The past few years, my family and I have taken long road trips during our vacations, hitting multiple cities at a go in our van, camping and taking hotels along the way. My kids have developed the hobby of doing research — what we should do and see in most places, but especially what we should eat. They’re very keen on the idea of “famous foods” associated with cities — the signature dishes particular places are known for.

So we’ve had Cincinnati-style chili (served on spaghetti and with a heap of shredded cheddar on top) from Camp Washington in Cinci. We went to Lafayette Coney Island for hot dogs served with mustard, onions and chili in Detroit, and hit up a Detroit-style pizza (square, with a deep, thick crust) as well. We had wings at one joint and beef on weck in another in Buffalo, Schwartz’s smoked meat in Montreal, various poutines in Quebec City, brauts and pretzels in Milwaukee, deep dish pizza and Italian beef sandwiches in Chicago. And in New York, we had pastrami and an egg cream from Katz’s, pizza and hot dogs all over the place and Italian ices from streetside stands.

Seldom are these civic identity foods fancy. Some of them aren’t even all that good. But they’re legitimately part of the culture of the cities we’ve eaten them in, and I can’t say we’ve ever regretted any of these stops.

But what about Toronto? It’s hard, famously hard, to say what our signature dish would be. The question comes up now and again, and I’ve been thinking about it and asking people about it for a few months. It was discussed on CBC’s Metro Morning again the other day — and their panel initially settled on the answer that we don’t have a signature dish. Which may be the right answer, at least partly, at least not yet.

If you’d asked me a few years ago, I would have answered without thinking: peameal bacon. This is “Hogtown,” after all, that bacon is where we got the name, and it’s a food they don’t really eat at all in other big cities, at least not outside of Canada. I grew up in a household with a mother who would bring back whole uncut loins of peameal from St. Lawrence Market to have on hand for breakfasts, lunches and snacks. It is an amazing food.

And when you’re at the market buying it, you stop at Carousel Bakery and get heaping slices of it on a soft Kaiser roll — just that, no condiments, no toppings. It needs nothing. Salt and softness, cornmeal and crust, and pork. This is Toronto’s sandwich, obviously.

In July 2016, Mayor John Tory declared that sandwich Toronto’s signature dish, so I’m not saying anything new. It’s a good answer.

But I have been thinking about the criteria that make sense for a local iconic food item, and I think it has to be somewhat unique (or at least uniquely common) locally, which the peameal sandwich is. But it also seems like it needs to be widespread in the city — something locals there actually eat regularly. And as food writer Corey Mintz pointed out on the CBC panel, that doesn’t really apply here. You get peameal sandwiches at the market, and almost nowhere else. I like the ones at When the Pig Came Home in the Junction, and they make tasty ones with fried onions, cheese, tomatoes, and a fried egg on them at Long Branch Arena (no joke!), but they aren’t something you find in every diner and dive across the city. Sadly. There are no peameal-on-a-bun chains. Many people have never had one, or as Mintz said of himself, have only tried one once, like a tourist item.

Mintz suggested the street meat hot dog, which is something I had been considering as well. Ours are different (and bigger) than those in other cities, with a range of toppings unique here. And because they were our only street food for generations, they are everywhere. Jamaican patties also come up for consideration regularly — not because they are unique to Toronto in any way but because they are beloved and available everywhere from doughnut shops to subway stations.

I have heard people suggest that veal on bun is a distinctly Toronto thing — the elements of veal parmigiana heaped on a crusty roll with sauce — but I can’t determine whether it really is rare outside the city, and the names of the two biggest purveyors of them (California Sandwiches and San Francesco) suggest some west-coast connection. Perhaps readers can tell me their experiences.

Meanwhile, Fran’s restaurant claims to have invented the banquet burger at Yonge and St. Clair. Now, whether they were the first to call it that or not, I have to think putting bacon strips on a cheeseburger is something that was bound to become common in any event. And is common, across the continent.

I considered whether there was a Toronto-style pizza, and stopped the train of thought when it dawned on me that the doughy mediocrity of Pizza Pizza is it. Swiss Chalet chicken with its red sauce and Tim Horton Timbits — both from chains founded in or near Toronto and now dominant in the market — probably have unheralded claims, though few of us want to make them loudly.

On some fundamental level, the problem is that these are not the things that spring to mind when you think of Toronto and food. Because our food scene is so much better and more varied than chain-store chicken: you think of kimchi and sushi and roti and dim sum. You think of how if you pick any cuisine from around the world, you can find an outstanding example of it here.

Which may be, strangely, why it’s hard to figure out a signature dish. Three different experts I spoke to about culture and cuisine — writer David Sax who chronicled the rise and fall of the Jewish deli in his book Save the Deli, anthropologist and food researcher Dylan Gordon of U of T, and Shyon Bauman who researches the sociology of food at U of T — all independently suggested that the diversity of the city’s culture is why we don’t have any (or many) singular foods that stand out as reflecting our culture. Because we’re not a monoculture.

“Toronto, as we all know, has a diversity of food because of our strong history of immigration. So, instead of an iconic food in particular, Toronto is known for having a rich diversity of foods connected to ethnic communities,” Bauman wrote in an email.

Gordon, noting that our pride in our cultural diversity is not something we always live up to in practice, even suggested the lack of any dominant food item might be an asset, symbolically. “I think Toronto does have a unique food culture: a very diverse one. And it reflects the imagined diversity of our community. So there isn’t just one Toronto food. There are many of them vying to represent who we think we are, and the lack of one that stands above the others is maybe a nice vision of how we imagine and aspire to a culture and politics built on difference instead of similarity.”

What I wonder is whether, in time, this will give rise to new Toronto versions of the many food cultures we enjoy. Jewish deli foods in Montreal and New York, after all, emerged as local variations on a larger, older culture. Pizza, in all its North American incarnations, represents local evolutions of an Italian dish. The curries that are the most common dishes in London, England today bear little relation to those found in India, but were certainly based on them.

Sax suggested to me that perhaps over time we’d see dishes and menus emerge that were like a Drake mixtape, showing influences from different styles and genres from the U.S. and Caribbean and places beyond, and references to Forest Hill and Weston and other neighbourhoods, adding bits and pieces from here and there — as unself-consciously mixed and matched as his hometown.

I’m not widely travelled enough to know if local variations and mash-ups are already emerging here — not as one-off experiments but as Toronto standard dishes. Are there variations of popular dishes served here that have become substantially different from their ancestors around the world? Is there a Toronto-style pot-sticker, or a Scarborough-style dhal, or some distinct Etobicoke roll maki? Is there a common way of making roti or tartare or pasta here that would be considered instantly recognizable as our own?

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If you’re familiar with dishes that might fit that description — or have thoughts on what stands out to you as the Toronto signature dish — I’d love to hear them. You can email me at ekeenan@thestar.ca. As I say, it’s a topic that comes up a lot, so it’s useful to have notes to refer to.

Besides, my kids are obsessed with trying famous foods from various cities. It would be great to let them try a few more of our own.

Ed Keenan is a columnist based in Toronto covering urban affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @thekeenanwire