Looks that got wrapped in 'Continental' in the Zagat numbers, which is pretty high.
Anecdotally here in DC Germanic restaurants are almost all Biergarten type places that emulate 'street' food, and there isn't any fine dining to bring up the averages. I imagine that's true in most of the US.
Fun outliers I can think of are Filipino and Laotian, which are both fairly expensive vs the country prestige, but of course there's a tiny sample size.
"Real" Filipino food is street food, and pretty unappetizing. Offal, adidas, sausage made of who knows what, betamax, roast/fried pig feet/ears, brain, etc, all served with a side of white rice and washed down with san miguel.
That being said, lechon, oxtail stew and sinigang are awesome, but not what most Filipino people eat on a regular basis.
> "Real" Filipino food is street food, and pretty unappetising.
Unappetising to western tastes, I think is what you meant.
> sausage made of who knows what
That's what a sausage is, unless you make it at home.
> roast/fried pig feet/ears
I've come to enjoy roasted pigs tail (technically its the tailbone from the carcass, rather than the actual curly part of the tail) and its fucking amazing.
Well, I observed that as Filipinos made more money they tended to stop eating that food, so I don't think they're that into it either. I will admit that the deep fried pigs feet are very tasty though.
If I had to pick one thing Filipinos loved most, it would definitely be fried chicken. They also seem to have a soft spot for spaghetti with an extremely sweet tomato sauce.
In the Twin Cities, Laotian food is cheap and easy to find - we have a huge southeast Asian community (the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam, with many Hmong). Around here, there's nothing particularly "exotic" about Vietnamese or Thai. More specifically Laotian and Cambodian food is also easy enough to find, although they're sometimes hidden in "Vietnamese" restaurants. Larb and sticky rice? Yeah, we got that. :)
Filipino, on the other hand, is almost nonexistent. We just don't have a significant community here to support it.
Every time I go to a German restaurant that people rave about (but more on the family-style dining side of things,) I'm shocked by how similar it is to the stuff my grandparents (on both sides) used to cook.
Meanwhile, when I cook my staples are tacos, chili, coconut curry, and chicken salad.
That includes a glass of wine + tip, and it has to be a Zagat rated restaurant in NYC. Also "average" implies mean, which could be slightly biased upwards due to having some high end restaurants in the list (compared to a median)
Fascinating article, although I'm a little taken aback when anyone uses the phrase "ethnic food" nowadays. I didn't realize people said it anymore, it sounds like a relic of the '50s.
I'm also bitter because I grew up in a household where anything that was even remotely different from the same bland 4-5 dishes we ate every single day was considered strange and exotic by the rest of my family. I would love to hang out with certain relatives and be able to suggest Indian or Thai food without getting a reaction like I want them to construct an interdimensional portal so we could go eat food from an alternate universe where everything's made out of pure thought and energy.
I dislike the term "ethnic food" and foodie cultural in general when it comes to foreign food.
There is a restaurant that I like to get my culture's home cooking. Nothing fancy, just home cooking. You do not even know it is a restaurant since there is no storefront except for a social club awning. I could never remember the exact street it is on, so when looking for the address one day, I came across reviews for the restaurant. First of all I was shocked that "outsiders" went to eat there. Good for them. But the reviews by these foodies went on into detail about every aspect of the food. It is home cooking! I felt like the food was an animal in a zoo and people were paying to see these strange creatures. They were there not for the environment, the culture, or even the food. They were there to see how these other people eat. I am sorry if American food is bland, but do not treat cultures like animals in a zoo.
I think everyone has been to enough potluck and home cooked dinners to know the difference between good and bad home cooking. That's the problem with "authentic" cuisine. It's no guarantee of quality. Likewise, "home cooking" is also not a free pass for poorly made restaurant meals.
To be clear, the reviews were not negative. To me, they were too focused on details that did not matter IMHO. They were trying very hard to be foodies, missing the point of the food and the restaurant.
Was this a private club, and they were unwelcome patrons?
I think everyone should pick apart everyone else's culture if they feel like it. If you want a sacred space, don't welcome the general public. You're welcome to treasure the things you want to, of course! But it seems rather surly to pick on people who like to nerd out on food.
Of course on another level, if your culture is picking on foody's culture, so be it! It all gets pretty meta...
There's a formula for restaurant finance - 30% ingredients, 30% labor, 30% rent and other overhead, and (hopefully) 10% profit. This is broadly true across the industry, at all price points. Much of the higher cost of "nice" restaurants is higher quality ingredients (this is especially true of pricey sushi-dominated Japanese, which pays a premium for the best fish). An additional cost is prestigious locations.
Because of this formula, expensive restaurants are not necessarily more valuable or profitable - merely more prestigious. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about his father's restaurant businesses. He owned two restaurants - a prestigious steakhouse on a valuable lakefront, and a cheap fast food chain location. He made far more money slinging cheap burgers than he ever made on fancy steaks. Cheap ingredients, cheap labor, cheap location, very high volume!
Minneapolis has an amazing food scene, driven by localvore ingredients (we're farm country) and hipster-casual "fine dining". It's a hard town for traditional fine-dining restaurants. The really good eating is split between the hipster places and southeast Asian ethnic restaurants. For $50/person, you can get a shockingly good meal here, and you can wear jeans and a t-shirt eating it.
For $50 I'd hope so! That's an expensive meal sans alcohol. I've had great meals at every price point, but above $25/person I'm expecting a good meal, above $50/person a great meal, and above $75-100 an exempelary meal.
Yeah, when I think of great cheap local food, I'm thinking of e.g. this awesome Cajun place where you can get a big plate of amazing chicken etouffee, garlic bread, and a beer for around $10. I might go as far as "cheap for what you get" for a truly great $20/person place. $50/person may be delicious, but it's not "cheap" by any reasonable definition.
Depends what you want out of food. I personally go to high end restaurants because I want to see what chefs are capable of doing with all the new techniques they invent, or come up with new combinations, or use familiar things in new ways. This sort of cooking is not easy or cheap work. So when restaurants are able to be inventive well under the $100 mark, then yes, it's cheap - unless you think labor should be free.
In general, Europe is (much) more expensive than the US food-wise and I still can eat a four-course meal at a one Michelin star restaurant for less than $50 (without drinks) 10 mins by foot from my house (Netherlands - you won't get to wear t-shirt and jeans though). I'd certainly hope that $50 would get me exceptional food.
Years ago a VC who passed on my startup drove my co-founders and myself past a restaurant in the western Philly suburbs. He pointed to it and declared that he and his father had almost bought it. "Why didn't you," I asked. He laughed derisively. "Because we realized you could only fill the tables, and once you did that was it: you'd never make any more money."
Anecdotally, I've heard from a number of people that catering is one of the larger profit centers for restaurants that do it, with the dine-in service acting almost like a marketing tool, or sometimes even a loss leader.
Absolutely. The restaurant I used to work at did catering as well, and we made far more profit from catering than from regular service. I don't think that total income was more for catering though.
With catering, you only have to pay for the staff you need, when you need them. You also often don't have to pay for the venue, or only have to pay for renting furniture etc.
Part of the profitability also comes from the fact that you're already paying for the kitchen, and often the venue (if it's hosted at the restaurant after hours), so you're essentially removed 30% of the cost.
This is dependent on the level of fine dining and the locale. A high-end restaurant in an affluent, high density area like LA or NYC can support very high prices while still keeping packed day in day out. And that leads to a lot of money coming in (five figures a day easily). Which is why, incidentally, there tend to be more such restaurants in such places.
From the operational end, some cuisines take much more kitchen effort than others. Pumping out carbs in pasta form is a cheap operation. French cooking is more labor-intensive.
There are many Italian restaurant chains, but few French restaurant chains.
Japanese food is way overpriced nowadays, and hardly "japanese". You have to pay a ridiculous amount for actual Japanese food; anything mid-priced or below is covered in fried breading, mayonnaise, and even jalapenos. I'm not against "fusion" cuisine, but it sucks when there's so much of that it makes it difficult to get the real thing.
Chinese food in America much cheaper because the ingredients are much less costly and far less difficult to make. I don't think the value of Chinese food really has to do much with the Western perception of the Chinese economy or its people. That "Chinese" food is, in America, is designed to be tasty and relatively inexpensive. Authentic Chinese food isn't as appealing or palatable to most Americans.
"Chinese" food in America isn't even "Chinese" food most of the time. It's "Oriental-inspired" at best. If I go to a Chinese restaurant in the U.S, I expect none of my dishes to be anything that would exist in a "typical" Chinese restaurant. Hell, most of the food is considered American food by Chinese people because it is so dissimilar to actual Chinese cuisine.
If I go to a Japanese restaurant I can expect them to have udon or sushi and I know I can find those things at actual restaurants in Japan and Japanese people may criticize aspects of it, but will recognize the udon and sushi as a Japanese dish.
The few "authentic" Chinese places I've known to exist quickly shut down, often due to a lack of patrons. As you said - I don't think it is appealing or palatable for most Americans.
The secret to good Chinese food in the US is to find the hole in the wall Chinese grocery and make it yourself. I continually find amazing things at great prices.
I've grown to hate Americanized Chinese food. The best thing to wake your average eater up to this disparity is proper dim sum in my opinion.
This definitely depends on where you live. Most major cities seem to support at least a few "authentic" Chinese places (and some, like the West Coast cities, NYC, etc, are loaded to the gills with them).
That may well be true but it's hard for tourists to find them. My experience of "Chinese" food in San Francisco is that it's appalling, and in New York, my Chinese wife wasn't even willing to try it. Fortunately, tourists are usually very happy with "New York diners" and other exotic American restaurants, whose authenticity is unquestioned.
I find this surprising. I've lived in the Bay Area and NYC, and by chance most of my friends in both were immigrants from various Chinese-speaking places. Nobody ever complained about the Chinese restaurants we went to, and some would exclusively go to Chinese restaurants and eat quite happily (they never grew a taste for western food).
It never felt like these were hidden gems: we just went to Chinatown in NYC, for example. If you're particularly worried about authenticity, you can peek at the clientele and see what percent is Asian.
Is your wife Chinese American by any chance? Anecdotally I've found that Chinese Americans (and all other first gen Americans, e.g. Mexican Americans) are considerably pickier about their heritage food than immigrants. I'm a first gen myself, and saw it in my first gen friends growing up too -- it's a way to feel more attached to your cultural identity, one that you already feel a bit like an outsider in.
> "Chinese" food is, in America, is designed to be tasty and relatively inexpensive. Authentic Chinese food isn't as appealing or palatable to most Americans.
Do you really think any other culture/country's food is 'authentic' in the US?
Do you somehow think "Outback Steakhouse" is anything like Australians eat?
Do you somehow think Thai restaurants are anywhere close to authentic anywhere but Thailand?
I've said it before: the only food that seems to be universal in what to expect, is Indian curries. Everything is adapted for local tastes and to use locally available ingredients.
I'd argue that a lot of Chinese food is well-suited to American tastes. Certainly not the Guangdong stuff and the cheap animal parts (looking at you, pig and chicken feet), but almost everything else. At very least, everything about Sichuan and Hunan food seems to translate well except for the very spicy fish stew.
I don't know if you've ever been to Japan, but they eat a lot of breaded, fried food with mayonnaise.
Ebi-fry, tonkatsu, tempura, katsudon, karaage, chicken namban, kurokke and the list goes on are all common, authentic deep fried Japanese foods that are commonly consumed with mayonnaise.
A really interesting theory that with relevance beyond cooking. The global discussion of programming, for example, is dominated by the high ranks of per capita GDP, music by the GDP rankings of a few centuries ago. I had assumed it was all path dependency, but perhaps that's putting the cart before the horse.
I found the discussion of Italian vs French food especially interesting since what we think of as "French" cuisine was brought from Italy to France in the early 17th century by Marie de Medici who considered France an uncultured place compared to her native Tuscany.
Something not really touched on here is how poor people's ethnic food can become fashionable and achieve high prices and desirability, often far outside its origins. Consider the recent bone broth craze, for example.
Here in Minneapolis, the current trend is Southern food, often made by hipsters who grew up in Minnesota and have no real cultural ties to the South. For me, with my half-southern roots, it's kind of bizarre to see stuff like bologna sandwiches and collard greens popping up everywhere and commanding high prices. That's the stuff you got at church luncheons and roadside shacks in Kentucky.
I don't expect them to start serving burgoo made from red squirrels anytime soon.
As someone who lives and has traveled extensively in the south, I have to say that from a culinary standpoint the food is the best example of a true American cuisine. New England also has a cuisine with cultural heritage, but it isn't as quintessentially American as barbecue/southern food.
It's definitely more strongly regional and more distinctive than other places I've traveled in America. The only place that seems to compare for uniqueness is California.
I think of Californian food as a range of ingredients and stylistic flairs more than a particular dish. Avocadoes, lemon, leafy greens and seeds, an avoidance of deep-frying and greasy meats. It's much lighter and fresher than Midwestern or southern food.
Having lived most of my life in California, I was surprised to discover there was such a thing as "California" food when I traveled to the East Coast about 10 years ago. It turns out that "California" food there was food that involved avocados. I had never heard of such a thing before.
Avocados are definitely eaten in California, and they have been for as long as I remember, but I'm not under the impression that it defines California food. Occasionally, I'll get avocados in a sandwich, salad, or burrito, but that's about it. Maybe eating avocados was so foreign to the rest of the country that it became associated with California.
I guess if you don't live in other parts of the country, you don't have a sense of which foods are unique to your region and which foods are common throughout the country.
> Maybe eating avocados was so foreign to the rest of the country that it became associated with California.
It's not hard to explain. They won't grow in the rest of the country. They do grow in Mexico; I understand NAFTA hit the California avocado business pretty hard.
Agreeing with and adding to the 2 previous comments, specifically "California Rolls" in sushi restaurants. There are many variants, but the primary thing is the avocado.
I'd also like to nominate creole/cajun as my favorite American cuisine, NC eastern-style bbq as my favorite bbq, and shrimp and grits (with runner-up chicken and waffles) as my favorite soul food.
And then there are things within the South like Tidewater food, which up until the past century was still a combination of English-settler and aboriginal food: pork and squash, just like our ancestors ate at Jamestown or soon after. It's almost completely extinct now, which IMHO is a damn shame: it can be delicious and filling, and — unlike so many of the cuisines in this country — really is native at this point (the English heritage took root in the Tidewater over 400 years ago, so I consider it native).
Interestingly, lobster is pretty cheap now, due to abnormally high numbers of catch-sized lobsters (probably something to do with global warming). There's a restaurant here in town that specializes in basically lobster everything, and it's not out of line price-wise with standard Minneapolis hipster fare. If lobster prices ever go back up, they're toast. Their whole menu would skyrocket.
Relatively :-) Lobster meat in Maine still runs about $40 per pound. It may be about half that if you cook soft shells and pick your own meat but prices for live lobster are still $1 to $2 per pound higher this year at this time than they were the last few.
Well, yes. I was talking retail, not wholesale but my point was that lobster is still pricey per pound compared to other protein at retail (and wholesale). Last week soft shells were running about $6 per pound at lobster pounds and other local retail sources. They were more like $4 to $5 last year.
[EDIT: The $40-ish/lb was for picked lobster meat.]
The reason lobster catches have been increasing is that the lobstermen are effectively farming them. They are putting out so much bait and providing so much feed, while at the same time only harvesting young, relatively immature lobsters. The amount of eggs a large, full-grown lobster can carry is exponentially higher than what the catchable ones can carry, and lobsters can live a very long time.
I seem to recall reading that servants at mansions in Newport (about 1880 or 1900) demanded that they not be served lobster more than three times a week.
> Consider the recent bone broth craze, for example.
Broths made with cartilage and bone are much more nutritious than muscle proteins. Humans have traditionally eaten as much of the animal as they could, for efficiency. Incorporating the types of amino acids in the rest of the animal in addition to the meat is more compatible with wellness.
Bone broth is a correction of a mistake, not a "craze".
Not knocking bone broth as a food - it's wonderful. But as the latest "magic ingredient", as Michael Pollan would put it? Yeah.
Bone broth is a pain for restaurants to make. Doing it right takes very long cook times. It won't last as a trend, and people sure as heck aren't going to make it themselves, unless they're nerds (my daughter makes fish and duck bone broths at home, but she's a nerd - and half the time she cheats and pads it with hearts and livers to reduce the cooking time).
I have not seen straight bone broth restaurants but ramen shops had been a thing for decades and don't seem to go away. Ramen is based on a broth, which might not be only from bone (even though there is tonkotsu ramen too) but still takes dozens of hours to cook.
I am southern (New Orleans, live in Idaho now) and love collard greens, but they are super cheap to make. Also, fried pork chops, catfish etc... southern/Cajun is hands down the best food in the world.
Nothing is more hipster than paying a high price for bologna sandwich.
The hard part about preparing collards is making sure you washed all the sand out of them. In rural Georgia and the Carolinas, you'll see an old washing machine on the back porch that's used just for that purpose - throw the greens in there, short cycle on cold (no soap of course!) and they're ready for cooking.
BBQ is another southern classic. Whether it's Eastern NC style chopped pork with vinegar sauce, or Texas smoked brisket served dry, it's all good.
Interesting, but I feel this is missing the culture's impression of their own food. Not everyone values their cuisine to the same degree, or at least, not all of it. It's hard to get something pushed into "fine dining" menus when there is no one suggesting that it qualifies.
"With China, [Americans] are still filled with this funny disdain, that it is about cheap and crappy stuff, including about cheap and crappy food"
Because until very recently, it HAS been cheap and crappy food in America. "Chinese food" has traditionally meant the chop suey that you take out from Dragon Inn (and in many areas, it STILL means that).
I grew up with a severe dislike for Chinese food. It tasted like I was literally eating out of a garbage can. The first time I ate at a Chinese friend's place I was very leery, but it turned out of course that the Western idea and the Chinese idea of "Chinese food" could not be more divergent. Good food is good food, but Chinese cuisine has a long Western history to live down.
To this day I still cringe whenever someone suggests Chinese cuisine, because I never know which kind they have in mind.
> but Chinese cuisine has a long Western history to live down.
a) don't lump the rest of the 'western' world in with America. "Chinese food" in Australia is of course not authentic, but by local tastes is usually delicious.
b) implying something has to "live down" implies that there is fault with the item itself. Good Chinese food (or even good chinese-inspired food, rather than authentic chinese) didn't force Americans to eat shit.
I think the parent meant "live down" in the American perception of Chinese cuisine as being just "chop suey" and other greasy dishes.
The problem is that much of the early Chinese food cooked in America was by miners/railroad workers who had few other job opportunities. It was not until the late 1960s and 70s when actual chefs came to the States[0].
The demand-side explanation offered isn't ludicrous on its face, but I expect supply-side explanation is more the direct mechanism.
Sure, it has to do with economics, but not so much taste being driven by what people eat in rich and militarily powerful countries, but the fact that rich and stable countries don't have huge numbers of people that are very skilled in their cuisine emigrating to the US and opening restaurants, saturating the market and driving market-clearing prices down. Whereas Mexico, for instance, does.
Mexican food isn't cheap in the US because people look down on Mexico, it's cheap because there are so many people making it, and so many that could be making it.
I feel like I'm stating the obvious here, but prices are set by a combination of both demand and supply. The article is focusing mostly on the demand side, but the supply factor makes a huge difference as well. There are significant immigrant populations from Mexico/China/India/Thailand, which means that someone opening a restaurant catering to these cuisines, can hire "ethnic chefs" at an affordable price.
In contrast, how big is the recently-French population in America really? And how many professional French cooks can one really find? Even if the demand for french food is much lower than the demand for Chinese food, the lack of supply alone will drive up the price.
Note also the second effect of the above. If someone wanted to open a Chinese restaurant, they can hire a affordable Chinese cook and market the restaurant as a mid-price restaurant. Or they can hire an expensive Chinese cook and market the restaurant as a high-end venue.
In contrast, if someone wanted to open a french restaurant, they don't have the option of hiring a cheap French cook. It's go big, or go home... which means that the pool of all French restaurants, is going to be heavily biased towards upscale, expensive restaurants.
If you simply take the average menu price of all zagat-rated French restaurants, and compare them to the average menu price of all zagat-rated Chinese restaurants, you're going to find a big difference in these average numbers, but a lot of it will simply be a result of the above price-bias. If you're trying to investigate people's demand/perception for a certain cuisine, the above results are going to be a highly distorted one.
Modern French cuisine was codified by Escoffier. Not only did he nail down what haute cuisine was in terms of technique, he codified a process of restaurant management, based on the military chain of command. Escoffier trained up-and-coming chefs on how to structure large kitchens (up to hundreds of staffers) and how to handle budget and marketing, to get the "right" customers. In other words, he invented the modern large-scale upscale restaurant business.
American and European cooking schools are all modeled on Escoffier's techniques, as passed down through generations of chefs going back to those worked under him directly. It's not just about the cooking. It's the white tablecloths, the wine list, the dress code - it's about a restaurant experience that says as much about who the customer is and what their role in society is as it says about food.
Why require that gentlemen wear a jacket and a tie for dinner? Does it add to the cost of the food? No. It's about standards. If you offer a gentleman a tie so he may eat, you've said something about his station in life. That's why waiters at such fancy places seem like they're insulting you - they're actually insulting you! Because of this, the restaurants are expensive. Of course they're expensive. Not because the food is superior, but because the kind of people who would eat there expect it. At the best, putting prices on the menu is a faux pas. If you have to think about the cost, you don't belong.
When I was a cook I worked under a french chef and read Escoffier. Le guide culinaire is a fascinating read, meals for kings with pigeon stuffed into hen, stuffed in a goose, stuffed into a pig and cooked in a coal fire oven for 12 hours.
> That's why waiters at such fancy places seem like they're insulting you - they're actually insulting you! Because of this, the restaurants are expensive. Of course they're expensive. Not because the food is superior, but because the kind of people who would eat there expect it. At the best, putting prices on the menu is a faux pas. If you have to think about the cost, you don't belong.
It sounds like you're saying that the purpose of French restaurants is to signal your wealth/social class, and if you want good food that's worth what you're paying, you should go somewhere else.
Yeah. Something I think that was lost in the original article was that French and Japanese technique really are superior to other cuisines. There's a reason they're so dominant.
I think you're 100% correct. But, I also think that even implying that that is the purpose is itself a form of signaling of your wealth/social class. "I'm much too smart/frugal/down to earth/in the know about where the real good food is to be fooled by cloth napkins and dim lights." Signaling is funny like that. We often discuss it in the context of letting others know how up the social ladder we are or want to be perceived as being. But at least as often signaling is used to convey to others that we're not at the top, we're right where we belong, with the other members of our tribe.
"And when Latin American and Asian food also become American food, it will be a signal that the country has at last embraced a new generation of Americans."
I found this peculiar, given that the US has no fewer than four distinct regional "Mexican" cuisines, not found in Mexico. These are Tex-Mex, California Mexican food (e.g. the fabulous Mission burrito), New Mexican food, and American Mexican food (think chimichangas).
New Mexican cuisine is older than the US, and middle-white America has been eating tacos (with the crispy shell, itself a US development) for at least two generations. They're about as American as Chef Boyardee at this point.
Excellent point. But perhaps they meant "Latin American other than Mexico".
Here in Silicon Valley, there might be Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean, etc. restaurants that I'm unaware of, but even including the north bay, surely very few.
And in most of America, predictably there'd be none in most towns and cities (aside from New York, Miami, etc.).
Which is pretty different than Mexican, which is indeed widely embraced in one form or another.
P.S. I did just see a new Cuban restaurant in the south bay the other day; I'm not trying to say these things are never here.
P.P.S. a fifth regional American "Mexican" cuisine is, I'm told, found far from the coasts and from the southern U.S. border (possibly especially in the Midwest), "Mexican" almost entirely in name only, which may e.g. use ketchup as the only red sauce, and is often denied to be Mexican at all by fans of the other 4 kinds.
I hear that something similar is what is usually, if not universally, found in e.g. London as well.
I'm not sure why you'd go all the way to Marin, but I count 20+ such South-American-inspired restaurants in the east bay in a casual search. I don't really think of the north bay (or the peninsula) as culinary destinations, but SF and the east bay are great for food.
Your point is well taken that most of the US is unfamiliar with any cuisine further away than Mexico (and GP is right most of the Mexican is heavily Americanized).
(I meant "north bay" to include SF/Oakland/Berkeley, as opposed to the south bay; not so much to go to Marin.)
That's interesting. I would have guessed half that number -- although if you count each country in the central and south Americas, including island nations like Cuba, isn't that roughly just one restaurant per country?
Also, bottom line, I'm pretty sure that 20 is quite dwarfed by the number of Mexican restaurants in the Bay Area. Perhaps even if we only counted taquerias, which seem to pop up almost once per block in some areas.
Thanks for making an actual numeric estimate.
> I don't really think of the north bay (or the peninsula) as culinary destinations, but SF and the east bay are great for food.
Agreed, although note that some good restaurants (if not Michelin-starred) tend to be sparse, rather than nonexistent, in some of those more deprived cities.
And even Michelin stars can be found in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Woodside, Saratoga and Los Gatos, which surprises many people.
FWIW I've never seen ketchup in a London Mexican restaurant. Most make the bulk of their trade on Mission style burritos and similar. It's Mexican viewed through a West Coast American filter.
And except for a handful they are all very, very bad. Whenever I travel from London back to the bay area my dining consists of maxican and sushi (London sushi has two modes: terribly sad or incredibly expensive.) As a simple example, the only way to get a corn tortilla that is not a deep fried hard taco shell is to either make your own (by ordering masa from Amazon) or arrange for delivery by a service, you cannot find them in the grocery store. In general, it feels more like Mexican viewed by a Brit who spent two weeks in San Francisco once a few years ago...
When I lived in London I would buy corn tortillas "that are not deep free hard taco shells" at least once a week, from the chain grocery stores you find everywhere.
Not real yellow corn tortillas you didn't. I am literally checking waitrose, tesco, aldi, and sainsbury online right now to confirm. Not a single one has a corn tortilla that is not deep fried or else a corn and wheat blend. Perhaps you do not actually know what a corn tortilla looks or tastes like, but there is not one for sale on the shelves in any major chain in London.
May eldest daughter has a wheat allergy so we ride the gluten-free train frequently. Over here the gluten-free fare generally uses rice flour, some tapoica starch or potato starch, and your standard stabilizers and thickeners. Gluten-free tortilla on the sites is also a fail, but in one case I found a gluten-free wrap that was a tortilla-like thing made from the same ingredients as the standard gluten-free baking mix. As I suggested in my previous comment, for most people in the UK a "corn tortilla" is actually a corn and wheat blend (usually less than 1/3 corn.)
As an example of the sort of corn tortilla that I try to find, here is the place I order from in London when I do not have time to pull out the press and make my own: http://www.coolchile.co.uk/mexican-shop/corn-tortillas
I'd argue that Brazilian food has gotten a bit more of a "higher class meal" distinction compared to its counterparts, but that's probably because they're often Steakhouses (which are often considered higher class), and it's offers a bit of a unique experience as people often come to your table and offer you all sorts of different cuts of meat that they carve for your right there. There's quite a few of those around the area, and they're not cheap places to eat. There's quite a few of those now in the Chicago area.
There's a Peruvian sandwich place near me now. I wouldn't say it's high class, but the sandwiches are more expensive than many other places around here. I just assumed it was due to it being more expensive to import the food they need, but now this article makes me think of the cultural aspects of it too.
> middle-white America has been eating tacos (with the crispy shell, itself a US development) for at least two generations. They're about as American as Chef Boyardee at this point.
My dad likes to tell the story of his mother, who came from Durango, encountering the concept of "tacos" for the first time... in California. He's always had a hard time thinking of them as "Mexican food".
Eh, "much the same as a taco, but filled with different ingredients" means a flatbread wrapped around any filling at all. They're considered quite innovative in the US now under the name "wraps", and can claim to be local to many different cuisines.
The fact that they're authentically Mexican won't change the fact my dad thinks of them as being less Mexican than tamales, or that 2-3 generations back their penetration was such that a farming community didn't even know the word.
This has Indian food near the bottom of the list, but in most of the places I've lived, Indian restaurants have been among the more expensive places I frequent. Of course, I'm not frequenting Zagat rated places, and I have a fondness for cheap Chinese food and taco trucks and taquerias, so I tend to like cheap and non-fancy places. But, I think I've only lived in one city (Houston) that had really good and really cheap Indian food from multiple restaurants, whereas cheap Chinese and Mexican food is available almost everywhere in the US.
Nonetheless, it's an interesting observation. I wonder what will take the place of cheap Chinese, if those prices rise? Most other Asian cuisine is on the higher end and rising.
Indian food often has a much higher proportion of purely vegetarian dishes (~50% or more) compared to these other cuisines, which I think is party responsible for the discrepancy.
The discrepancy I see (that Indian food is pricey in most of the places I've lived, while the original article has it near then bottom), or the discrepancy between Chinese and Indian? I can't tell if you're saying the cuisine having more vegetarian options is a reason for it to cost more, or the opposite.
Anyway, I'm vegetarian (vegan lately), so I'm always comparing vegetarian options across the board (and another reason I like Asian restaurants more than most other options; there's always more items on the menu that I'd eat). It seems like vegetarian options are usually cheaper than those containing meat, at Chinese restaurants. The same is not always true at a lot of other kinds of restaurant; for example, a burger place will usually charge more for a veggie burger, a pizza place will charge more for vegan cheese (if they even offer it), etc.
I spent 40 years as a non meat eater, and great vegetarian food is consistently cheaper than mediocre food with meat in it. I had a lot of girlfriends before I got married, and they were always bemused because I tended to buy non-meat appetizers that tasted great, in place of an entree. I also love the non-meat goodies that come with the entrees in steakhouses. I have often ordered an entree without the steak, and the prices are bewilderingly low for very good food.
I'll always favor eating real Chinese food than American food. You go to a decent American restaurant, for $20-$30+ you get a plate for yourself. For $15 at a real Chinese restaurant, you get enough food for yourself and share with another. The food comes out in mere minutes, even in a busy restaurant. Chinese food is meant to be shared. You go to a western restaurant, you order a plate for one person.
A real Chinese restaurant has round tables, so everyone is equidistant from the food and can share among each other. You don't 'plate' a dish. You cook everything and put it out there for everyone. Food is about the taste, the freshness and quality.
You go there for bonding with friends and family. You don't pay dutch. One person pays, and sometimes there's a fight on who pays.
Real Chinese food cannot be expensive, because Chinese people know how to cook and won't go out. So often my aunts, uncles, family friends balk at going out. They can cook just as good, and it's cheaper. I need to drag them out. If it's expensive they'd never go out. You'd end up with food that caters to western taste, because only they would pay for expensive Chinese food.
> Curry was adopted and anglicised from the Tamil word kari (கறி) meaning "sauce",[5] which is usually understood to mean vegetables and/or meat cooked with spices with or without a gravy.
Round tables are for big parties. Restaurants in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc. have two person and four person tables as well. They also have shared food and non-shared food. It really depends on the restaurant type and the meal you're ordering as well as occasion. (Recall, some people eat lunch by themselves --most take it to go, some eat on premises.) You will see the round tables at "banquet" restaurants, many in hotels, but not all.
Restaurant food in China, Malaysia, Taiwan, etc. is not all that different from the ones you find in neighborhoods which cater to a ex-pat or first or second generation Asians. They both cook with packaged ingredients, it cuts costs, rather than from scratch as you might at home or _some_ street vendors (many street vendors are franchised).
This is not only evident mid-tier lunch establishments, but also in pricey restaurants in those countries too (not the exorbitantly priced restaurants, but the ones middle and upper middle go out for a good meal at the weekend. For the most part round tables are found in spacious "banquet" style restaurants (you may find others who have that too, but by and large, most have tables for two, four and a few sixes).
Cheap places just have long foldable picnic style tables with benches where anyone can sit anywhere.
Shared food and fighting over who pays is also very much a part of Indian culture. As well as freshness - fresh ingredients make for much more delicious curry =)
>.."Consider the cases of steak frites and carne asada. They both involve cooking a fairly high-quality cut of meat over high heat, and they’re both dishes whose origins are foreign to America."
One of the biggest differences here, but not mentioned, is Parisian as well and "Peking" cuisine is "imperial" or dynastic. Many other cuisines have more rustic heritage, i.e. "peasant" food. Yes, ultimately Parisian and "Peking" cooking can trace back to peasant origins, but many were refined in imperial palaces --thus the prestige. Mexican, British, Russian food is quite squarely in the "peasant" bracket.
Interesting and crazy that Italian food is so high, considering it has the cheapest ingredients, hence why pizza restaurants are the most profitable I suppose.
For me Thai is easily my favourite cuisine, yet ranked bottom, I don't think this is true in UK, where is average price, though like US Japanese is most expensive and French second.
For me French is way over rated esepecially Michelin starred French restaurants with exorbitant prices especially for wine, tiny portions, why do they make everything into a foam?
the novelty soon wears of.
I much prefer authentic Chinese restuarants with large round tables where you cant fit two families around, kids friendly till late at night, I love the sharing of all dishes, so much better than individual servings, which isolate the experience.
Italian food nailed the ambiance and service down. Date night? Italian food. It's a safe bet your dinner date will enjoy it, there's a waiter who's friendly and helpful, and cloth napkins!
But yes, the price of good pizza is nuts in the States. I'm in Berlin right now and a damn good pizza at Il Casolare is a humble 10€, whereas in San Francisco, it'd easily cost at least $20 (and you'd have to stomach a pretentious story as well).
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadAnecdotally here in DC Germanic restaurants are almost all Biergarten type places that emulate 'street' food, and there isn't any fine dining to bring up the averages. I imagine that's true in most of the US.
Fun outliers I can think of are Filipino and Laotian, which are both fairly expensive vs the country prestige, but of course there's a tiny sample size.
That being said, lechon, oxtail stew and sinigang are awesome, but not what most Filipino people eat on a regular basis.
Unappetising to western tastes, I think is what you meant.
> sausage made of who knows what
That's what a sausage is, unless you make it at home.
> roast/fried pig feet/ears
I've come to enjoy roasted pigs tail (technically its the tailbone from the carcass, rather than the actual curly part of the tail) and its fucking amazing.
If I had to pick one thing Filipinos loved most, it would definitely be fried chicken. They also seem to have a soft spot for spaghetti with an extremely sweet tomato sauce.
Filipino, on the other hand, is almost nonexistent. We just don't have a significant community here to support it.
Meanwhile, when I cook my staples are tacos, chili, coconut curry, and chicken salad.
I'm also bitter because I grew up in a household where anything that was even remotely different from the same bland 4-5 dishes we ate every single day was considered strange and exotic by the rest of my family. I would love to hang out with certain relatives and be able to suggest Indian or Thai food without getting a reaction like I want them to construct an interdimensional portal so we could go eat food from an alternate universe where everything's made out of pure thought and energy.
There is a restaurant that I like to get my culture's home cooking. Nothing fancy, just home cooking. You do not even know it is a restaurant since there is no storefront except for a social club awning. I could never remember the exact street it is on, so when looking for the address one day, I came across reviews for the restaurant. First of all I was shocked that "outsiders" went to eat there. Good for them. But the reviews by these foodies went on into detail about every aspect of the food. It is home cooking! I felt like the food was an animal in a zoo and people were paying to see these strange creatures. They were there not for the environment, the culture, or even the food. They were there to see how these other people eat. I am sorry if American food is bland, but do not treat cultures like animals in a zoo.
I think everyone should pick apart everyone else's culture if they feel like it. If you want a sacred space, don't welcome the general public. You're welcome to treasure the things you want to, of course! But it seems rather surly to pick on people who like to nerd out on food.
Of course on another level, if your culture is picking on foody's culture, so be it! It all gets pretty meta...
Because of this formula, expensive restaurants are not necessarily more valuable or profitable - merely more prestigious. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about his father's restaurant businesses. He owned two restaurants - a prestigious steakhouse on a valuable lakefront, and a cheap fast food chain location. He made far more money slinging cheap burgers than he ever made on fancy steaks. Cheap ingredients, cheap labor, cheap location, very high volume!
With catering, you only have to pay for the staff you need, when you need them. You also often don't have to pay for the venue, or only have to pay for renting furniture etc.
Part of the profitability also comes from the fact that you're already paying for the kitchen, and often the venue (if it's hosted at the restaurant after hours), so you're essentially removed 30% of the cost.
There are many Italian restaurant chains, but few French restaurant chains.
Chinese food in America much cheaper because the ingredients are much less costly and far less difficult to make. I don't think the value of Chinese food really has to do much with the Western perception of the Chinese economy or its people. That "Chinese" food is, in America, is designed to be tasty and relatively inexpensive. Authentic Chinese food isn't as appealing or palatable to most Americans.
If I go to a Japanese restaurant I can expect them to have udon or sushi and I know I can find those things at actual restaurants in Japan and Japanese people may criticize aspects of it, but will recognize the udon and sushi as a Japanese dish.
The few "authentic" Chinese places I've known to exist quickly shut down, often due to a lack of patrons. As you said - I don't think it is appealing or palatable for most Americans.
I've grown to hate Americanized Chinese food. The best thing to wake your average eater up to this disparity is proper dim sum in my opinion.
It never felt like these were hidden gems: we just went to Chinatown in NYC, for example. If you're particularly worried about authenticity, you can peek at the clientele and see what percent is Asian.
Is your wife Chinese American by any chance? Anecdotally I've found that Chinese Americans (and all other first gen Americans, e.g. Mexican Americans) are considerably pickier about their heritage food than immigrants. I'm a first gen myself, and saw it in my first gen friends growing up too -- it's a way to feel more attached to your cultural identity, one that you already feel a bit like an outsider in.
Neither of us is American but we've eaten Chinese food in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the UK, among other places.
Do you really think any other culture/country's food is 'authentic' in the US?
Do you somehow think "Outback Steakhouse" is anything like Australians eat?
Do you somehow think Thai restaurants are anywhere close to authentic anywhere but Thailand?
I've said it before: the only food that seems to be universal in what to expect, is Indian curries. Everything is adapted for local tastes and to use locally available ingredients.
At least two Chinese restaurants near me serve this, and it has become one of my favorite dishes. ;)
Then again I'll give almost anything a go.
Ebi-fry, tonkatsu, tempura, katsudon, karaage, chicken namban, kurokke and the list goes on are all common, authentic deep fried Japanese foods that are commonly consumed with mayonnaise.
I found the discussion of Italian vs French food especially interesting since what we think of as "French" cuisine was brought from Italy to France in the early 17th century by Marie de Medici who considered France an uncultured place compared to her native Tuscany.
Here in Minneapolis, the current trend is Southern food, often made by hipsters who grew up in Minnesota and have no real cultural ties to the South. For me, with my half-southern roots, it's kind of bizarre to see stuff like bologna sandwiches and collard greens popping up everywhere and commanding high prices. That's the stuff you got at church luncheons and roadside shacks in Kentucky.
I don't expect them to start serving burgoo made from red squirrels anytime soon.
In modern cuisine, if it's got avocados, it's Californian!
If you want to go much further back, you get Mexican food.
Avocados are definitely eaten in California, and they have been for as long as I remember, but I'm not under the impression that it defines California food. Occasionally, I'll get avocados in a sandwich, salad, or burrito, but that's about it. Maybe eating avocados was so foreign to the rest of the country that it became associated with California.
I guess if you don't live in other parts of the country, you don't have a sense of which foods are unique to your region and which foods are common throughout the country.
It's not hard to explain. They won't grow in the rest of the country. They do grow in Mexico; I understand NAFTA hit the California avocado business pretty hard.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/14/dining/field-g...
I'd also like to nominate creole/cajun as my favorite American cuisine, NC eastern-style bbq as my favorite bbq, and shrimp and grits (with runner-up chicken and waffles) as my favorite soul food.
Small overview: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/world/americas/20bolivia.h...
[1]: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/03/31/472453674/you...
Of course, last year and the year before the prices were historically low; I think I bought hard-shells once for $2.50 a pound.
[EDIT: The $40-ish/lb was for picked lobster meat.]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lobster-not-lobster-subs...
Broths made with cartilage and bone are much more nutritious than muscle proteins. Humans have traditionally eaten as much of the animal as they could, for efficiency. Incorporating the types of amino acids in the rest of the animal in addition to the meat is more compatible with wellness.
Bone broth is a correction of a mistake, not a "craze".
Bone broth is a pain for restaurants to make. Doing it right takes very long cook times. It won't last as a trend, and people sure as heck aren't going to make it themselves, unless they're nerds (my daughter makes fish and duck bone broths at home, but she's a nerd - and half the time she cheats and pads it with hearts and livers to reduce the cooking time).
Nothing is more hipster than paying a high price for bologna sandwich.
BBQ is another southern classic. Whether it's Eastern NC style chopped pork with vinegar sauce, or Texas smoked brisket served dry, it's all good.
Because until very recently, it HAS been cheap and crappy food in America. "Chinese food" has traditionally meant the chop suey that you take out from Dragon Inn (and in many areas, it STILL means that).
I grew up with a severe dislike for Chinese food. It tasted like I was literally eating out of a garbage can. The first time I ate at a Chinese friend's place I was very leery, but it turned out of course that the Western idea and the Chinese idea of "Chinese food" could not be more divergent. Good food is good food, but Chinese cuisine has a long Western history to live down.
To this day I still cringe whenever someone suggests Chinese cuisine, because I never know which kind they have in mind.
a) don't lump the rest of the 'western' world in with America. "Chinese food" in Australia is of course not authentic, but by local tastes is usually delicious.
b) implying something has to "live down" implies that there is fault with the item itself. Good Chinese food (or even good chinese-inspired food, rather than authentic chinese) didn't force Americans to eat shit.
The problem is that much of the early Chinese food cooked in America was by miners/railroad workers who had few other job opportunities. It was not until the late 1960s and 70s when actual chefs came to the States[0].
[0] http://time.com/4211871/chinese-food-history/
Sure, it has to do with economics, but not so much taste being driven by what people eat in rich and militarily powerful countries, but the fact that rich and stable countries don't have huge numbers of people that are very skilled in their cuisine emigrating to the US and opening restaurants, saturating the market and driving market-clearing prices down. Whereas Mexico, for instance, does.
Mexican food isn't cheap in the US because people look down on Mexico, it's cheap because there are so many people making it, and so many that could be making it.
In contrast, how big is the recently-French population in America really? And how many professional French cooks can one really find? Even if the demand for french food is much lower than the demand for Chinese food, the lack of supply alone will drive up the price.
Note also the second effect of the above. If someone wanted to open a Chinese restaurant, they can hire a affordable Chinese cook and market the restaurant as a mid-price restaurant. Or they can hire an expensive Chinese cook and market the restaurant as a high-end venue.
In contrast, if someone wanted to open a french restaurant, they don't have the option of hiring a cheap French cook. It's go big, or go home... which means that the pool of all French restaurants, is going to be heavily biased towards upscale, expensive restaurants.
If you simply take the average menu price of all zagat-rated French restaurants, and compare them to the average menu price of all zagat-rated Chinese restaurants, you're going to find a big difference in these average numbers, but a lot of it will simply be a result of the above price-bias. If you're trying to investigate people's demand/perception for a certain cuisine, the above results are going to be a highly distorted one.
American and European cooking schools are all modeled on Escoffier's techniques, as passed down through generations of chefs going back to those worked under him directly. It's not just about the cooking. It's the white tablecloths, the wine list, the dress code - it's about a restaurant experience that says as much about who the customer is and what their role in society is as it says about food.
Why require that gentlemen wear a jacket and a tie for dinner? Does it add to the cost of the food? No. It's about standards. If you offer a gentleman a tie so he may eat, you've said something about his station in life. That's why waiters at such fancy places seem like they're insulting you - they're actually insulting you! Because of this, the restaurants are expensive. Of course they're expensive. Not because the food is superior, but because the kind of people who would eat there expect it. At the best, putting prices on the menu is a faux pas. If you have to think about the cost, you don't belong.
It sounds like you're saying that the purpose of French restaurants is to signal your wealth/social class, and if you want good food that's worth what you're paying, you should go somewhere else.
I found this peculiar, given that the US has no fewer than four distinct regional "Mexican" cuisines, not found in Mexico. These are Tex-Mex, California Mexican food (e.g. the fabulous Mission burrito), New Mexican food, and American Mexican food (think chimichangas).
New Mexican cuisine is older than the US, and middle-white America has been eating tacos (with the crispy shell, itself a US development) for at least two generations. They're about as American as Chef Boyardee at this point.
Here in Silicon Valley, there might be Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean, etc. restaurants that I'm unaware of, but even including the north bay, surely very few.
And in most of America, predictably there'd be none in most towns and cities (aside from New York, Miami, etc.).
Which is pretty different than Mexican, which is indeed widely embraced in one form or another.
P.S. I did just see a new Cuban restaurant in the south bay the other day; I'm not trying to say these things are never here.
P.P.S. a fifth regional American "Mexican" cuisine is, I'm told, found far from the coasts and from the southern U.S. border (possibly especially in the Midwest), "Mexican" almost entirely in name only, which may e.g. use ketchup as the only red sauce, and is often denied to be Mexican at all by fans of the other 4 kinds.
I hear that something similar is what is usually, if not universally, found in e.g. London as well.
Your point is well taken that most of the US is unfamiliar with any cuisine further away than Mexico (and GP is right most of the Mexican is heavily Americanized).
That's interesting. I would have guessed half that number -- although if you count each country in the central and south Americas, including island nations like Cuba, isn't that roughly just one restaurant per country?
Also, bottom line, I'm pretty sure that 20 is quite dwarfed by the number of Mexican restaurants in the Bay Area. Perhaps even if we only counted taquerias, which seem to pop up almost once per block in some areas.
Thanks for making an actual numeric estimate.
> I don't really think of the north bay (or the peninsula) as culinary destinations, but SF and the east bay are great for food.
Agreed, although note that some good restaurants (if not Michelin-starred) tend to be sparse, rather than nonexistent, in some of those more deprived cities.
And even Michelin stars can be found in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Woodside, Saratoga and Los Gatos, which surprises many people.
As an example of the sort of corn tortilla that I try to find, here is the place I order from in London when I do not have time to pull out the press and make my own: http://www.coolchile.co.uk/mexican-shop/corn-tortillas
There's a Peruvian sandwich place near me now. I wouldn't say it's high class, but the sandwiches are more expensive than many other places around here. I just assumed it was due to it being more expensive to import the food they need, but now this article makes me think of the cultural aspects of it too.
My dad likes to tell the story of his mother, who came from Durango, encountering the concept of "tacos" for the first time... in California. He's always had a hard time thinking of them as "Mexican food".
They're as Mexican as moles.
The fact that they're authentically Mexican won't change the fact my dad thinks of them as being less Mexican than tamales, or that 2-3 generations back their penetration was such that a farming community didn't even know the word.
Nonetheless, it's an interesting observation. I wonder what will take the place of cheap Chinese, if those prices rise? Most other Asian cuisine is on the higher end and rising.
Anyway, I'm vegetarian (vegan lately), so I'm always comparing vegetarian options across the board (and another reason I like Asian restaurants more than most other options; there's always more items on the menu that I'd eat). It seems like vegetarian options are usually cheaper than those containing meat, at Chinese restaurants. The same is not always true at a lot of other kinds of restaurant; for example, a burger place will usually charge more for a veggie burger, a pizza place will charge more for vegan cheese (if they even offer it), etc.
A real Chinese restaurant has round tables, so everyone is equidistant from the food and can share among each other. You don't 'plate' a dish. You cook everything and put it out there for everyone. Food is about the taste, the freshness and quality.
You go there for bonding with friends and family. You don't pay dutch. One person pays, and sometimes there's a fight on who pays.
Real Chinese food cannot be expensive, because Chinese people know how to cook and won't go out. So often my aunts, uncles, family friends balk at going out. They can cook just as good, and it's cheaper. I need to drag them out. If it's expensive they'd never go out. You'd end up with food that caters to western taste, because only they would pay for expensive Chinese food.
As Ive said elsewhere, the only food I've had in 4 countries that was even close to the same in all, is Indian food (i.e. curry + rice).
Every other type of food I've experienced, is influenced by the local tastes, and availability of products.
Round tables are for big parties. Restaurants in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc. have two person and four person tables as well. They also have shared food and non-shared food. It really depends on the restaurant type and the meal you're ordering as well as occasion. (Recall, some people eat lunch by themselves --most take it to go, some eat on premises.) You will see the round tables at "banquet" restaurants, many in hotels, but not all.
Restaurant food in China, Malaysia, Taiwan, etc. is not all that different from the ones you find in neighborhoods which cater to a ex-pat or first or second generation Asians. They both cook with packaged ingredients, it cuts costs, rather than from scratch as you might at home or _some_ street vendors (many street vendors are franchised).
Cheap places just have long foldable picnic style tables with benches where anyone can sit anywhere.
One of the biggest differences here, but not mentioned, is Parisian as well and "Peking" cuisine is "imperial" or dynastic. Many other cuisines have more rustic heritage, i.e. "peasant" food. Yes, ultimately Parisian and "Peking" cooking can trace back to peasant origins, but many were refined in imperial palaces --thus the prestige. Mexican, British, Russian food is quite squarely in the "peasant" bracket.
But yes, the price of good pizza is nuts in the States. I'm in Berlin right now and a damn good pizza at Il Casolare is a humble 10€, whereas in San Francisco, it'd easily cost at least $20 (and you'd have to stomach a pretentious story as well).