What food(s) does your area specialize in?

[David Emm]

Taco Bell and Burger King. 🙄 However, there is the major salvation of a Mexican restaurant that embodies "fresh." Its heavenly, hand-made everything to die for. Its an oasis away from the world of tube food. It reminds me of the days when I'd simmer a cauldron of spaghetti sauce for 20 hours so that every tender molecule of garlic, etc. got woven into the results. You can taste it when a "mom & pop" place has a grandmother out back who has her proverbial hand in it. Some foods make the girls swoon and strong men weep. Its blessedly far from fresh squirrel Hot Pockets. 🤢  

[RABid]

On 10/4/2023 at 2:24 AM, ksoper said:

Oddly, the pulled pork in town is mostly shite. You've got to head west toward Memphis to get respectable bbq.

I'm really lucky to have a local BBQ that does really good pulled pork and brisket. It is as good as the best Western Kentucky BBQ that I've had. What I hate is places that advertise pulled pork, and when you go there is not BBQ grill out back. They fix it in an oven.

[RABid]

2 hours ago, David Emm said:

You can taste it when a "mom & pop" place has a grandmother out back who has her proverbial hand in it. Some foods make the girls swoon and strong men weep. Its blessedly far from fresh squirrel Hot Pockets.

Those places are so hard to find. We have 7 Mexican restaurants in my small town and they all serve the same, bland, Americanized food. For just a short while we had one out of the way place with a grandmother cooking. She could not speak english, but wow, her food put the other places to shame. The only place where I have found Mexican food that good was Dallas, and that is too far for this Kentucky hillbilly to drive for a meal. Sadly that place closed in less than a year. Bad location. There were four restaurants in three years in that place. Finally a BBQ place moved in and made it work. For two years I went once a week to get good BBQ before they closed. They have been there five years now. Word has gotten around.

[o0Ampy0o]

On 10/4/2023 at 7:37 PM, bill5 said:

I agree. Eggs belong nowhere near a hot dog!

 

My father always made eggs with a meat in it. He preferred linguiça, ham or breakfast sausage. I have explored and made eggs with chopped hamburger, bacon or cashews.

 

We also used bologna. Bologna is close to ham. If you like ham and eggs you would like bologna and eggs. Bologna is a giant hotdog. Bologna or hot dogs take on an enhanced character when fried. Diced hotdog in a baked potato casserole is sublime.

[o0Ampy0o]

13 hours ago, Dave Bryce said:

 

What do you put on a pastrami sandwich?

 

 

dB

 

I generally do not order pastrami sandwiches. There are other sandwiches I favor. So I have not sampled many pastrami sandwiches. But an old girlfriend back in the mid 80's had a routine of hitting a local German deli in town and introduced me to a very tasty German pastrami sandwich. It definitely did not have mustard on it. I vaguely recall something more like coleslaw and sauerkraut. It might have had mayo. Served on dark rye. It was amazing. The pastrami was sliced thinner than in your image. It was also very tender.

[Dave Bryce]

15 minutes ago, o0Ampy0o said:

 

I generally do not order pastrami sandwiches. There are other sandwiches I favor. So I have not sampled many pastrami sandwiches.

 

Ah.  Y’see, I’m a serious hot pastrami fan.. It’s the sandwich I use to evaluate a good deli.

 

 

15 minutes ago, o0Ampy0o said:

an old girlfriend back in the mid 80's had a routine of hitting a local German deli in town and introduced me to a very tasty German pastrami sandwich. It definitely did not have mustard on it. I vaguely recall something more like coleslaw and sauerkraut.

 

Typically, cole slaw and Russian dressing are combined on a pastrami sandwich (with or without cheese); or, you can go for sauerkraut and melted swiss on grilled bread, aka a Reuben.  Corned beef can be substituted with either of those preps.  I do not add mustard to the first, but I do on the Reuben.

 

I’ll happily eat either of those…but my first choice is a simple straight up hot pastrami with a couple slices of swiss cheese on fresh rye bread, typically sliced thicker (like in the pic)…or, if thin, chopped grilled pastrami with melted cheese on a long roll, like a cheesesteak.  Both with brown mustard, please.

 

dB

 

 

 

[o0Ampy0o]

Speaking of coleslaw, it usually is a little bitter I think from the cabbage or perhaps they favor mayo over vinaigrette. But there is a Mexican restaurant which features dishes inspired by the world traveling owner/chefs. Nothing is traditional. Their coleslaw is slightly sweet rather than bitter. It is so good I could eat a large bowel of it by itself. They serve the coleslaw inside their tacos. Mexican food can get ambiguous with everything meshing together. Somehow these guys keep all of the ingredients distinct. I have tried fish tacos a few places and my theory has proven to be correct for the most part, fish is too mild tasting to compete with Mexican spices and pungent vegetable ingredients. But this eclectic restaurant is strikingly different. The fish is always charred and retains that characteristic. A mild tasting fish like mahi mahi is flavorful in their tacos. They actually switched to salmon years ago but the mahi mahi was amazing. Some people dislike the flavor of salmon but charred salmon overcomes that. It charbroils and grills well because it is an oily fish.

 

The restaurant is Aqui in Willow Glen. Isn't that beautiful? Inside is a work of art, meaning the restaurant decor in all is the work of art. They serve the food beautifully as well.

 

I just remembered during the week following September 11, 2011 I had lunch here and was the only customer in the restaurant. One of the owners and I chatted a while. It was one of those things where the world had changed in a day and there were things you hoped would not.

 

 

[Threadslayer]

12 hours ago, o0Ampy0o said:

I could eat a large bowel of it

+1 for imagery

[KuruPrionz]

Fresh seafood. Bellingham is on the coast of northern Washington. Lots of fishing boats in the docks and lots of docks. 

[o0Ampy0o]

There is as much fresh seafood here in my town as San Francisco but SF has been romanticized for so much I think there is a significant chance of getting tourist food rather than the good stuff in SF. Here it is mostly the good stuff. A good word for SF, there are "restaurants" serving such good food the atmosphere is merely table cloth covered picnic tables, benches and seating with strangers. I don't know about anyone else but I also like how employees from the restaurant engage and encourage passers by to stop and eat there. You look at the company you are with for agreement and decide. (The neighborhood of restaurants is traversed by a steady stream of pedestrians).

 

Which reminds me. I was on Fisherman's Wharf (mid-80's(?)) years ago. I heard a commotion behind me. I turned around to see what was happening. A young woman was angry and yelling at a man. I saw her swing at something he was holding then heard glass breaking. Some innocent tourist strolling the wharf snapped a picture of the girl. It was not just any girl. She had a Mohawk, tattoos and piercings. This was long before such tattoos and piercings were mainstream. This girl was demanding $1 for having her picture taken.

 

The poor guy was taken aback and did not know how to react. Unfortunately among all possible options taking her seriously was not #1 on his list. She demanded the dollar, then demanded he give her the film, then she smacked his camera and the glass breaking I heard was its lens landing on the sidewalk. This was many years before smartphone cameras. This was a pricey 35mm SLR.

 

Of course this ruined his trip and left an impression on the tourist about SF. I felt so sad about the whole thing. I was a half block away and I could feel the emotion of it all. The girl was as right as a wild animal is right when you cross a line. Not everyone knows to give wild animals their space. There are videos on YT of all these tourists treating wild animals like domesticated pets as they find out the hard way they are not.  She was a hard streetwise girl to be reckoned with. She was the real deal and not some kid just dressing in a certain style. This tourist was enjoying his visit to SF and just taking a picture of one of the sights and it bit him square in the face.

[RABid]

OT - What food(s) does your area NOT specialize in?

 

I really miss good seafood and you can not get it in a small town so far inland. The closest I can get is shrimp at the Japanese restaurant. And listen, Long John Silvers or Captain D's is not seafood. I do occasionally buy frozen salmon filets at the grocery but they cost as much as steak. My town does not even have a place for catfish. 

[bill5]

ouch. Here I would say BBQ. Oh you occasionally find a place or even a food truck where it's acceptable, but no more. Gone to Carolina in my mind. 

[jazzpiano88]

On 10/6/2023 at 10:12 PM, o0Ampy0o said:

SF has been romanticized for so much....

 

I had relatives there and visited since the 70's...

Moved there in '95 and thought I was in heaven....

Moved away in '12, with the writing on the wall....

 

Now that history has played out in SF and the Bay Area, the best thing that ever happened to us was to leave CA and relocate to the Midwest. 

 

 

[bill5]

Funny I was just talking to someone last night whose parents did just that. They moved to Minnesota of all places and I went "from Calif? ??" She explained the following:

 

- Massive drop in cost of living, esp housing

- Friendlier people

- People who are more down to Earth, more "real" (their words) 

- They aren't native Californians and so not afraid of winters (in fact enjoy the change of seasons and white Christmases)

- Finally, it's nice to be able to actually find parking spots   

 

[RABid]

The cost of housing in my area has doubled in the past 5 or 10 years. Almost everything sales the day it is listed, usually to people out of state and a large number of those are from California. I purchased my house 12 years ago for $180,000. 1/2 acre lot and 2300 sq feet. If I listed it now I would probably put it up for $350,000 and expect it to sale the first week. 

[bill5]

That's how it is pretty much all over the country for years now; It's insane. I have to wonder where people are getting all this money.

[surfergirl]

My grandfather owns the house I live in and I pay $800. a month, he could probably get 3 times that if he put it on the market. It's 3 bedroom, 1 and 1/2 bath about 1100 sq feet. If he wanted to sell it he could get $700,000. or more. 

[Anderton]

On 10/4/2023 at 1:24 AM, ksoper said:

but there's a really strong Lao, Vietnamese, Korean and Thai scene in the Nashville area.  Some killer international markets, too.

 

...which is really different from 40 years ago, when you had a choice between Shoney's, MacDonald's, and Cracker Barrel   Nashville has become quite the foodie heaven over time.

[RABid]

L&N used to be a railroad. (Louisville and Nashville) Now it is a foodie region. Top Chef even went to Louisville for a season. One of the finalist is from Paducah, KY and has a restaurant featuring a blend of southern, application and Jewish cuisine using locally grown products. She later was runner up in Top Chef World All-Stars. Not bad for someone living in a town of 26,000.

[Anderton]

On 10/8/2023 at 11:48 AM, bill5 said:

That's how it is pretty much all over the country for years now; It's insane. I have to wonder where people are getting all this money.

 

Not to derail the thread, but to answer your question: A lot of house buying is from investors who want to park their money in a tangible asset. They then rent it out. Worst of all possible worlds: no housing available for people who want to buy, and prices get driven up so high that rents, not just housing costs, become astronomical. When rents are that high, no one can save up to buy. When you see someone buy a group of 10 or 20 townhouses and turn them into AirBnB rentals, my first thought is make absent ownership of AirB&B properties illegal. Then release all those houses back into the housing market to drive prices down. 

 

Meanwhile, back to food. Restaurant prices remain pretty reasonable here in Nashville compared to places like LA, New York, Boston, etc. As a refugee from Santa Fe (the one in New Mexico), I do miss the excellent Southwest cuisine.. But that's pretty much all Santa Fe does really well when it comes to food.

[NewImprov]

Here in the Pacific NW, I can't really say we have a cuisine, or even dishes that we excel at over the rest of the country. We have great ingredients (fresh seafood from the coast, lots of local organic farms), and a lot of good to great food, but it seems like everything are food traditions imported from the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. We do have the best microbrew beer and coffee in the country, though. Maybe it's because we were "settled" so much later than the rest of the country, we haven't been here long enough to establish a cuisine.

 

If I had to identify a local cuisine, it'd be brew-pub food, I work in downtown Corvallis, a college town in the mid-Willamette, and within 6 blocks of my store are at least 10 Brew pubs, with mostly really good, often excellent beers and at least decent, often excellent burgers, fries, etc. But not exactly imaginative cuisine.

 

One trend I've been noticing lately is that there are a lot of small, limited seating, mostly take-out Chinese restaurants opening in my town. We have a lot of Chinese students, and these new places are pretty much strictly serving the Chinese students, with menus in Chinese, usually badly translated into English. The food is very different from the Americanized Chinese I grew up eating, much spicier, stronger flavors. There's a place I go that has a spicy Lamb soup with hand-pulled noodles that is absolutely amazing, and it's just a tiny kitchen in a strip-mall. Some of the "conventional" Chinese restaurants in the area have started doing separate menus in Chinese, we've found some great food by ordering off these.

 

We do have really good Vietnamese and Thai food in the area as well, largely due to immigrant populations in the area.

 

There's lots of Mexican food in my area, but most of it pales in comparison with what I've had elsewhere. One exception is a Yucatecan joint run by a couple in a gas station, it's literally a Subway that closed in a gas station, and this couple took it over and barely re-decorated. The food is amazing, Cochinita Pibil plates and tacos, turkey Panucho's and Salbutos (both are varieties of fried tacos, and are fantastic), Pac Chuc, an achiote and bitter orange marinated pork steak, wonderful tamales, etc. They occasionally make Mole Negrito as a special, it is positively the darkest black food I have ever seen, and tastes amazing.

 

There's been some mention of Pastrami sandwiches on this thread, and I have to throw this in here. My good friend JD is a chef (and one of the best drummers in the area), and he recently opened a sandwich shop where he smokes and cures all his own meats. He makes his own pastrami, and does a fresh batch every few days. I've never been to NYC, but another friend, who grew up there, says that JD's pastrami sandwiches are exactly like what he got in the NYC deli's in the 60's and 70's, that the first time he tasted JD's the flavor memory flashback was so strong that it made him cry. His place is a great venue as well, if anyone's traveling through and looking for a gig.