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Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

You can get salads, grilled meats, vegetable platters, etc. in any city. Just to pick one off the top of my head, Corner Bakery Cafe has healthy options and plenty of locations:

"The cafe has 192 locations nationwide, including in Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Tampa Bay and Buffalo metropolitan areas, as well as in Northern California, Mississippi, New Jersey, Virginia, Savannah, East Texas, the Rio Grande Valley areas, and a location in Carmel"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_Bakery_Cafe

Likewise, Panera has lots of salads and half sandwiches available and 2,000 locations.

Maybe they're "crap" to you? But most people don't eat as well as that, on average, quality-wise.

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The food quality is trash. You get salads that are palatable because they're dowsed in dressing and stacked with croutons. By grilled meats I'm assuming you mean the ocean water brined grilled chicken that somehow manages to be as cardiac arrest worthy as a fried chicken sandwich while maintaining the texture of a hockey puck? These places suck. It's because the people who make the food don't care about making food and the owners only care about margins.

I'm not talking about Wendy's salads. I'm talking about casual-to-upscale places that feature salad like Just Salad, La Madeleine, Pret A Manger, Sweet Tomato (Souplantation), Chopt, Salad Works, Souper Salad, etc. And that's not even getting into the fast-casual sandwich places like McAlister's Deli.

If all that's not fresh and healthy enough, it's not hard to pick up an (unsauced) grilled chicken breast at a BBQ place and some fresh veggies at the grocery store.

I mean, maybe you have especially refined taste, but all those places aren't unpalatable to the median person.

> Likewise, Panera has lots of salads and half sandwiches available and 2,000 locations.

Before I moved to New York, I used to eat at Panera all the time. I wouldn't say it's bad, but... honestly, I would never eat at one in NYC, because there's basically always going to be a better and healthier restaurant nearby. (Incidentally, there are very few Panera Bread locations in NYC, and they're almost all clustered along Lexington IRT stops.)

I was just saying it had at least a few healthy options and wasn't "complete crap". My problem with those places is staying away from the bread products, but that's not because there's a health-food wasteland outside the island of Manhattan below 96th.

> My problem with those places is staying away from the bread products, but that's not because there's a health-food wasteland outside the island of Manhattan below 96th.

Nobody said anything about "Manhattan below 96th". But it's definitely true that, outside NYC (and especially outside the NYC metro area), the options for good-quality, healthy food are pretty rare.

I threw that in there because the healthy options in, say, Queensboro Plaza, Jamaica, or Staten Island aren't better than downtown Columbus (Ohio), so "New York" really meant something more specific.

> I threw that in there because the healthy options in, say, Queensboro Plaza, Jamaica, or Staten Island aren't better than downtown Columbus (Ohio), so "New York" really meant something more specific.

I very intentionally said "New York", not "Manhattan. I would take the options in Jamaica, Queens over Columbus, Ohio any day.

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