NOT CURIOSITY, not caution, but anger and dismay: That’s what other New Yorkers expressed when I told them I was moving away. And the reason, hilariously, was food. “You’ll starve out there,” I was told. “Out there,” of course, meant “everywhere else.” No doubt San Franciscans give their apostates similarly dire warnings, and Chicagoans, too.

It’s time for them to wake up and smell the Stumptown coffee. Because if there is one thing I’ve learned in traveling the country as a dining critic over the last few years, it’s that...