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Notes -
I mean that even when it's just me cooking, the chicken is remarkably bad, the pork is absolutely rank for some reason, and the vegetables are stringy and bland even when I try to buy from either ethnic or higher-end grocery stores, compared to what I could do with equivalent ingredients elsewhere; and this is even more true for many (non-fancy) restaurants. I mean, seriously, what is up with your chicken? It's horrible!
(American beef is pretty decent, though.)
That isn't to say that there aren't good restaurants in the US -- I've been to a fair few -- but I don't think the food is particularly good outside of, say, New York and LA. Even San Francisco was pretty disappointing, even if it wasn't horrible.
Steakhouses and grillhouses are pretty hit and miss in my experience, and there's really only so far that I can take burgers, pizzas, doughnuts, fries, barbeque, cheesecake, etc. as "good food". Americans have managed to butcher most continenal European foods that have travelled over the pond; Italian-American is on the whole really not close in quality to Italian, for example. This goes down to individual food items, too - the bread is just better across the Atlantic, as is yogurt, as is the seafood (especially around the Mediterranean), ...
And don't get me started on the "ethnic" cuisines. Most of the Japanese food in America is a travesty (or at least it was until very recently, and I haven't had the opportunity to check in the last five years), similar with Korean food (mostly pretty shit). Most of the Chinese restaurants in SF were unimpressive; I think I thought one, maybe two Chinese restaurants were good, and maybe another handful were passable to decent? I thought SF was supposed to be a city with a high Chinese population? And I haven't even got around to most of the Malaysian or Thai food.
Put another way, America is the only place I know of where the food processing is sophisticated enough yet the average food quality is bad enough that the food in Honey Honey Boo Boo makes sense.
On the other hand, Western cuisine is good. The few times I've been to Europe the food has generally impressed me. I'm not sure why Americans can't seem to replicate it.
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