Each time I visit, I try to eat at least one slice of pizza and one bagel every day. The thing that blows me away is how generally good they are, no matter where I buy them. Of course I'll look at reviews, but I won't walk more than 5 blocks to get a slice. Never been disappointed.
Same thing visiting Paris - you can hunt for the BEST croissant, but the remarkable thing is that nearly everywhere you shop, you'll find a really, really good one. I live near Arsicault in SF, and though they might make the BEST croissant in the US (and I will probably live a shorter life due to the number of them I put in my body every week), I'd trade that for a really good croissant on every corner.
I think it reflects having shared cultural values around the food and a knowledge in the community of what makes the food great both in terms of inputs and outputs, and I hope we never stop valuing good pizza!!
You can rinse and repeat in many places for various items. For example, when I was last in Germany, you'd get good sandwiches with good bread at any random train station in a system of any size. Try that in the US.
French here! I'm usually not that picky with croissants, but much more with other patisseries, such as eclairs. It's a bit harder to find good patisseries, and the quality doesn't always correlate with the price. Even in what looks like legit "patisseries artisanales", you can find eclairs which are basically frozen industrial stuff and sell for 3.50+ euros, which I think is a scam.
That being said, yes, I think you can normally find decent bread, croissants and patisseries (and cheese) pretty much everywhere in France.
On a side note, I lived in London and I noticed that Sainsbury made good bread and croissants, for much cheaper than the fancy "French" bakeries.
It depends. Nowadays it's not always the case. To reduce costs, apparently quite a lot of shops sell industrial pastries. For bread, there's a label apparent on the shop that certifies whether the bread is made in house ("artisan boulanger"), but it's not true for pastries. It's hard to say exactly what is made in-house without asking.
You can get cheese and wine made in the US ~ as good as French, but it’s 5x as expensive.
Because I no longer live in California, there is excellent distribution of French wine where I live. Now I can buy myriad discerning $15 bottles of French wine that frankly are much better than what you can typically buy from California for the same price point in the US. California wines are overpriced for the quality. I’d prefer that were not the case but that’s the reality in my experience.
At any price point, French wine is lower risk than California wine. Their reputation for wine is deserved.
The top-quartile 5-10 EUR bottle of wine at the hypermarche is way better than anything in the <$20 price range made in the US. A $15 lump of cheese would be a few EUR in France at quality-parity.
Coffee in Portugal;
Wine in Portugal;
Traditional food in Portugal;
Artisanal pastries in Portugal;
(no “supremacist” views, just pointing out - love good food & epicurism in any country/place I can find it. cheers!)
It looked tasty except for the flies, but I don't think I'm ever going to trust something in Europe that wasn't covered up before it was handed to me
Dragon Pizza there similarly high quality.
The best shrimp poboy I had was in Tampa; nothing I could find in New Orleans even came close. There was a New York style pizza place in Shanghai which people that went back to America would talk about missing (better than any pizza I've had in NYC). An Italian person I knew visited D.C. and when they got back to Rome they kept talking about how much they missed the pizza place in Washington.
For bagels, best I've ever had is probably a split between New Jersey (not _far_ from NYC) and Montreal.
(Ironically, some of the worst “real” pizza I’ve had was at the Atlanta restaurant owned by someone whose “How to make real pizza” page gets posted here every year or two. Yea, it had a nice char but everything about it was just bland bland bland)
Homeslice or Joe’s?
Generally speaking they’ve been decent enough bagels, but the shops don’t have the turnover to be able to ask “what’s hot?” and get a reasonable answer.
Also, the appetizing game tends to be pretty weak. Occasionally a shop will fly in Acme, which is admittedly impressive, but it tends to only be nova. I’m hard pressed to find herring in cream sauce, whitefish salad, or belly lox outside of the tristate area.
edit: for crossiants and other treats, A.J. King is my fav -- they supply a lot of the Boston cafes
Kane's for donuts
Note to others: Arsicault is worth the visit if you’re in SF! Also don’t be a sucker and wait in line for an hour on a Saturday morning. Just go at like 11am on a Tuesday and walk right in.
If you go to a place like Joe's you'll understand why the food became famous in the first place and how much better cheesesteaks are in Philly.
I've definitely had better delicious hot steak sandwiches with cheese and toppings in other places. Maybe I was expecting something different, or maybe you've got a point?
Guess I'll have to get to Joe's if I am in Philly again!
The steak shops on South Street (Jim's when it reopens and Ishkibibble's) are probably the best places to eat in a touristy area where there's nothing else better around. Campo's or Sonny's in Olde City are good too if you can't get a table at a real restaurant or just want something quick.
I'm just not a fan of how finely they chop the meat at Dalassandro's.
I went to college in Philly and not once did anybody ever suggest we go get one. When I was visiting a few years I was the one who told my friends about the sandwich. They'd grown up in Philly and never heard a mention of it. We made a whole trip of it.
It's a unique sandwich and not bad, but everyone felt we should have made a trip of going to get our favorite cheesesteak instead.
It's comical that someone would travel more than a few minutes within NYC just to try a slice of pizza. Like if it's a nice neapolitan pie, sure. But just for a standard NYC-style slice? That's a waste of time. All the places that typically top people's list, like Joe's Pizza, Prince St. Pizza, Bleecker St., etc., are all very mid. You can get an equally good slice as those big names in almost any neighborhood.
But maybe an out-of-towner feeling they need to find the perfect slice is a different perspective than mine as a local. I know what I want out of the places I seek out and I'm comfortable with whatever extra time investment that requires.
I think it was the first of those that I did manage to hit, and absolutely lived up to the hype. Probably the best individual slice I’ve ever had.
(Also really enjoy Prince St., haven’t tried Bleecker St. to date.)
But overtime, other good stuff started to pop up, and eventually there were enough good places that "the best" became less interesting. Still, Austin is far away from NYC, and of the few times I visited Europe (Italy specifically) nearly everywhere in the US is a bit behind. IMHO that's largely b/c of how new everything is. Overtime as areas become more established, things get passed down and around, the quality of everything goes up. And in some places, there's so much good stuff that yeah it makes no sense to talk about best anymore. But for many places the difference between the best and the rest is the decision point of "is it worth going at all?".
My theory is NYC had better average pizza in the past but people move out of the city over time. They probably move to lower cost areas. Many pizza makers in NJ are originally from NYC. The pizza is better in NJ on average.
Living in Barcelona I think this is pretty clear: Tourists. Though what's pizza in NYC is paella and tapas here of course.
Their reasoning is simple. Most tourists don't ever come back so why bother investing in a quality product when you can just milk them for what they're worth. Even reviews don't help with this very much.
As a local it's easy to avoid these places. Avoiding the ones with pictures of the food and sticky promoters outside trying to get you in the door does most of it. And realizing that most of the best places don't have the shiniest venues precisely because they don't need to. The locals know where to find them anyway.
This is not a joke. I strongly disagree with advising people to try random NYC pizza places. My theory is a lot of the good pizza makers moved out of the city to the suburbs or lower cost cities.
I think the reasons are straightforward: 1: The supply chain has evolved. Affordable ingredients are mass produced and low quality and a pizza place needs a strong motive to choose better ingredients. 2: family pride has not passed to current generations. And as you say most of those families have migrated out to the suburbs.
To be fair, I still think the bar is much lower outside the NY area. So visitors may legitimately love places we cringe at. And more power to them, frankly.
I think the decline extends to the suburbs too. Would love to get some of your New Jersey recs.
Buffalo HAS GOOD PIZZA! It's called Santora's.
P.S. As far as sandwich shops go though, Reykjavik's Nonnabiti (RIP) was the G.O.A.T.
Absolutely! I share the same.
Part of that is the fine dining though. Fine dining is its own culture, and just like other Bay Area industries, once you get some good chefs in the city, they'll train people who open their own restaurants. Then the quality expectations go up among residents... and everything ends up better, even "down market".
Unless you're in Bed Stuy. Most of the pizza here isn't worth the cardboard it comes in.
If someone is planning to visit there with the belief that they can throw a stone and immediately hit a great pizza place, they'll probably be disappointed.
It bothers me that someone would say they are all good. There is no need to hype up NYC. You can get very high quality food, but not just by randomly going into a place.
if you're lucky you have 3-5 in a few block radius, and the "best taco truck in LA" is your favorite out of those
L’industrie really does live up to the hype
I’ve seen a bit of this in areas of the country that have seen some emigration from NYC outwards: NC, FL. Maybe less so as you go west, unless some here have encountered them?
It's because the BEST Pizza in NYC is probably on par with some of the best pizza in other cities. Great chefs can make great Pizza. They can do this wherever they are.
What makes a town renowned for a type of food is the MEDIAN quality.
Vancouver has more Sushi restaurants than Starbucks and bad ones don't last. You are always within a 15 minute walk to a better sushi restaurant than 90% of cities outside of Japan.
I understand NYC is the same with Pizza
There’s a lot of good pizza to be found but even more if it is just ok. Mind you I mean ok in the literal sense, and don’t mean it’s bad. But a lot of people make it seem like every street corner has amazing pizza. But that’s just not true
I visited New York and ate at a pizza place† that advertised, if I recall correctly, their second-best rating according to someone who had made it their mission to sample and rate every pizza place in New York. (It couldn't have been this guy, since he says he started in 2014.)
The pizza was subpar. Why would I be interested in what someone in New York thinks makes a good pizza? I want pizza that I like, not pizza that some random guy from a different pizza culture likes.
† Not for the rating; I ate there because it was next to my hotel.
Those ratings are bunk.
Sacco Pizza on 9th Avenue & 55th St is an underrated gem and a family business since 1972.
These would be turn of the 20th century New York Jewish style bagels, made back then by bagel unions entirely by hand because the dough was too stiff for common kneading machines at that time (not quite sure how that squares with the giant industrial machines of the day, maybe the missing detail is the common bakery kneading machines were not up to the task though a hyper-expensive custom machine could be commissioned). These were so infamously toughly chewy they were hyperbolically touted as teeth breaking and taking an indecent amount of time to digest. "Food safe" because bagel bakery conditions at the turn of the 20th century are unacceptable these days.
Or maybe I've been bamboozled by food editors hunting for clicks.
If you want to brag about anything you have a much better case with bagels.