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Comment by MrGando | Hacker News Reader

> My impression is that Los Angeles is the world’s best food city, and it’s not close. I have a galaxy-brained theory about why this is. Restaurants decline when they sell prestige, rather than food. (This is why Manhattan is often not a good place to eat.)

Stops reading and closes the window. Seriously, what the hell. LA is a great place to eat, but for the love of G... Paris? Tokyo? NYC also kicks LA's ass to the ground regarding food. I know my food, LA's great, but come on.

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Anecdotally I have a French acquaintance who dreads his trips back home because the food is so terrible. Paris might be famous for fine dining at the extreme top end, but that doesn't necessarily make for the best eating.

Eating great food in Paris is expensive on average. And the service is unfortunately known to be horrible. It’s not a rule though.

But other French cities are full of restaurants that serves really great food, with either gorgeous local specialities (hello Britain and Provence), or excellent « French » cuisine for really modest prices as low as 12-15€ for the « plat du jour » (which is made from what the restaurant bought in the morning) to 30-40€ for meals you’ll keep in your memory.

This is due to a law that enforces employers to pay for your mid-day meal. Most of them do this by giving you restaurants vouchers so a lot of people in France got to eat at restaurants on a budget every day. So as a restaurant owner, you’d better have nice food if you want to see your customers come back every week.

That's definitely not true. Source: my wife is French and from Paris, I lived in France etc. Paris is AMAZING to eat, in every single tier. And that doesn't mean you'll be eating French cuisine everywhere. Asian food is incredible in Paris, so is Moroccan for instance. It's a deep city though, if you do "shallow dining" you'll eat garbage, like in pretty much every single major western city.

“Best food city” has a lot of dimensions to optimize against. Are you looking for cheap-ish ethnic food? Haute cuisine? Prevalence of vegan options? High quality fast casual? IMO extremely difficult to rank cities in the top tier of food against each other absolutely and LA is def top tier.

LA has the best everyday food. Other cities surely have better fine dining.

It probably depends on how heavily you weight variety, casual vs fine dining, and whether having a food truck with an awesome cheesesteak is the same as "LA has awesome cheesesteaks".

Oh but LA does have an awesome cheesesteak place - it's called Big Mike's and it's located in El Segundo and Hermosa Beach. Amazing cheesesteaks...

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