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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

Or just about any diner.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

As everyone else is echoing - really not true. I grew up in Orange County which, for a suburb, has really good food options. Tons and tons of restaurants and a lot of people accustomed to nice things.

The difference in food options between SF (where I am now) and OC (or LA vs OC) is absolutely astounding. Its really not even close. Its gotten better but large cities are still orders of magnitude better.

Did you mean to write “much” instead of “orders of magnitude”? If not, please provide support for even a single order of magnitude compared to OC.

Sincerely, the League for Reducing Hyperbole on the Internet

PS: “Everybody else”, “absolutely astounding”, “its [sic] really not even close”...sit down and have a nice glass of warm milk and think about what you wrote. :-)

I live in OC now, and have traveled quite extensively as well as spent time working in the Bay. While lacking in Michelin star restaurants (only a handful) it is otherwise phenomenal when it comes to options and quality, even compared to bit cities. Now bars/nightclubs/music venues are where it is sorely lacking.

Just to make sure I understand, your saying you have better options in LA and SF than in OC? Couldn't quite make out from your comment.

Are there specific cuisines? The Indian options are pretty bad imo, there are a few good places but overall not as good as the South Bay.

LA itself is mostly suburb too though.

I think this is really true. Ive been getting great coffee and food in the smallest towns, tourist towns albeit, but metropolitan level fanciness on a gateway town to capital reef NP is impressive. I can get my fancy latte's in almost every nook in america, some might be closed on sundays though.

I would say the presence of anything nice at all and the number of choices has really dramatically improved across the country.

The quality is what it is, but at least someone is trying to give you something interesting to do.

Or at least that was the case in 2019. I really hope we return to valuing in-person interaction when it's safe to do so.

If you have to eat outdoors, a mobile restaurant (aka “food truck”) can recreate a good portion of the experience anywhere.

As one example, NYC opens Governor’s Island to the public for only part of the year. Food service comes in the form of a “food court” made up of a bunch of food trucks/container kitchens.

Sorry but this is wrong. Food scenes require diverse cultures. Small town USA doesn't have 50+ ethnic groups making restaurants downtown

By this metric food scenes can only exist in 2-3 cities in the US (or world for that matter). I think food scenes that do one or two things well are totally worthwhile and a huge improvement over bland suburban chains.

Effectively, there's never more than a dozen cities, tops, in any country in the world where you can get close to top-level food quality, and even so that applies only for a few genres of food.

Except for Italy, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Thailand, and many other countries where you can find top quality food in thousands of small towns and out of the way places. So probably not a great rule to go by.

You can get top-quality Japanese food in thousands of small Japanese towns, and top-quality Thai food in thousands of small Thai towns. However, rest assured you will have a very hard time finding (say) Mexican in either. The only places in either country where you have a genuinely cosmopolitan food scene are Tokyo and Bangkok respectively.

What is top-quality American food, and where do you find it?

Not an American, but the last time I rocked up to a random small American town and chose a random small restaurant, I had a really good turkey chili burger [1]. Hardly gourmet, but delicious, and it's quite difficult to find this kind of thing outside the US.

[1] The "Chili Monster" at the Dillinger in Boulder City, NV, in case you were wondering. https://www.thedillinger.com/ (Not to be confused with Boulder, CO.)

In addition to the burger previously mentioned, off the top of my head as "American cuisine" there's obviously barbecue, as well as Southern cuisine, Cajun/Creole, and -- while some might argue -- I'd throw in Tex-Mex and New Mexican (e.g., the state of New Mexico) as gastronomically distinct. Where you find it is, well, all over. You have to do a little research. :) But you can find really well-regarded restaurants around America for those cuisines, across a wide variety of price points.

France begs to differ. You have spectacularly good restaurants in rural areas all over the county (Michelin star good).

Sure, but you don't get the variety. If you move out to rural France but are used to rotating among eating Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Thai, etc. throughout the month, you might be disappointed with the lack of choices.

You are probably used to this rotation just because you grew up in the US. As someone who has grown up in Italy we don't think about food this way, not even regionally. I.e. don't expect a great risotto in Naples or a decent carbonara in Milan...

This isn't a US thing, it's about cities with cosmopolitan tradition. Italians are the complete opposite of this culture.

I think there is a spectrum, the US being a country of immigrants is on one extreme, Italy having been several different independent states up to 160 years ago and having many different climates and cultures is on the other. While it's true that the Italian approach to cuisine might be overly provincial I think that most of the world is closer to Italy than the US.

Being in rural France, I like trying some new foreign cuisine once in while as much as anybody else, but it wouldn't come to my mind to make it my daily routine.

Going out of your way to not eat local stuff is completely pointless to me. People take quite a lot of pride in having good stuff specific to their area.

In the Bay Area you can get, in the same weekend, excellent Vietnamese, excellent Peruvian, and excellent patisserie.

The ingredients are sourced locally for the most part, and the imports are about as good as they can get, and substitutions are sober.

The Bay Area is three or four times the size my département. It could be a country. I don't even walk more than five minutes to buy all I eat...

It's hard to share scales with Americans.

France, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Basque, and Japan are all examples of places with mostly one ethnic group and great food scenes.

The best Indian food I've ever had (and I only ate there once so maybe it was a fluke) was an Indian restaurant in Brno, Czech Republic, population 400k.

I can't imagine there were very many Indian people there, but the food was amazing.

Very true! But I'd be disappointed if the only plentiful cuisine was the local one. As much as I love each of the cuisines you mentioned, I can't imagine predominately eating any one of them.

I think in Japan you could probably go to a different restaurant serving a different type of Japanese food (e.g. ramen, sushi, soba, tempura, steak... even the US has the more famous ones) and continue on for weeks before exhausting the possible options for different restaurant types, all of which count as "local" food. At least local to the country.

fair point. I think my comment was US centric. There really isn't a cuisine culture in a lot of small usa towns. Probably do to the short lived actual history of the US, and the nearly forced consumption of preservative ridden and processed food following the world wars.