.
    - howlgarnish 6y ago
      You can get top-quality Japanese food in thousands of small Japanese towns, and top-quality Thai food in thousands of small Thai towns. However, rest assured you will have a very hard time finding (say) Mexican in either. The only places in either country where you have a genuinely cosmopolitan food scene are Tokyo and Bangkok respectively.
      - freeone3000 6y ago
        What is top-quality American food, and where do you find it?