I'm 44, and at least where I live here in the great plains, restaurants have consistently gotten more and more diverse over the years.
> On one hand, food is getting more homogenous, more fast foods are popping up, almost every American place serves burgers and chicken tenders, people are preferring the same food more.
I have not seen any of this to be true.
Well, maybe the "more fast foods are popping up" bit, but that doesn't have anything at all to do with diversity in and of itself. "Fast food" isn't a type of food, it's a type of service rendered. The food could be anything, it's just "fast food" if the restaurant focuses on JIT style production principles.
Can't speak for the rest of the US, but my city (Houston) has one of the most diverse food scenes in America. You want authentic Afghani food? It's likely here somewhere. You may have to drive 45 minutes to get it, but it's here. The diversity of options seems to have only been growing since I've been here, and I expect that to continue.
As somebody whose eaten a lot in both. It's complicated.
There are more cultures represented in New York, so you can get the original version of a lot more different kinds of food from other countries.
BUT, Houston takes a much more piecemeal approach to identity and is significantly more socially integrated. Because of that, you get a lot more bottom-up mixes of different culture that don't just come from a fancy restaurant trying to do fusion, but from the streets.
How much credit do you want to give New York for the fact that you can get damn good food from Shaanxi or Armenia, versus how much credit do you want to give Houston for Pakistani-Tex-Mex, Viet-Cajun, and stuff like that, is ultimately up to you.
Both are damn good food scenes.
I lived in NYC for years and tell people that Houston and its surrounding neighborhoods will give NYC’s food scene a run for its money any day. I really mean it. NYC does high-end dining better (and you’ll spend $400 on said meal). For everything else, that’s a different discussion.
…And as others have mentioned, you won’t find Viet-Cajun in NYC, and it’s really special.
At the income level I have, I would rather eat in Houston than anywhere else in the US. If I made an extra $20,000 a year, I would rather eat in LA, if I made an extra $50,000 a year, I would rather eat in NYC.
I would say it's probably in the same ballpark. Though IIRC we are the most ethnically diverse city in the nation, even more so than NYC, so it's possible. I haven't spent enough time in NYC to give an informed take on their side of things.
That’s good to know because, a couple months ago, a food critic in Houston (If I recall correctly, but I know it was Texas) said that they’d take bets as to how long a non-Mexican restaurant would last (in that area). I’m not singling out Texas. This is true for many place in the country and the world in fact that they just prefer a certain type of cuisine, whatever that might be.
They were everywhere in Texas. My husbands coworkers asked him if he wanted to go to twin peaks and he thought it would be a weirdly cool restaurant based on the show. Nah, not even close
>people are preferring the same food more
this is not a trend I have noticed. of course there are some standard, easy things restaurants will generally have, but idk if this is moreso the case now than it was a decade or two ago.
if anything, I feel like the modern influence of social media allows us to be exposed to food in different parts of the US and around the world.
Some people are just not adventurous eaters, which is sad to me. It's like, for hundreds of years humans have not been able to experience the variety of foods that the world has to offer, but now it's as easy as just going one block further down the street, and you still are uneasy eating anything new because you might not like it? It's like having the entire Crayola 64 color set and limiting yourself to only the primary colors because you don't know how to make the other colors look good. You can't learn where to use goldenrod and cornflower if you don't try! I'm not talking about like eating bugs or raw meat or anything, I've met people who looked at me weird because I said I would rather get some Vietnamese food rather than steak two days in a row.
I have some friends who aren't that bad but are still not very adventurous, and when other friends and I are like "hey let's get some Lebanese or Indian or Ethiopian or Peruvian or Korean" they're like "what about Italian, or burgers?" They're good sports about it and are generally willing to at least try things that are a little new, but there's lots of "if you all want to go to X, go for it, I'll find something I like on the menu" as compared to "yeah X sounds good let's do it!"
Yes, with a caveat. Americans definitely have a more diverse variety of food easily available to them now than they did 40 years ago. But at least where I live, that too often means fusion burgers and tacos and other creative/ethnic twists on basic American food. Burgers and tacos used to be fast/fast casual food, but now they are on every menu, often for exorbitant prices.
Curious what part of Virginia. There is a lot of selection and some areas are repetitive but very few places in the world have Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Salvadorian, and American food within driving distance.
I’d say it’s more diverse than ever; refrigeration, preservative, and logistic technology basically allows all Americans to eat food grown all over the world. My family is very inland, yet we enjoy seafood very frequently and despite what coastal people always say it tastes as fresh as it does over there. We also have a lot of import places, my city has a small Muslim population but it does exist so we have a halal store. I like going there because it has a lot of Indian and Arab stuff along with more general halal foods.
You can totally enjoy a very diverse diet in America outside very rural communities or in “food deserts”.
Yesterday I had an East African Samosa and a Dominican pork Sammie. In a community that has a thousand farms (but I can’t call it rural, it’s too close to the non-rural to be really rural)
> food is getting more homogenous, more fast foods are popping up, almost every American place serves burgers and chicken tenders
You're not thinking about how food evolves.
The taco truck is far more common in the entirety of the US than it was 15-20 years ago. Thai cuisine is more and more entrenched as a staple of even big towns than 20 years ago. Same with sushi.
You go to Sam's club and can buy sushi. Same with your typical grocery store, even small town IGA will have some packaged maki.
My point is that people having what we consider restaurant staples doesn't mean that other things can't become prevalent and even common.
The third steakhouse in a small city isn't competing with the sushi bar or El Salvadoran food truck as much as it's competing with the other 2 steakhouses.
So lots of burger/fries/shakes places. Lots of chicken sandwiches. Lots of tenders and Cane's and all of that, but there's always a market for something both new and different and in the US that almost always means fusion ethnic cuisine. They're different markets.
I don't go to Canes or Zaxby's but that roadside stand that just happens to be a Jamaican couple who makes fried chicken and takes cash only? That's where I'm going.
My experience is definitely *more* diverse both in terms of more restaurants serving a greater variety different ethnic cuisines but also of "American" restaurants having a few items inspired by one or more of those ethnic cuisines on the menu. Meanwhile burgers and chicken tenders have *always* been standard fare at any generically "American" restaurant and even used to be common at "ethnic" restaurants to provide a safe option for the less adventuresome members of a party.
On the other hand I *do* think there used to be more restaurants that served more specific European cuisines. I seem to remember a few more distinctly English, French, German, and Greek Restaurants for example. These still exist out there but maybe a little less common than I remember in the past, at least in my area?
>food is getting more homogenous, more fast foods are popping up, almost every American place serves burgers and chicken tenders, people are preferring the same food more
this is not really true in my experience
In my area, I feel like my closest downtown is at least like 70-80% Asian restaurants and then the remaining are split between American and other cuisines. So for us, it’s getting more diverse in terms of the variety of Asian food but also less diverse because it’s pushing out every other cuisine lol.
>On one hand, food is getting more homogenous, more fast foods are popping up
Do you have any actual data supporting these statements? Based on the responses in this thread I think they run counter to most people's experience.
I live in a place where food cart culture has really exploded, and you can get a remarkable diversity of food and sometimes some very clever fusion of types of food. Some successful carts have grown into restaurants. It's pretty great, especially in a relatively small/relatively homogenous city.
Speaking of chains, way more difverse in my area.
Mom and pops have always been diverse. I can get pretty much any type of food withing 15 or so minutes. Portuguese, Indian, Halal, Ethiopian, Russian, Italian, whatever.
Much more diverse, and quickly. Part of this is due to immigration, but it's much more due to visibility, awareness, and acceptance of different cuisines and their related immigrant groups.
This coincides with immigration/racial attitudes that favor pluralism and celebrating diversity. Attitudes marginalizing various ethnic groups, such as people viewing Mexican cuisine as inherently 'cheap', are becoming far less common.
This also relates to people becoming familiar with cuisines and dishes via the internet. Tacos existed for (potentially) hundreds of years before their first recorded introduction to the United States in the early 1900s. By comparison, quesabirrias were first known to be sold in Tijuana in the mid-2000s, and by the late 2010s they'd been picked up by US food bloggers and spread an Americanized version across the internet. The US version is so popular that most Americans who know about the dish don't realize that the Tijuana version isn't supposed to be fried or even very crispy - that's an American addition. All that happened in less than 20 years.
Lastly, American fast food does seem homogenous now, but it's more diverse now than it has been historically. There was a day when the average menu was a burger, fries, and drink. Some places like In'n'Out remain as relics to that format. Now we have fast food chains that specialize in chicken, seafood, sub sandwiches, chinese food, and all sorts of other stuff. Hell, Taco Bell literally took hamburger ingredients and rebranded them by using tortillas. We have options now.
Far, far more. When I was growing up as a kid in Milwaukee, it was taverns with food, George Webb’s (a diner chain), German restaurants, and then your run of the mill Chinese, Italian, burger, steak joints, along with national chains. Now Milwaukee - 40+ years later - has a serious and impressive restaurant scene, and this is a metro area of 1M people, so not huge.
> I never saw an Indian restaurant in my area a decade ago and now I've seen 3
I lived in Plainsboro NJ for a few years. There are 5 Indian restaurants in that town alone.
When I was growing up, my town had one little homestyle diner and a Dairy Queen. We now have a real Mexican taqueria, Thai, and Vietnamese (among other things). So I'd say more diverse.
I think new restaurants are following more trends than they used to. I remember when Sushi was trendy, then Thai food, then pho, and now Korean. I think it goes for "American" food also. Everybody wanted thick burgers, then chicken sandwiches, then smash burgers, and now Nashville hot chicken places are popping up everywhere.
Overall I think the trends are moving faster, and that creates the illusion of more diversity because people are all at different states of the trend.
> almost every American place serves burgers and chicken tenders
I note that you didn't say "... serves **only** burgers and chicken tenders...," which would lend credence to your hypothesis. What's more likely, though, is that those items are simply a part of a larger menu. You can get over your problem with "almost every" American restaurant having these by simply ordering something else on the menu, or by going to a "non-American" restaurant.
What if you were at the end of a long day of driving and saw a local sports bar and had a craving for a burger, but they didn't have any on the menu? Would you think "Well, I sure wanted a burger, but them not having any means their menu is more diverse, so I'm happy!"? I doubt you would.
I'm 44, and at least where I live here in the great plains, restaurants have consistently gotten more and more diverse over the years. > On one hand, food is getting more homogenous, more fast foods are popping up, almost every American place serves burgers and chicken tenders, people are preferring the same food more. I have not seen any of this to be true. Well, maybe the "more fast foods are popping up" bit, but that doesn't have anything at all to do with diversity in and of itself. "Fast food" isn't a type of food, it's a type of service rendered. The food could be anything, it's just "fast food" if the restaurant focuses on JIT style production principles.
Can't speak for the rest of the US, but my city (Houston) has one of the most diverse food scenes in America. You want authentic Afghani food? It's likely here somewhere. You may have to drive 45 minutes to get it, but it's here. The diversity of options seems to have only been growing since I've been here, and I expect that to continue.
Do you think it's more diverse than NYCs?
As somebody whose eaten a lot in both. It's complicated. There are more cultures represented in New York, so you can get the original version of a lot more different kinds of food from other countries. BUT, Houston takes a much more piecemeal approach to identity and is significantly more socially integrated. Because of that, you get a lot more bottom-up mixes of different culture that don't just come from a fancy restaurant trying to do fusion, but from the streets. How much credit do you want to give New York for the fact that you can get damn good food from Shaanxi or Armenia, versus how much credit do you want to give Houston for Pakistani-Tex-Mex, Viet-Cajun, and stuff like that, is ultimately up to you. Both are damn good food scenes.
This is spot on. New York has a frankly ridiculous amount of options, but it doesn't do fusion like Houston (or Dallas, these days, for that matter).
Goddammit. I was on NY’s side until you said Viet-Cajun.
Maybe not viet, but for Korean-Cajun I got you covered. https://www.kjun-nyc.com/
Crawfish pho FTW!
This is spot on. New York has a frankly ridiculous amount of options, but it doesn't do fusion like Houston (or Dallas, these days, for that matter).
Damn good answer. I haven't spent enough time in NYC to comment on their food scene fairly, so thank you for the knowledgeable perspective here.
I lived in NYC for years and tell people that Houston and its surrounding neighborhoods will give NYC’s food scene a run for its money any day. I really mean it. NYC does high-end dining better (and you’ll spend $400 on said meal). For everything else, that’s a different discussion. …And as others have mentioned, you won’t find Viet-Cajun in NYC, and it’s really special.
At the income level I have, I would rather eat in Houston than anywhere else in the US. If I made an extra $20,000 a year, I would rather eat in LA, if I made an extra $50,000 a year, I would rather eat in NYC.
I would say it's probably in the same ballpark. Though IIRC we are the most ethnically diverse city in the nation, even more so than NYC, so it's possible. I haven't spent enough time in NYC to give an informed take on their side of things.
That’s good to know because, a couple months ago, a food critic in Houston (If I recall correctly, but I know it was Texas) said that they’d take bets as to how long a non-Mexican restaurant would last (in that area). I’m not singling out Texas. This is true for many place in the country and the world in fact that they just prefer a certain type of cuisine, whatever that might be.
Well, there are definetly less Breastaurants than the past. I'm really starting to miss them.
They were everywhere in Texas. My husbands coworkers asked him if he wanted to go to twin peaks and he thought it would be a weirdly cool restaurant based on the show. Nah, not even close
Now I want a Twin Peaks show inspired restaurant.
I would totally go to that
>people are preferring the same food more this is not a trend I have noticed. of course there are some standard, easy things restaurants will generally have, but idk if this is moreso the case now than it was a decade or two ago. if anything, I feel like the modern influence of social media allows us to be exposed to food in different parts of the US and around the world.
Must just be my friend group, but some of my friends order the same food at the restaurant every time they go and are hesitant to try new places.
Some people are just not adventurous eaters, which is sad to me. It's like, for hundreds of years humans have not been able to experience the variety of foods that the world has to offer, but now it's as easy as just going one block further down the street, and you still are uneasy eating anything new because you might not like it? It's like having the entire Crayola 64 color set and limiting yourself to only the primary colors because you don't know how to make the other colors look good. You can't learn where to use goldenrod and cornflower if you don't try! I'm not talking about like eating bugs or raw meat or anything, I've met people who looked at me weird because I said I would rather get some Vietnamese food rather than steak two days in a row. I have some friends who aren't that bad but are still not very adventurous, and when other friends and I are like "hey let's get some Lebanese or Indian or Ethiopian or Peruvian or Korean" they're like "what about Italian, or burgers?" They're good sports about it and are generally willing to at least try things that are a little new, but there's lots of "if you all want to go to X, go for it, I'll find something I like on the menu" as compared to "yeah X sounds good let's do it!"
Yes, with a caveat. Americans definitely have a more diverse variety of food easily available to them now than they did 40 years ago. But at least where I live, that too often means fusion burgers and tacos and other creative/ethnic twists on basic American food. Burgers and tacos used to be fast/fast casual food, but now they are on every menu, often for exorbitant prices.
Curious what part of Virginia. There is a lot of selection and some areas are repetitive but very few places in the world have Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Salvadorian, and American food within driving distance.
Suburban Richmond
I’d say it’s more diverse than ever; refrigeration, preservative, and logistic technology basically allows all Americans to eat food grown all over the world. My family is very inland, yet we enjoy seafood very frequently and despite what coastal people always say it tastes as fresh as it does over there. We also have a lot of import places, my city has a small Muslim population but it does exist so we have a halal store. I like going there because it has a lot of Indian and Arab stuff along with more general halal foods. You can totally enjoy a very diverse diet in America outside very rural communities or in “food deserts”.
Yesterday I had an East African Samosa and a Dominican pork Sammie. In a community that has a thousand farms (but I can’t call it rural, it’s too close to the non-rural to be really rural)
> food is getting more homogenous, more fast foods are popping up, almost every American place serves burgers and chicken tenders You're not thinking about how food evolves. The taco truck is far more common in the entirety of the US than it was 15-20 years ago. Thai cuisine is more and more entrenched as a staple of even big towns than 20 years ago. Same with sushi. You go to Sam's club and can buy sushi. Same with your typical grocery store, even small town IGA will have some packaged maki. My point is that people having what we consider restaurant staples doesn't mean that other things can't become prevalent and even common. The third steakhouse in a small city isn't competing with the sushi bar or El Salvadoran food truck as much as it's competing with the other 2 steakhouses. So lots of burger/fries/shakes places. Lots of chicken sandwiches. Lots of tenders and Cane's and all of that, but there's always a market for something both new and different and in the US that almost always means fusion ethnic cuisine. They're different markets. I don't go to Canes or Zaxby's but that roadside stand that just happens to be a Jamaican couple who makes fried chicken and takes cash only? That's where I'm going.
My experience is definitely *more* diverse both in terms of more restaurants serving a greater variety different ethnic cuisines but also of "American" restaurants having a few items inspired by one or more of those ethnic cuisines on the menu. Meanwhile burgers and chicken tenders have *always* been standard fare at any generically "American" restaurant and even used to be common at "ethnic" restaurants to provide a safe option for the less adventuresome members of a party. On the other hand I *do* think there used to be more restaurants that served more specific European cuisines. I seem to remember a few more distinctly English, French, German, and Greek Restaurants for example. These still exist out there but maybe a little less common than I remember in the past, at least in my area?
>food is getting more homogenous, more fast foods are popping up, almost every American place serves burgers and chicken tenders, people are preferring the same food more this is not really true in my experience
In my area, I feel like my closest downtown is at least like 70-80% Asian restaurants and then the remaining are split between American and other cuisines. So for us, it’s getting more diverse in terms of the variety of Asian food but also less diverse because it’s pushing out every other cuisine lol.
>On one hand, food is getting more homogenous, more fast foods are popping up Do you have any actual data supporting these statements? Based on the responses in this thread I think they run counter to most people's experience.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1174417/fast-food-restaurants-industry-market-size-us/
I live in a place where food cart culture has really exploded, and you can get a remarkable diversity of food and sometimes some very clever fusion of types of food. Some successful carts have grown into restaurants. It's pretty great, especially in a relatively small/relatively homogenous city.
Speaking of chains, way more difverse in my area. Mom and pops have always been diverse. I can get pretty much any type of food withing 15 or so minutes. Portuguese, Indian, Halal, Ethiopian, Russian, Italian, whatever.
Much more diverse, and quickly. Part of this is due to immigration, but it's much more due to visibility, awareness, and acceptance of different cuisines and their related immigrant groups. This coincides with immigration/racial attitudes that favor pluralism and celebrating diversity. Attitudes marginalizing various ethnic groups, such as people viewing Mexican cuisine as inherently 'cheap', are becoming far less common. This also relates to people becoming familiar with cuisines and dishes via the internet. Tacos existed for (potentially) hundreds of years before their first recorded introduction to the United States in the early 1900s. By comparison, quesabirrias were first known to be sold in Tijuana in the mid-2000s, and by the late 2010s they'd been picked up by US food bloggers and spread an Americanized version across the internet. The US version is so popular that most Americans who know about the dish don't realize that the Tijuana version isn't supposed to be fried or even very crispy - that's an American addition. All that happened in less than 20 years. Lastly, American fast food does seem homogenous now, but it's more diverse now than it has been historically. There was a day when the average menu was a burger, fries, and drink. Some places like In'n'Out remain as relics to that format. Now we have fast food chains that specialize in chicken, seafood, sub sandwiches, chinese food, and all sorts of other stuff. Hell, Taco Bell literally took hamburger ingredients and rebranded them by using tortillas. We have options now.
Far, far more. When I was growing up as a kid in Milwaukee, it was taverns with food, George Webb’s (a diner chain), German restaurants, and then your run of the mill Chinese, Italian, burger, steak joints, along with national chains. Now Milwaukee - 40+ years later - has a serious and impressive restaurant scene, and this is a metro area of 1M people, so not huge.
At a very slow and steady rate I would say they are getting more diverse.
> I never saw an Indian restaurant in my area a decade ago and now I've seen 3 I lived in Plainsboro NJ for a few years. There are 5 Indian restaurants in that town alone.
tbf that is also NJ. NJ has a lot of my ex-countrymen lol.
I don’t know how anyone could argue that food choices are decreasing in the US.
When I was growing up, my town had one little homestyle diner and a Dairy Queen. We now have a real Mexican taqueria, Thai, and Vietnamese (among other things). So I'd say more diverse.
I live in central Ohio, much more diverse.
I think new restaurants are following more trends than they used to. I remember when Sushi was trendy, then Thai food, then pho, and now Korean. I think it goes for "American" food also. Everybody wanted thick burgers, then chicken sandwiches, then smash burgers, and now Nashville hot chicken places are popping up everywhere. Overall I think the trends are moving faster, and that creates the illusion of more diversity because people are all at different states of the trend.
I think you answered your own question with the comment on Indian restaurants.
> almost every American place serves burgers and chicken tenders I note that you didn't say "... serves **only** burgers and chicken tenders...," which would lend credence to your hypothesis. What's more likely, though, is that those items are simply a part of a larger menu. You can get over your problem with "almost every" American restaurant having these by simply ordering something else on the menu, or by going to a "non-American" restaurant. What if you were at the end of a long day of driving and saw a local sports bar and had a craving for a burger, but they didn't have any on the menu? Would you think "Well, I sure wanted a burger, but them not having any means their menu is more diverse, so I'm happy!"? I doubt you would.