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Comment by awhitty | Hacker News Reader

I 100% agree, and I've only visited NYC a couple times.

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!!

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One thing I've heard said about French food generally in the past is that there's an entire supply chain in France around French food in particular so you really tend not to get bad French staples at very many places--even if it's a random touristy place.

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.

> so you really tend not to get bad French staples at very many places--even if it's a random touristy place.

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.

Maybe I'm wrong but I had the impression that in France pastry shops had legit pastry chefs who had to go through apprenticeships whereas in America for example, pastry shops give a baker a recipe to follow and that's pretty much it (for the ones that bake in-house I mean)

It varies. Your neighborhood bakery/pastry shop may have a baker that learned from their parent(s). Or it could be a higher-end shop with a trained patisserie chef. Or it could be a 'front' bakery that receives their daily shipment from a regional factory that makes them by hand or by machine.

> France pastry shops had legit pastry chefs who had to go through apprenticeships

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.

For simpler items like croissants, IMO the recipe and following directions is all that matters. I've made a decent amount of semi complex desserts from recipe authors I trust and they turned out great. Sure, there are some minor physical skills you learn and knowledge you gain, but for baking I find that as long as you follow good recipes precisely you can get great results. This does fall apart when you start talking about decorating desserts as that is definitely more art/skill than science.

In the 80s some bright spark realised that the smell of baking bread makes people hungry and buy more food, so now most large-enough UK supermarkets bake in-store.

I believe nowadays they have automatic sprays for bakery smells, I saw a documentary about it like 10 years ago

Freshly baked bread is also a lot more delicious, especially when it's still warm.

In the NYC metro area we actually have a great supply chain for bread, it's New Jersey.

Last time I was in Germany, they had a lot of food just sitting out in the open with flies regularly hanging out on it

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

That's what your immune system is for. Unless you're unusual, you'll be fine.

Haha, man, I hope you don't have a food handling permit

Not to mention they have typically been making the regional food for centuries, if not millennia. The selection can be more limited in the EU, but the quality is incredible, and at a very low price point compared to US.

You can get cheese and wine made in the US ~ as good as French, but it’s 5x as expensive.

I don’t know about the cheese but I disagree with you about the wine. For example Californian wine is excellent, and you get a much higher quality for the money than with French wine for anything below $150. French wine is in much higher demand so all the lowest quality is sold too, instead of being made vinegar or discarded, becoming the entry level. French wine is subjected to strict rules that don’t allow them correct them like the Californian do, like adding a bit of water here or there… etc. In places where you have to import both the quality difference for the money is evident, within the us is abysmal

California wine can be excellent but is overpriced, and I am a native Californian raised on California wine. French wine has impressively consistent quality at low price points. You can’t easily buy good cheap French wine in California I’ve discovered, but you can in other parts of the country. There are certain types of wine that California does better, but France does much better for the price generally. This was not the case a few decades ago, but global competition crushed the price of French wine and opened the global wine trade. France has so many regions that produce excellent wine without the brand premium of Bordeaux, Burgundy, et al.

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.

In a place like New York, it's hard to find a good restaurant that doesn't have a relatively severe price premium

You need to sample the price/quality in France, not on goods exported elsewhere - that’s the key point of this observation. French products are often expensive abroad, but dirt-cheap locally.

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.

Argentina and steaks too. (Sorry, cows)

Oh yes! Extend that to fish and you get Tokyo where you have to work your ass off to get mediocre sushi.

Coffee in Italy.

Fish & sushi in Portugal;

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!)

Just want to say you took the words out of my mouth on this one. I was given the exact same advice re: Parisian croissants, and I feel exactly the same way about Arsicault in SF. I’d I’ve never had a better one in the US, let alone SF.

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.

My neighbors still remember my shrieks of rage when I read Arsicault got rated.

Sorry, what do you mean that it got rated?

I've spent a lot of time in Paris and NYC but have found it very hard to find a randomly good croissant; less so a randomly good slice. I've tried many of the foodie favorites for both and been largely unimpressed. There have a few truly excellent. Maybe they ruined me for others.

Finding a decent croissant is fairly easy in Paris, but if you've ever tasted an actually good croissant, buttery but not sickening, airy but not empty, crispy but not dry, you know how incredibly difficult to find those are.

Has any NYC bagel aficionado living in Boston tried Bagelsaurus? (In Porter Square, on Mass. Ave.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xup2Lcd4Ers

Not Boston’s but I’ve had a ton of “you have to try this one bagel shop in town, it’s just like New York!”

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.

Those last three can always be found at Mammelah's in Cambridge, if you're in town.

Great name for a bagel shop.

It's basically a Jewish deli which I'm happy to see is apparently open for dinner again. (Closed for dinner pre-COVID.) Yes, very good in Kendall in Cambridge though they also apparently have a couple of other locations now.

I used to live near Bagelsaurus and it is better than any bagel I can get in my Brooklyn neighborhood now.

Dragon Pizza there similarly high quality.

There are a number of foods that are supposedly only being amazing within a certain geographic location, but the best ones I've had were far outside if that location.

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.

Was the pizza place in Washington 2Amys?

Best pizza I’ve ever had. Franks in New Haven is close, but just not that crazy about thin crust.

(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)

That's the one.

Homeslice in Shanghai is fantastic

There are a lot of good pizza places in Shanghai because China is a big food country and restaurants that serve bad food can't survive here

> 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).

Homeslice or Joe’s?

Better than bagel pub??

The line is consistently out the door, so they have to be doing something right!

Or maybe they're just doing their service wrong. Who is to say?

If you're in the Boston area go to Bagel world (technically not in Boston, but a little north of it)

edit: for crossiants and other treats, A.J. King is my fav -- they supply a lot of the Boston cafes

Kane's for donuts

I like Iggy's for bagels. (Some) Whole Foods carry.

Have they relented on only offering cold-smoked salmon yet?

I really like croissants but haven't ever been to Paris. My last trip abroad was to Portugal and it was crazy how some sandwich shop at the train station had croissants that tasted better than any specialty bakeshop I've ever been to in the US.

It's not about quality when they're reducing sauce to save money, as stated in the article. The slices may still be better than in any other state, but the focus has shifted from quality to price.

Arsicault is also about three times the price of a croissant in Paris

Everything in SF is about three times the price of Paris ...

I live in a cheap flyover country city and our "good" croissants are also about 3x Parisian prices... but aren't good.

While we’re on the topic, any recommended pizza places in SF?

Doppio Zero on Hayes by Davis Symphony was quite good, although a bit fancier. Amici's East Coast Pizzeria on Lombard in Marina was also very tasty. Also, it's not as fun, but Mountain Mikes is also great, inexpensive pizza, like in your Papa Johns range but better overall.

Arizmendi bakery has rotating toppings but is a ceaselessly classy slice.

North Beach has some good spots. My go to after a night of drinking is Golden Boy.

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