Comment by socalgal2
10 hours ago
I don't know London all that well, I've only spent about a month there. But in my limited experience the food scene didn't come close to LA, SF, NYC, Tokyo.
As an example, the LA metro Area (LA, OC, SB), 46% latino, 27% white, 15% asian 7% african, 3% mixed
There huge sections of those cities, several kilometers long where you drive for miles and see majority one culture. Several areas majority korean, chinese, japanese, vietnamese, middle eastern, african,
I have the opposite feeling. I would put London and NYC on roughly the same level, but London definitely beats SF and LA in terms of variety, quantity, and quality for a lot of cuisines. Tokyo is also not as good, but it’s different because you can find high quality (higher than basically anywhere in the world), but low variety.
The great thing about London is that it has diversity without segregation. So no, you won’t find a huge area of town where almost everyone is of the same ethnicity, but the diversity is still there. Race isn’t the only index. A higher percentage of London’s population is foreign-born than LA’s.
Food depends a lot on what you go for. You won’t find much good Mexican food in London, but on the other hand, you can by a better croissant in a supermarket here than you can find in most of the US.
My experience is that until you get the concentrated areas you don't get the actual diversity of the foods. When you have large areas of the same culture you start to get regional restaurants from the culture, specialty restaurants from the calture, because the market is big enough and business needs to distinguish themselves. You also get the ingredients as there's a big enough market to import them. When you don't have the concentration you just get the generic representation of the food from that country.
LA is much less dense than London so maybe you need concentration for those things, but we don't. We don't really have monocultural ghettoes. The beauty of London is how dense and intermixed it is. Cheek by jowl, as Shakespeare wrote.
I disagree, NYC was OK but LA and SF specifically, the average quality of food was pretty bad. There were absolutely good options, plenty of them, but on average, just walking around, seeing something that looks good and checking Google Maps reviews (including reading them), had 0 guarantee of the food being of any quality.
Compared to London and Paris where you're guaranteed a good meal in any random place as long as the google reviews are ~3.5+. And even for the lower, the complaints are usually that the service is slow or rude, not that the food is shit tier quality. I mean 4.9 noted places with ramen that tastes like margarine and uses canned vegetables, or where the meat tastes bad.
Wow, my experience is so different. The two most disappointing places I’ve ever been food wise were London and Paris. Spent 2 months in Paris, nothing stuck out except for one home cooked meal at a friend’s
as Tyler Cowen says, Tokyo has the best food in the world, and the best French food in the world.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-brooks-2/
Tokyo has even won best pizza as judged by the Italian pizza competition in Italy several years
Paris has almost no East Asian food and what I did see when trying to find some was all in porcelain trays like slightly fancier Panda Express.
London I found a few good places in Soho but just slightly out of the center it was a food desert
> Paris has almost no East Asian food and what I did see when trying to find some was all in porcelain trays like slightly fancier Panda Express.
This is simply not true. Are you sure you were in Paris, France? French people absolutely adore East Asian, and especially Japanese cuisine. There are the meh fast food options, yes, but the majority are definitely sushi places. And you have tons of others like Korean, Korean barbecue, more traditional japanese, etc.
The Japanese restaurants are concentrated around rue St Anne; the Chinese ones around rue Volta. But not exclusively.
As a fun exercise, Japanese is the highest represented origin (country) category in the Michelin guide. After that is Italian with slightly less. (The first category is "modern" which can mean anything).
Unless if you plan on eating cheap kebabs or inauthentic asian food, a good meal in london is gonna cost you at least 20 pounds
Nonsense. I sat down with 3 plates of legit Japanese BBQ + rice and soup today for £18. Right behind Oxford Circus.
I would say [even] Berlin is better than London.