Obviosuly there are great restaurants in the US. I’d be happy to eat at the French Laundry every day. SF is full of great places.
I live in a college town in Northern California with 70k people that doesn’t have a single good restaurant. Not even an above average one.
Like this is obviously not a serious food discussion and I’m exaggerating, but the 194 seasons of poorly made food on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives are far closer to the actual American cuisine in both cities i’ve lived in so far than Anthony Bourdain.
Yeah see I’ve only lived in San Antonio (which has great food cheap, particularly Mexican), Louisville (which is a GREAT food city), and now Austin as an adult… except for a 1.5 year stint in Florence KY which is outside Cincinnati… and yes the food there is terrible.
The only good food city I’ve been so far that isn’t a huge metropolin that just has a few good places due to sheer volume was Charleston, SC. If you read somewhere that Sacramento is an up and coming food destination, don’t believe the hype.
Yeah I’m a city dweller. Most people are. Small towns suck everywhere though I’m pretty sure. If you’re lucky there’s like one good restaurant if that.
One nice thing that happens in big cities is that real restaurant groups spring up that can absolutely waffle crush chains on ingredient cost/quality and deliver exceptional dining experiences at scale… because there’s enough population density to justify that. A great example of this would be Ole restaurant group in Louisville. I sincerely pity any national chain restaurant that is trying to compete with any of those guys concepts. It’s not even a little bit fair. It turns out having many different concepts in one place sharing a supply chain around sourcing ingredients in that one place is WAY better than having hundreds of scattered restaurants nationally sharing the same concept with a huge national supply chain. One big warehouse and insane relationships with local vendors is MUCH better than dozens of smaller warehouses and a strong relationships with national vendors. It’s really not even a little close.
Weirdly they don’t have three of their concepts on that website:
I do think food culture in the US is terrible. Even in my liberal hippie w/e college town, I see the shit parents pack for the kids for lunch at my son’s preschool. Seriously last week I saw a kid eating popcorn for lunch. It might not even be surprsing, I dunno.
Small sample size for me, but I visited a couple of Sean Brock’s places plus a dinner at FIG which was one of the better meals I had in the states. Granted, none of them were casual/cheap dining.
fwiw Michelin doesn’t cover Charelston nor does it cover most of the US. People have some misconceptions on how Michelin works. They usually charge money to publish a guide in that area. California paid some hefty amount to get LA in the last guide.