new - The Twilight Report

I tire of people trying to tell me that you can get any type of cuisine in New York City. My experience is that the city offers a varied and often delicious choice of restaurants, but that most, if not all cater to the particular tastes of New York City. This is plainly good economic sense. If I were to open a restaurant in any place, even if it were a specific ethnic or cultural speciality, I would need to cater to the local pallet or I would go out of business.

If I had a bakery in New York City that sold lamingtons and custard tarts, then any economist would tell me that I wouldn’t sell many after I explained to him what they were. I would also have trouble finding some of the ingredients. Although lamingtons seem a simple thing to make, the cake in the United States is too moist and the coconut is too sweet, and cut in a different way. To make lamingtons in the United States I would have to import the ingredients, or make them from scratch (ever try to make shredded coconut from scratch?). So I could either spend a lot of time/money making lamingtons that nobody wants or I could make something that people would recognize and buy readily.

If you happened to be opening an Italian restaurant in New York City you could probably get away with making it actually authentic because there are lots of Italians in the area (I can’t say that I am a particularly good judge of authentic Italian food either way). If you were going to open a New Mexican restaurant then you’d probably end up with the sort of place that I went to once that purported to have Southwestern cuisine and called itself “Santa Fe”, although

• The enchilada I had was rolled, not stacked in layers
• The enchilada did not use any detectable green chili
• The enchilada was made with flour tortillas, not blue corn
• There wasn’t a fried egg on top
• ...

While none of these things makes it necessarily a bad enchilada, it is clear that they are not trying to make food that has anything to do with the namesake of the restaurant! This is generally my gripe with the Mexican food pretty much anywhere outside the state of New Mexico, not that it is bad (some of it is good, tasty and quite enjoyable), but because it isn’t the sort of food that I grew up with. New Mexican food is magical and special to me because I grew up consuming its spicy deliciousness. Right about when I am trying to explain this to someone they will tell me “oh well you can find any type of food in New York City”. But it isn’t true. There are many things that you cannot find in New York City. There are many things that you actually have to travel to places outside of New York City to experience. If you believe New York City to be a perfect microcosm of everything in the world, then it is likely that your experience is lacking.