America has a lot of food. Way too much goddamn food, probably. You've got your nationally-important foodstuffs, like Twinkies. Then you've got your regional cuisines that divide the country into a colorful quilt of culinary conglomerates, the invisible borders separating the Democratic Republic of In-N-Out, the Kingdom of White Castle, and the Whataburger Autonomous Disputed Zone. But today, we go all the way down to the local level. The civic cuisine of America. The cornerstone of Wikitravel "What To Eat when you're stuck in THIS city" sections, the siren-song of jorts-clad tourists, the lynchpin of all American food debate. Second only to SPORTS!, the Iconic City Food is what best defines the people, history and culture of any given great American city.


To give you a better idea of what's at stake in these rankings, here's the script treatment for every single episode of every Food Network show pitched in the last 10 years. Just insert the name of a city and the name of a dish from that city, and you'll get the idea of what we mean by Iconic City Food. (Still waiting for that callback, you Food Network assholes.)

TO: FOOD NETWORK C/O: DEPARTMENT OF PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT, SPINOFFS, AND FIERI-WRANGLING 75TH NINTH AVENUE NEW YORK, NY, 10011 Dear Food Network, In accordance with your programming goals of providing Americans with a variety of grinning, charismatic traveling hosts eating a variety of deep-fried shit and slow-roasted cheese-stuffed big fucking piles of garbage across this beautiful nation, please see below for our script treatment for every single episode of our Food Network-exclusive travel series. "EATING FOOD ACROSS AMERICA IN A VAN" EPISODE 1x01 [HOST: A charismatic, doughy-faced man, with bright white teeth and a devil-may-care salt-and-pepper soulpatch, reminiscent of Billy Bob Thornton, Billy Ray Cyrus, or really the facial hair of any three-named grown man named "Billy". His smart, corduroy blazer paired with his Local Rock & Roll Band t-shirt will make our target audience say: "this non-threatening, raspy-voiced man is an authority figure, but hoo-boy, I see he also likes to party!"] [EXT. A LEAFY PARK OVERLOOKING OUR DESTINATION CITY'S SKYLINE, our host standing with his arms outstretched] HOST: My name's Billy, and I love food. My dream: to visit every city in America, and eat the food that makes them special. This... is EATING FOOD ACROSS AMERICA IN A VAN. [INTRO: A quick-cut sequence of B-roll footage of whatever stupid city we're in, underscored by an upbeat trumpet/guitar medley, featuring the following shots: -Downtown, looking up with a fisheye lens towards the city's major skyscrapers: yowza, those buildings are taller than normal buildings! -A clean-cut couple jogging through a litterless stretch of downtown -A handsome, bearded busker plays acoustic guitar at a downtown intersection. This is a city with CULTURE, motherfuckers!] HOST: Welcome to beautiful [city]! This town's known for a lot of things - the music, the people - but all I care about is the food! And when you're in [city], there's only one thing you've gotta try - the [dish]! [Stock footage of a sweaty, grinning chef sliding a plate down the counter towards the camera] [INT. Mayor's office, with LOCAL MAYOR, wearing the flat-brimmed baseball hat of the local sports team, but with his crisp white dress shirt's sleeves rolled up to his elbows, because he MEANS BUSINESS] MAYOR: Look, when you're here in [city], you've GOTTA eat [dish]. [EXT. a piece of shitty public art in front of City Hall, where we find our HOST] HOST: The only problem is, locals are divided over which place makes the best [dish] in town! [EXT. the middle of the street, where we meet a CONSTRUCTION WORKER WITH SOME SORT OF EXAGGERATED LOCAL ACCENT THAT SOUNDS LIKE IT WAS SLATHERED ON WITH A BUTTER KNIFE BORROWED FROM "REGIONAL ACCENTS OF AMERICA" CENTRAL CASTING] CONSTRUCTION WORKER: If yer here in [city]? If yer wantin' to get some [dish]? Ya GOTTA go to Original Jim's on the East Side! [EXT. somewhere on the other side of town, where the production crew interviews the first BLACK PERSON that we can find. It's called a balanced perspective, people, and it's what Daytime Emmys are made of] A BLACK PERSON: You want REAL [dish]? Then y'all want AUTHENTIC Jim's on the WEST side! [HOST is now standing outside of either Original Jim's or Authentic Jim's, holding a fork and knife while standing on the sidewalk, for some fucking reason] HOST: All I know is, whether you pick Original Jim's or Authentic Jim's - when you're in [city], you NEED to decide for yourself by trying both! [Start rolling historical footage of local city, etc. etc. this shit writes itself. Wait as giant bags of cash start rolling in from syndication. Or fuck it, we'll sell this to the Travel Channel if you cheap Food Network fuckers hold out on our Season 2 contract. Yeah I'm threatening you in our pilot script.]


That's what I mean by local regional cuisine. The sort of greasy iconic local shit that defines a city's gastronomic culture to the palate of a local tourist, and that a city invariably gets all huffy and self-righteous about.

Here they are.

RANKED.

Not representing: Chicago, IL

DEEP DISH PIZZA

Rank: Unranked


The pizza debate in America is poisoned.

Unlike politics, books, or anything requiring actual background knowledge, pretty much any big fat idiot in America can have a STRONG TAKE about pizza. And it's usually an opinion that's disproportionately vocal and angry, considering we're talking about fast-food cheesy-tomato-bread. For some reason, pizza discussions always turn into asshole-magnets that attract the worst types of stubborn, raging lunatics on the internet this side of FreeRepublic and bronies.


Chicago-style deep-dish pizza is the fucking Sarah Palin of food items. It is impossible to be an internet commenter and to not have some sort of furiously partisan, foaming-at-the-mouth opinion on the topic.

While pizza itself is contentious, rogue partisans on both sides of the deep-dish battlefield can't even agree on the basic terms of whether or not deep-dish constitutes "REAL pizza". Dipping a toe into the noxious, spewing miasma that is internet pizza discussion isn't worth it, guys. Even if you just want to politely express an opinion that soggy pie crust drowning in a 15-pound pile of melted cheese hardly constit— Wait, no.


NO.

You've caught me in your own game, you goddamned pizza zealots. You want to lure me into this trap, and once you've got your hooks in me, I'll be sitting here on the internet for the next half hour, sweatily arguing with a 350-pound stranger from Skokie about the relative merits of the crumbled sausage from Uno's on Wabash. Well I'm not playing your fucking game, Pizza-Nazis! Have fun writing death threats to strangers in the comments section of Yahoo! Travel slideshows because they have differing views on the thickness of cheese-and-dough-based carbohydrate obesity-death-snacks. Chicago deep dish pizza, you are a pox on American food rhetoric. I hereby leave you unranked. (YOU TOO, NEW YORK. YOU DON'T GET RANKED EITHER. STOP PIZZA HATE.)


Representing: Cincinnati, OH

CINCINNATI CHILI


That being said, chili opinions are OK, and Cincinnati chili is stupid. Fuck Cincinnati chili.

Invented by a starving heroin addict with nothing in the pantry of his southwest Ohio boarding house but dry spaghetti and expired canned chili, this dish is the bastard offspring of Chef Boyardee having sex with a chemical spill. The chili component isn't even Real Chili, it's some sort of spiced, cinnamon-fucked knockoff with a diarrhea texture, dumped over a plate of rubbery spaghetti and coated with 18 metric tonnes of shredded American cheese, and served, to actual human customers, as "food".


"But oh man, after a long night of partying in the 'Nati, you've gotta get some Skyline! It's the perfect drunk food!", a gross idiot will say.

This presupposes two things:

1. That there are bad "drunk foods". This is simply not the case. Everything is delicious when you're drunk. Shitfaced people would eat Pop-Tarts dipped in ranch dressing if that's what was available, and they'd find it fucking delicious.


2. That if I lived in Cincinnati, there would be instances when I WASN'T drunk. I'm pretty sure between Cincinnati's main exports of diarrhea-spaghetti, unemployment, and wins for Bengals opponents, I would just constantly be living under a shadow of crippling Cincinnati alcoholism.

Representing: Detroit, MI

CONEY DOGS


Good Lord. Do I even need to get into this? It's not even fun ragging on Detroit or their stupid-ass chili dog at this point. It's just... OK. Let me just make this noise - (LONG, EXHAUSTED SIGH) - alright, let's do this. Let's talk about Detroit, and Coney dogs.

... So, the city of Detroit, Michigan. (EVEN LONGER, MORE EXHAUSTED-SOUNDING SIGH, LIKE IT'S COMING FROM THE DIAPHRAGM.) I mean, what's left to say? Even upbeat descriptions of Detroit come out sounding like a beloved dead dog's eulogy. Detroit went crashing from 1960s high-life into 1990s low-lifes like a fiery, out-of-control Pinto. They were living in Mad Men, now they're living in Mad Max. To say that Detroit has been overtaken by jungle is doing a disservice to jungles, which generally have the basics to support life. But beneath the layers of grime and decay and meth and juggalos and op-eds full of overwrought car metaphors (THIS OL' RUSTY CADILLAC ENGINE OF A CITY DON'T START LIKE SHE USED TO), Detroit is still special. You don't just provide the world with contributions as perfect as Motown, the Shelby Mustang, and the '97-'98 Red Wings and then fade off into the sunset.


That's why it's so sad - SO SAD - that a city with a huge, swinging Cultural Contributions Dick like Detroit has such a weak, flaccid signature food. The Coney dog.

Let's start off with the obvious: Coney Island is in New York and Detroit is not in New York, therefore we're looking at a -500 point deduction right off the bat for copping another city's shit.


Now, onto what a Coney Dog actually is.

Lemme just... (DEEP SIGH THAT ACTUALLY TRAILS OFF ON A SLIGHTLY ANGRY, GRUMBLING NOTE) Alright. It's a fucking chili dog. THAT'S IT. It's a regular, grocery-store-variety hot dog covered in chili and diced onions, similar to every chili dog available for purchase everywhere else in America. There's nothing Detroity about it. I can go to a 7-11 in Eskimo Fart, Alaska and get a reasonable facsimile of an authentic Detroit-style Coney Dog for 3 goddamn dollars. You deserve so much better, Detroit! I'm not driving into the city limits of fucking 28 Days Later just to eat a chili dog.


The worst part? There's a war between local chili dog places. Because of course there is. You've got American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island, and they're right beside each other (of course) and founded by competing brothers (of course) and you're supposed to go to Detroit and decide for yourself which one blabla well this one's got tangier chili blabla this one's bun is plumper THEY'RE CHILI DOGS. Actual grown adults get all worked up over the minor differences between two competing purveyors of shitty high school cafeteria food. Say what you will about GM, I'm pretty convinced at this point that Coneys are what killed Detroit.

Representing: Buffalo, NY

BUFFALO WINGS


Buffalo wings are maybe the most singularly iconic food Americans have ever invented. A big bowl of hot, spicy buffalo wings belongs in a trophy case alongside blue jeans and jazz music as the only uniquely great American cultural contributions to the world. And yet, the ultimate shame is that no one associates them with Buffalo. Even though the fucking city is right there in the name! People have taken the word "Buffalo" to just mean "a type of spicy sauce", and have completely forgotten that it's named after an actual, real place. No one associates Buffalo with Buffalo wings. They've become a genericized trademark, like Band-Aids, Kleenex, or Frisbees. No one thinks of the 3M corporation when they think of band-aids. No one thinks of Buffalo when they think of Buffalo wings.

There's a great element of tragedy here, that Buffalo, the Frank Grimes of American cities, can't even score a win at something so basic as "owning the name of their city". And no American city needs a win as badly as Buffalo. A half-deserted concrete disaster full of goateed meth addicts in faded early-90s Starter jackets all named Kevin, they're a city without a fallback option. Cultural exports? The list starts and ends with The Goo Goo Dolls. Architecture? I hope you like crypto-fascist grey mausoleums - fun fact, one of the tallest buildings on the city skyline is actually derelict and abandoned! Weather? Fucking hell. Sports? Jesus Christ, don't open that festering wound. Buffalo has done one great thing in its history, and it's quintessentially Buffalonian in its lunch-bucket simplicity: rip the arms and legs off of a chicken and fry them up in Frank's Red Hot Sauce. It's simple, and it's perfect. They even stamped the name of their city onto the name. Yet as you read this, a sweaty man in Scottsdale, Arizona is ordering Buffalo wings off a laminated menu at a family eatery, and the idea of Western New York didn't cross his mind even once. He didn't spare a thought for their Siberian gulag winters, the arson-tinged abandoned houses, Scott Norwood kicking wide right. No. It's too late for Buffalo. They have sacrificed themselves, and as their last and only gift to the world, provided us a saucy chicken wing recipe that will live on forever - long after the frigid permafrost reclaims Buffalo and swallows her back into barren, unforgiving nature.


Representing: New Orleans, LA

NEW ORLEANS SHIT


The city of New Orleans is not an actual American city in any real, cultural sense of the term. It is a banana-republic microstate existing within America's borders. Everything about New Orleans, and Louisiana in general, is exotic and backwards. Everything they do seems made up, like some sort of prank on its neighboring states.

While the rest of the South gets by happily on a predominant culture of conservative Wal-Mart country-music Christianity, the predominant culture of New Orleans is VOODOO-NEON-GUMBO-SEX. While everyone else in America is leaning against the bar and simultaneously tapping their finger against their Bud Lite bottle to the tune of a Bruce Springsteen song, New Orleans is drunkenly hamboning in a purple skeleton costume at a jazz funeral. If you were having a barbecue and you could only invite 49 states, you'd uninvite Louisiana, because you just know that by 10 PM they'd be standing pantsless on a picnic table, wearing only a rum-stained Drew Brees jersey and a masquerade mask, throwing plastic beads at your neighbors while firing a handgun into the air. You'll ask Louisiana "Hey, you see that Yankees game everyone's talking about?", and they'll respond in a Martian tongue "Nah, I was too busy dressing like a drunk clown-monkey and breaking into homes and chasing a live chicken through a muddy field while strangers on horseback whipped me."


For God's sake, their state speaks French.

And amidst all of this jazz-bayou-gumbo-fucking insanity, it seems that New Orleans missed the memo on city-specific American foods. Cities are generally allowed only one famous local food. Philadelphia EQUALS cheesesteak. The really, really lucky places are allotted a maximum of three dishes that form a holy trinity. (Chicago has their own style of pizza, hot dog and Italian beef sandwich. Boston has their own chowder, cream pie and baked beans. Montreal claims their own style of bagel, smoked meat and poutine - which, if this weren't limited to God's Own Favorite Country America, would all be top-3 contenders on this list.) A lot of cities get zippidy-fucking-dooda in terms of regional delicacies. Look at Indianapolis, a city roughly the size of New Orleans. They have nothing. There isn't a defining Indianapolis-style food. People in Indianapolis just spend their days sitting in vacant parking lots, drinking tapwater and eating loaves of white bread. New Orleans, meanwhile, isn't content to have a single famous dish. They have own entire fucking cuisine to themselves, a teeming smorgasbord of bizarro-world NAWLINS! delights.


Here's a partial list:

Gumbo. Jambalaya. Andouille. Beignets. Crawfish. Po-boys. Muffulettas. Shrimp creole. Etouffees. Red beans and rice. Bananas foster. King cake. Doberge cake. Calas. Couche-couche. Sazerac. Hurricanes. The list just keeps going on and on like the line outside of a Bourbon Street STD clinic the morning after Mardi Gras.


How do I even begin to approach such a dizzying, swirling culinary clusterfuck of gastronomic grandeur? They're not playing by the same rules as the rest of America. They brought a buffet to an appetizer fight.

The only way to rate all of the diverse dishes above is to pour them into a big witch's cauldron labeled "NAWLINS", simmer it into a thick brownish stew, and take a sip. It's slightly tangy with a hint of spice. Overall, I give the dish hereby known as "All Of New Orleans" a B.


Representing: Philadelphia, PA

PHILLY CHEESESTEAK


Philadelphians take perverse pride in being scum.

I can’t explain it. It’s some sort of deep-routed, psychological thing. It’s like one day, instead of trying to compete with New York on culture and sports and food and everything else, they just decided they’d do the exact opposite, and go for the all-time low score. It’s like they’re intentionally tanking their city, possibly for a high draft pick. They’re in a gleeful one-man race for the bottom, as the rest of the nation looks on, worried.


“Sports? Yer talkin’ ‘bout our fuckin’ sports teams? We hate ‘em! We’ve got the worst fanbase in sports, and if ya say otherwise I’ll punch ya right in yer fuckin’ dick!” Unlike other cities, where the silly law of “good things are good” holds true, here in Bizarro-delphia the best things are bad! Like throwing snowballs at Santa Claus! This otherwise-forgettable decades-old incident of drunken, regrettable abuse has morphed into a calling card, their signature perverse-pride “don't fuck with Philly, bro!” moment. It is a land where the traditional concepts of Hatred and Love have coalesced into a weird, soupy mix of the two, best described as just Philadelphia Feelings, or Phillings. “The Phillies? Fuckin’ love those shitty miserable bums!” “I’m the biggest Eagles fan there is! Nobody hates the Eagles more than me!”

“Your city's best-known statue is some fancy historical figure? Well fuck that, cuz here in Philly we got a statue of a fictional Sylvester Stallone character, cuz we’re regular ol' trashy jagoffs! YEAH!"


“Hey New York, you think you’re better than us, with a bunch of TV shows about the lives of sexy young rich people having sex? We’ve got It’s Always Sunny, a show about regular filthy moron assholes like ME!” (Although to be fair, the inherent Phillyness of It’s Always Sunny is what makes it an excellent show.)

Then we get to food. Other cities have iconic dishes because they’re good. That doesn’t cut it in Bizarro World. Here, the signature food is famous because it's specifically trying to be low-class and disgusting. If Philadelphia is in a race to the bottom, the cult they’ve built around the cheesesteak is the low-point they’re striving for.


You can get a Philly cheesesteak pretty much anywhere. Generally it’ll be on a sub-style bun with minced steak, grilled peppers/onions/mushrooms, maybe a drizzle of mayonnaise-y or barbecue-y sauce, and topped with melted cheese. Whether you’re at a humid Florida truckstop or a T.G.I. McFuntime’s Family Food Barn in a Minneapolis strip mall, the cheesesteak is a greasy good time had by all. But don’t tell that to a Philadelphian, who’ll fly into a blind rage usually reserved for Ben Roethlisberger at the mere idea of cheesesteaks made anywhere outside of pissing-distance from the Schuykill River.

“What? WHAT? You’re makin’ a Philly wit’ CHEDDAR? Clearly, you ain’t from PHILLY!” Here we go with this shit. The cheese is where it all starts with these people. Cheddar, pretty much the most basic and mild-tasting cheese available, is too la-dee-da upscale for the misery-humping guttersnipes of Philadelphia. They insist on either American processed cheese, or Cheese Whiz™-brand oil-based emulsified neon cheese-like goop. Real cheese is demonstrably preferable over Cheese Whiz to every single goddamn city in America that isn’t Philadelphia. Cheese Whiz tastes like a jar of axle grease fucked a jug of expired milk.


“Yer usin’ REAL STEAK? See that’s yer problem! Ya gotta do it tha PHILLY way, wit’ the greasiest, stringiest cuts o’ meat you can find!” This is another fucking thing that Philadelphians actually say. You give them minced, medium-rare sirloin, they ask for the parts of the cow usually used to make off-brand dog food. They want the toughest, stringiest hunks of cow hooves, necks and anuses, and they want it seared up into a chewy, moist pile of mystery-meat. You can really taste the tendons!

“And the TOPPINGS! Ya can have onions, but no other fuckin’ vegetables! And know how to order properly or gitthafuckouttahere!” Philadelphians, not content to just eat like animals, have come up with a system of grunts and shouts to order their cheesesteak. First, you go to a cheesesteak joint, and if they don’t immediately start shouting xenophobic slogans at you for being a foreigner, you’ll be allowed to shout your order: “Whiz wit!”, with no verbs, articles or sentence structure, like a child raised by wolves. “Whiz” means “I want Cheese Whiz because I am an idiot”, and “wit” (meaning “with onions”) is an approximation of the word “with” after being fed through a Philly-accent meat-grinder, because what’re you, some elitist New York college kid who can pronounce a “th” sound? Special note: sautéed bell peppers taste great on a cheesesteak, but these are not allowed, because unnecessary vegetables make you a worthless communist, and if we’ve learned anything from Rocky IV it’s that Philadelphians don’t tolerate communists.


“Oh, and the BUN-" yeah, yeah, we get it, gotta be all stale and expired, you’re a blue collar city, you take pride in eating trash like a Dickensian street urchin, terrific.

Philadelphia, you have managed to take a tasty treat and turn it into a weird reverse-pissing match. A being-pissed-on match. Since being ranked either low or high on the list would give you a weird sense of satisfaction, I'm ranking you here, in the middle.


Representing: Pittsburgh

PRIMANTI BROS. SANDWICH


This is a sandwich with French fries on it.

It was invented by the city of Pittsburgh and, oh yeah, by every single drunk person ever.


There is nothing inventive or unique about this concept. It is a halfhearted, obvious crossover of two like-minded foodstuffs. It is the Rush Hour 3 of sandwiches. Putting French fries and coleslaw on your roast beef sandwich is something the class-clown would do at lunch – “take that, society, I won’t be limited by the separate ridged compartment on my cafeteria tray.”

Still, the Primanti Bros French Fry Clusterfuck On Bread resides here on my list, ahead of the cheesesteak. Just to piss off Philadelphia. Because although Philadelphians love being losers, they hate losing to Pittsburgh.


Representing: Boston, MA

BOSTON CLAM CHOWDAH


Boston Clam Chowder is great. It's a chunky, crackery treat for the chunky crackers of New England. And in the great Boston-New York Cold War, it's a definite point in the Boston column: it easily trounces the soupy red mess that is Manhattan-style clam chowder. But picking Boston chowder over Manhattan chowder is a bit of a hollow compliment, like saying "I prefer American Airlines over taking a bus." Manhattan chowder, with its la-dee-da delicate tomato broth served by well-dressed waiters in big, clean white bowls, deserves to be looked down upon by its bolder, better Boston cousin, which is gulped from an overflowing thermos by big Irish dockworkers in dirty Red Sox hats, washed down with cigarettes and Jameson's.

Clams, on their own, aren't all that great. Stacked against lobsters and mussels and other GLORY BOYS of sea critters, they're the turnips of the sea - just sorta bland. That makes it an ideal blank canvas, offering a mild fishy taste to its creamy surroundings in a chowder, boldly breaking the #4 rule of the show Chopped, "Don't ever ever mix fish with dairy." (The third rule is "Don't serve red onions to that one petulant baby judge who always whines NOOO RED ONIONS EVERRR", and the first and second rules are both DON'T TALK ABOUT CHOPPED CLUB.) Everything clicks along the same pleasanty BAWSTON-y wavelength in a good chowdah: the seafood-y taste takes you to the city's seafaring fiserhman roots, the heavy cream represents a bunch of big fat Irish bastards, and the uniformly white color ties into the city's proud history of overt racism.


You know what the only problem with chowder is, though?

"Chow-derrr? It's Chowdah! Say it right, Frenchy."

People can't discuss chowder without making the same identical Simpsons reference. You're reading a menu, and you say "hey they've got clam chowder", and your wiseacre buddy says "it's CHOWDAH!" in his best Quimby-nephew-definitely-not-based-on-any-real-Boston-political-family accent.


Chowdah isn't the only thing ruined by a Simpsons reference. Here's a partial list of things that cannot be referenced in a group of people aged 18-35 without immediately being tagged with a corresponding Simpsons reference.

FOREVER RUINED BY THE SIMPSONS:

Monorails

Branson, Missouri

Whenever people are saying "booo"

Goggles

Dental plans

Anything being the worst, anything, ever

Don Mattingly

Steelworkers

Rory Calhoun

Muumuus

Floodpants

Representing: San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO-STYLE BURRITO


First off: it’s weird how many American cities DON’T have their own food. Or they make a lukewarm claim to having their own food, only for it to just be a bowdlerized version of some other country’s shit. Doing the half-assed research I did for this list can seem like the scene in Talladega Nights where they try to impress Sacha Baron-Cohen with American inventions.

Let’s say I Google to find out what a gigantic city like Los Angeles has given the food world, just in case there’s something I’m forgetting. “LA is famous for Mexican food!” Uhh… that’s from Mexico.


“Miami has the Cuban sandwich!" Cuba.

“Seattle has lattes!” … Italy…

So San Francisco has burritos. Big deal, right? You know what other city has burritos? All of them. Every two-horse Midwest meth-town has a Chipotle open on Main Street now (or, God help them, a Qdoba, which is kind of like the “Gobots” to Chipotle’s “Transformers”.) There’s a fucking Chipotle open in France now. France! So what makes San Francisco so special? They straight-up INVENTED that type of burrito. That’s right: Chipotle serves San Francisco-style burritos.


San Franciscans get into burrito arguments like New Yorkers get into pizza arguments. You can’t walk a block in San Francisco without being assaulted by a homeless person the alluring smell of meat, cheese, rice and Our Special Fixin’s! being just-barely crammed into a tortilla, like all of the ingredients are trying to squeeze into a pair of leggings 3 sizes too small. That’s the great thing about San Francisco-style burritos (and, a reminder, "San Francisco-style" includes pretty much every big ol’ rice/veggies/meat burrito you eat at your local Chipotle-style burrito joint, excluding only milquetoast Taco Bell-esque thin, refried-beany pretenders): they’re the size of a human baby. You need to two-hand these fuckers. You feel like a pop warner quarterback holding a full-sized football. And by God, if you’re hungry enough, or drunk enough, you’ll finish that entire fat carby bastard right down to the grease-soaked aluminum foil. Which is impressive, because a burrito that big is essentially the size of the entire human stomach. Whenever you see a normal-sized human being double-fisting a gigantic 5-pound burrito, you should look at them with the same smirking bemusement as when you see a snake trying to swallow a rabbit on National Geographic: “jeez, buddy, what’ve you gotten yourself into?”

And then comes the only real drawback, which essentially sabotages the Mission Burrito’s chance at rankings glory.


Your ass explodes.

Just straight up, fiery lava shits. Why do burritos do this, but eating a big sandwich with similar ingredients doesn’t? Is it the beans, the spiciness? Our nation’s top poop scientists may never know. All we know is, you will be on a toilet, straining so hard you’ve got one foot off the ground, like you’re trying to push a stalled car. Somehow you will eat 5 pounds of sour cream, cheese, guacamole, rice, beans, steak, salsa and hot sauce, but you will feel like you’re producing 10 pounds of shit.


Will it be worth it?

Probably.

Representing: Kansas City

KANSAS-CITY STYLE BARBECUE


Ladies and gentlemen, in the sauce-stained corner, wearing the crispy brisket trunks, your winner and NEW heavyweight champion of the wooooorld…



Wait, Kansas City barbecue?



Uncock your suspiciously-cocked eyebrow. Delete the all-caps e-mail that you just began writing from your PantherStud69 AOL account with a subject line of “THERE’S NO WAY KANSAS CITY GAY-B-Q IS BETTER THAN CAROLINA-STYLE”. People – Southerners especially – just love arguing over barbecue, even more than they love arguing over college football, or whether Barack Obama is a secret space muslim. I’m here to tell you right now - with all due respect to your grandpappy’s signature Tuscaloosa-style mustard-soaked bison ass slow-cooked for 17 weeks in the engine bay of a 1968 AMC Rambler – that Kansas City is the barbecue champion.

Kansas City is, in my mind, the gem of the Midwest. It’s a cute little oasis of culture and fun and fountains (so many fountains!) in the middle of the vast, inhospitable M’ZZOURAH desert. There’s a big difference between Missouri, where Kansas City is located, and M’ZZOURAH, the wasteland between Kansas City and St. Louis. Kansas City is full of cherubic smiling faces drinking craft beer and wearing Royals hats with hipster plaid shirts. M’ZZOURAH is full of dopes with a mouthful of chew wearing camouflage shirts, Jesus shirts, and camouflage Jesus shirts. Within that oasis, Kansas City has carved out a niche for itself in the barbecue world by being smokier, saucier and juicier, laughing at lesser vinegar and mustard-based rivals with their own gleaming nectar of the Gods: a tangy brown sugar-and-tomato based sauce so good that any pig would gladly die just to have his insides smothered in it.


You take a big bite into a brisket sandwich overflowing with juicy slow-cooked cow parts, and as you chew, with sauce dribbling down your chin, it’s so fucking AMERICA that it’s like fireworks are going off over Mount Rushmore while a jeggings-clad Lady Liberty plays a blistering guitar solo.

You keep going - you get some baked beans and some potato salad and some macaroni so cheesy that it pushes the limits of cheese science, and you just devour a rack of ribs, leaving behind nothing but clean-sucked bones, like a feasting hyena.


Then you’re ready for the cherry on the meat sundae, the burnt ends. The nuggets of beefy gold. Kansas City is a jazz town, and while the rest of the barbecue options follow a smooth, steady jazz rhythm, burnt ends are the dirty old saxophonist who jumps up on a table in the front row to lay down a smokin’ freestyle solo. Eating burnt ends is like getting punched in the face by flavor. You plow through a table full of Kansas City barbecue and you’re just left dazed, in a meat-sweaty bliss, like a bomb just went off and then the explosion had sex with you.

Kansas City barbecue is the best local food in America.

====================================================

Thanks. That's my list. Now you can go ahead and call me an idiot in the comments section or whatever.


When the fuck is Food Network going to return my call?