The biggest problem in restaurants anywhere is the product and I really don't have a solution. I like my tomatoes ripened on the vine and grown in dirt. I like my corn either fresh or picked and then blanched and frozen. A tomato picked green and then gassed has little flavor. Canned corn is canned corn. Even pork tastes better when it has a diet of something besides corn and soy. The foundation of the dishes being served is underpinned with a sub standard product. I would rather eat at home. We grow our own chickens, vegetables, and occasionally our pork and beef. It just tastes better.
You slaughter your own cows? I'm sorry, I couldn't do that, I can barely eat them when I think how they look at you.
Southern cuisines are generally tastier than Yankee foods. But only if by Yankees you mean New England. Good as they are, they do not come close to NYC food in terms of taste. As an amateur gourmet cook who has feasted on foods from every corner of the world, I am in a good position to judge which foods are the tastiest. NYC with its agglomeration of multiple ethnicities and integration of cuisines far surpasses all other regions in the USA.
No way Brotha! Watch the Food Channel's pizza contest in which it was Chicago vs NYC pizza. As most of us know, fire fighters are good judges of pizza. A group of them from Los Angeles were brought in to objectively test which pizza was better. All of them said NYC pizza is # 1. Having grown up in Brooklyn and having tasted pizza there, NYC, Chicago, the Twin Cities, I know a good pizza when I taste it. NYC pizza is by far the best.
My mother was from the South we ate ham hocks and black eyed peas, southern fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, crawdads (we caught them in the local creek), corn bread, green beans with bacon and potatoes....
I'm originally from Brooklyn, NY and ate all that as well. I would also eat Yankee chowder, Italian mussels-on-the-shell cooked in white wine sauce, Polish sausage cooked in beer with German potato salad cooked with sauerkraut & spinach, Puerto Rican cuchifritos, French veal ragout, etc. While the Southern cuisine is good (as I have mentioned before), the NYC is far better because of its vast diversification. Variety remains the true spice of life.
I don't drink alcoholic beverages any more but there is no question in my mind that the finest drink ever made is Kentucky bourbon:
I'm southern through and through but I agree with all of this. You can probably even get excellent southern soul food in Brooklyn. The best eggs benedict, the best Chinese, the best bacon, that I ever had, all was in New York. I didn't get a chance to try the German or the Polish, but it has to be great as well.
