Food Your State's Signature Food

The Great American Menu ranks the best and worst regional foods in America...with tongue in cheek



The Great American Menu: Foods Of The States, Ranked And Mapped

Chicago-style deep dish pizza (Illinois) is number one.

Man is mortal. He frolics upon the grass of life for but a short season, and then is snatched back to the inanimate dirt of his origin. The Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, America's greatest regional foodstuff—all those toppings, good God so much cheese and meat, I can hear my heartbeat, this can't be right, it sounds like a goddamn chainsaw, can that be right?—will greatly hasten that day's arrival, but it will also fill at least a little part of at least one of those days with a transcendent, mind-boggling, outrageously indulgent sensory experience. This is the best thing any food can do, and certainly far beyond the capabilities of [stares daggers at New York] a sheet of soggy cardboard with a flap of waxy melted cheese stretched across it.​

Cincinnati Chili (Ohio) ranks last.

For the mercifully unacquainted, "Cincinnati chili," the worst regional foodstuff in America or anywhere else, is a horrifying diarrhea sludge (most commonly encountered in the guise of the "Skyline" brand) that Ohioans slop across plain spaghetti noodles and hot dogs as a way to make the rest of us feel grateful that our own shit-eating is (mostly) figurative. The only thing "chili" about it is the shiver that goes down your spine when you watch Ohio sports fans shoveling it into their maws on television and are forced to reckon with the cold reality that, for as desperately as you might cling to faltering notions of community and universality, ultimately your fellow human beings are as foreign and unknowable to you as the surface of Pluto, and you are alone and always have been and will die alone, a world unto yourself unmarked and unmapped and totally, hopelessly isolated.​

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But wait! This abominable garbage-gravy isn't just sensorily and spiritually disgusting—it's culturally grotesque, too! What began as an ethnic curio born of immigrant make-do—a Greek-owned chili parlor that took its "Skyline" name from its view of the city of Cincinnati—is now a hulking private-equity-owned corporate monolith that gins up interest in its unmistakably abhorrent product by engineering phony groups of "chili fanatics" to camp out in advance of the opening of new chains, in locations whose residents would otherwise see this shit-broth for what it is and take up torches and truncheons to drive it back into the wilderness.​

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Whatever virtue this bad-tasting Z-grade atrocity once contained derived from its exemplification of a set of certain cherished American fables—immigrant ingenuity, the cultural melting pot, old things combining into new things—and has now been totally swamped and consumed by different and infinitely uglier American realities: the commodification of culture; the transmutation of authentic artifacts of human life into hollow corporate brand divisions; the willingness of Americans to slop any horrible goddamn thing into their fucking mouths if it claims to contain some byproduct of a cow and comes buried beneath a pyramid of shredded, waxy, safety-cone-orange "cheese."​

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Cincinnati chili is the worst, saddest, most depressing goddamn thing in the world. If it came out of the end of your digestive system, you would turn the color of chalk and call an ambulance, but at least it'd make some sense. The people of Ohio see nothing wrong with inserting it into their mouths, which perhaps tells you everything you need to know about the Buckeye State. Don't eat it. Don't let your loved ones eat it. Turn away from the darkness, and toward the deep-dish pizza.​

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The crab cake is spot on for Maryland (#4). It is definitely one of the best food stuffs in America!

For Washington, DC, I wouldnt pick the Half Smoke (#36). I would go with Navy Bean Soup, famous for being served in the US Senate dining room for 100+ years, but I wouldnt rank it any higher.

Does the Great American Menu have the right food stuff for your state?

 

The state of NY could have its own map just like that.
You would probably need a multi-partitioned section for NYC alone (pastrami on rye? Nathan's? Dim sum?) and then there's the rest of the state too.
Having lived in Buffalo I would go with beef on weck for that city, just edging out wings.

 

Screw this article, pasties are delicious.

 

I love breaded tenderloin sandwiches. But it's so hard to find a good one, even in Indiana.

 

I do that for grilled loins. Not for 4 minutes though.

 

Double true.

 

I hate to say it, being a Chicagoan now, but I like NY pizza way better than Chicago deep dish. Deep dish is just...a lot. Don't get me wrong, once in a blue moon, I get a taste for it, for sentimental reasons: it was my grandma's favorite food in the world, and there were few things that brought her as much joy as going to Lou Malnati's for a deep dish pie. But, overall...NY slices all the way.

Also, though Cincinnati chili sounds very gross, I spent some time as a kid in Minnesota, and I can tell you (despite the fact that they erroneously attached this dish to North Dakota), lutefisk is the grossest thing on earth. We had Norwegian neighbors who made it from time to time, and it stinks to high heaven. I thought nothing could smell worse than gefilte fish, but gefilte fish smells like flowers, rainbows, and unicorn farts next to lutefisk. It's like a mix of dead fish and burnt rubber cement.

 

Yeah, I'm from Ohio, and I had Skyline Chili today. Suck it, authors of this article.

 

That is not chili spaghetti, that is a 3-way. I had a 5-way today.



It might be high calorie, but those calories are WORTH IT.

 

Also, I'm pretty surprised that whatever he did his research with claimed that the pasty was Michigan's food. Pretty much everything else ever is coney sauce/coney dog or something to do with apples (Apple blossom is the state flower. We make a lot of pie.)

 

I know Michigan for cherries. Mmmmm, cherries.

 

Yes. We have a fucking cherry festival every year. Goddamnit. These people suck.

 

Cincinnati Chili is the only time in my life when it is acceptable to go up to a cute server girl and say I would like a 3-way please. Or a 4-way. The author is a little bit hard on it.

And the pasties are great in the UP of Michigan.

 

Hey, we have Marion Barry.


Mayor Marion Barry is caught by an FBI sting using cocaine in a room at the Vista Hotel.
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I'm with you on the pizza. If you cant fold the slice, its not pizza.

And Cincinnati chili was gross in my one experience at the Cincy airport. I tossed it after one forkful in favor of waiting for the airplane peanuts.

 

Oregonians want to make Marionberry everything. Not that I dislike blackberries in general (and stop on my tractor to pick/eat them when I drive past them) but I would rather have blueberries. I didn't know anyone outside of the Willamette Valley even knew Marionberries existed.