I wonder how those specific places (bars, restaurants) got there. I live in one of those place and I didn't know about one half (really expensive restaurants, so my fault I guess) of those and the other half (bars) wasn't particularly special. Not a bad selection.. just very arbitrary.
I don't really see how this is the case, every single nice restaurant also has a bar and bar area, it's not like you have to go to Buffalo Wild Wings or something.
I feel like this is applicable on a smaller scale than tourist/locals as well. I have lived in the same place in the same city for 7 years now and I have almost never been to any of the good bars/restaurants close to me. I'm always surprised when friends who live other places in the city recommend me places that I've walked past a hundred times in my neighborhood but never went into, and vice versa. I wonder why it is like that. I don't have a good answer myself.
It just feels a bit of an edgecase to imagine that a menu of a specific restaurant is important enough to occupy a spot in the top 20-25 of your digital real estate.
There's still a decent correlation between a restaurant's location and the wealth of its customers. People who live in Manhattan aren't typically going to go to a club in Newark or vice versa.
Anyway you can see on the map that tweets come from a huge number of locations; there's not that many restaurants and clubs.
This is a huge part of it. People have an idea of what they want and search for that, so a restaurant that appears to specialize in that will get top ranking.
> Don't go into a michelin level restaurant expecting "well it's expensive so it should be what I normally eat but better", think of it as its own category of food, that happens to have a really high buy-in price. Lots more crazy flavors, presentation, exotic ingredients, etc.
A hobby of mine is picking a neighborhood and going to every single eatery, from possibly-illegal hole-in-the-walls and popups to fast food chains to bakeries and delis to cafes to fine dining establishments. I think I've only been to one Michelin-starred restaurant though — there aren't a lot of those.
Restaurants have to cater to their clientele, even high-end ones. If you offer something creative on your menu, odds are there won't be a large market for it because most people want familiar fare. There are a lot of expensive-yet-conservative Italian restaurants in the US, for example — with lots of patrons who love them! The chefs may chafe at the constraints, but running a restaurant and bringing pleasure and satisfaction to your customers is a different endeavor than exploring the possibilities of cuisine.
If you want to experience unfamiliar flavors, presentations, and ingredients your best bet is to go to places run by and primarily frequented by first-generation immigrants. It's not that such eateries are any more adventurous — the same economic forces constrain them — but they target a clientele with different tastes.
The 80 eateries I've visited in San Diego's City Heights district offered way more variety and novel-to-me fare than the 70 or so restaurants I checked out on a tour of downtown San Diego. That's because City Heights has large enclaves of Mexican, Vietnamese and Somali immigrants, enough to sustain businesses which cater primarily to the tastes of those enclaves.
I can think of some high-end restaurants that had very interesting menus, but in my experience there is only a weak correlation between price and adventurousness. It may be different though for specifically Michelin-starred restaurants, since that's a curated list.
The list seems to intentionally avoid well-known delicious, popular spots (the aviary, au cheval, pequods, minghin, serai) in favor of hole-in-the-wall places which might not be as good but have edgy, hidden, or traditional vibes to them (violet hour, Marie's, Nicky's hot dogs). I do like some of the picks (Birrieria Reyes de Ocotlán is amazing) but there's a lot to be desired. Only one restaurant from Pilsen? And Al's beef... really?
Then again, it would be damn tough to conglomerate a restaurant list for the city of Chicago that pleases everyone. Thanks for sharing, it was fun reading through these nostalgically.
You make some good points, especially about the prices possibly being geared toward recent immigrant clientele. Since you focus on the bottom end of the market, I’ll consider the reverse for the sake of argument:
Think of the highest end restaurants in your area, establishments where formal attire and reservations are a requirement. The types of places that win awards and accolades, where people that have the means will go to celebrate major life events.
In my experience, having lived in major cities on the East and West coasts, those restaurants are almost exclusivity western cuisine – specifically French or Italian derivatives. Japanese cuisine, as the article points out, tends to be the one exception to that rule. Thai, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, etc don’t seem to be represented proportionally to their global popularity in the high-end market.
I googled around for “highest ranked restaurants in the United States” and the trend seems, in my opinion, pretty well aligned with this article’s claims. And if you believe that the high-end market indicates what we value as a society, in that it’s what we demonstrate we will pay for and praise handsomely, then there does seem to a eurocentric bias.
What I found though provoking in this article, and a sentiment I largely agree with from my own anecdotal experience, is the idea that there’s a sort of prestige hierarchy for types of cuisine in the US.
That's true, especially among the one-stars and bibs.
On that top comment I was really thinking of tasting menus, which tend to be more out there. There are for sure plenty of places with an a la carte menu of very recognizable roast chicken and steak or whatever.
I think on average in the US, Michelin caliber of places (stars or no) tend more modernist/experimental than in Europe.
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