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Comment by mercutio2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

A bar inside the Fairmont hotel could hardly be described as a “hole in the wall”

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.

The SF Bay Area as a whole has some great holes in the wall, and there's even still some in San Francisco proper if you dig around, but in addition to being a bar in the Fairmont as others have noted, the Tonga Room is a world-famous tiki bar that opened in 1945, with two themed dining rooms that wrap around an artificial lagoon with a "rainstorm" every thirty minutes. That's a really weird definition of hole-in-the-wall. :)

While I haven't been up to SF proper for food and barhopping in a few years now, the Lark up in the financial district is much more of what I'd call a good cheap bar. I tend to bristle a bit at people dissing the SF food and drink scene, but I have to remind myself that with few exceptions my favorite places in the Bay Area aren't actually in SF itself. The metro area as a whole has virtually everything you can imagine at a very wide range of price points. I suspect one could make a case that the most interesting stuff happening is in the East Bay and South Bay, though.

I lived in LA for a long time and I would say NYC has it beat by a large margin when it comes to bourgie restaurants. Most of the hip places in LA are uniformly terrible, the places that have been around a long time are about as good as the same kinds of places in NYC, and the various ethnic restaurants are better in LA (assuming they’re in their neighborhood enclaves).

> It only makes sense when you consider top-tier fine dining (like, Michelin star(s)) IMO

Within a narrow window. The diversity and turnover of New York or London’s food offerings compared with the Bay Area’s is on par with the latter’s offerings in relation to Fresno’s. If anything, the Bay offers its uniqueness in the middle tier of immigrant fusion.

I would say middle tier food in SF is easily better than NYC.

Well, agree to disagree. Personally I've found food in the $15-40 range in NYC to be better executed and be a better value, with more options. I think other cities also blow SF out of the water with execution and value for that price range, but few are able to compete on the diversity of options.

Only if youre eating mexican or clam chowder.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Then you're looking for the equivalent of a solid takeaway place, not somewhere where you go for the "experience" and "gastronomy"

Or just about any diner.

That’s just one aspect of a vibrant food culture. That is, access to multiple cuisines is a different discussion from how fancy the preparations are.

There are plenty of “sit down” restaurants that aren’t fancy, but are more than “solid takeaway” that fit in this picture. And these are what most folks actually think of when they picture dining out.

Well, you can't make something simple in a simple way unless you are both really confident and really good :).

In a sign of the crazy times we live in, Chez Panisse has started doing takeout. First time I tried it, I got a BLT sandwich. Exactly what it says on the tin: bacon, lettuce, tomato, no weird spices or creative takes or deconstruction. Just a stock BLT sandwich—except better in every way. I'm not even sure how. I would not have thought there was that much room to improve on a BLT through better ingredients and execution, but apparently there is.

Anyway, if you're in Berkeley, I would highly recommend giving it a try.

I like how this is downvoted. HN's culture is so not the nerd stereotype that people paint it as, it's much more elitist honestly.

There's a kind of weird inverse elitism in going to a fine dining restaurant, ordering an expensive fancy grilled cheese and tomato soup combination, and bitterly complaining about it because it's not a can of Campbell's and a slice of American on white sandwich bread.

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.

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.

Not everything outside SF is a "culturally devoid suburb"

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.

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.

> 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! :(

Try the San Gabriel valley.

Try Asheville, NC

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