I don’t know how Topeka came up, but as someone who has lived in both Topeka AND NYC, there are things to love about both places. I can recommend a wonderful Thai restaurant in Topeka. There are immigrants who settle all over the US and open restaurants. I have traveled recently to Georgia and Alabama and had delicious Thai meals.
For the stereotypical “Jewish Christmas” of Chinese restaurant and a movie, it’s not critical that the restaurant be the most authentic. That’s not part of the religion :-). It’s the concept of Chinese-and-a-movie, not some pissing contest over authenticity.
Not Chinese…but the very best Thai food I’ve ever eaten was in Augusta Maine, of all places. My husband was born in Thailand and his family resided there. They agreed that this particular place was top notch. Really authentic, and excellent.
So yes, PF, I think you can have authentic foreign cuisine in even remote parts of this country!
So, you are saying Ms. Pizza I can find the delicate qualities Fukein, or Heinan or authentic Sichuan or Taiwanese…and well, you can place whatever you want in your mouth. I prefer not to place any old, sweet and sour, Hunan or General Tso, or some conscripted Chinese-American dish in mine…
Oh please Boola. Now you are changing the issue. You know…only YOU are suggesting that the Chinese somehow needs to be the tippy top of the top…and by your tastes. Guess what? Some folks don’t even LIKE the foods you are listing…at all.
Your tastes are…well…your tastes. Get over yourself.
So…just stay in NYC…and have your good food. And yes, I’ve eaten some excellent, and very authentic Chinese food in NYC. But guess what? The restaurant I ate at with the best food is NOT open in Christmas! And it’s not particularly near a movie theater.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the idea of Jews going to Chinese-and-a-movie on Christmas Day is not something that’s unique or exclusive to NY as you seem to have thought. Even in flyover Missouri I knew people who did that. (My family didn’t, as we did celebrate Christmas, but it wasn’t unusual amongst our Jewish friends who didn’t celebrate Christmas.) You’re the one now turning it into “oh, well, the most authentic if the authentic.” You’re moving the goalposts because you didn’t want to admit you were wrong or uninformed.
Yk what this reminds me of? My daughter, going to school in the Boston area - had supposedly “sophisticated” classmates who heard that her address was xxx, Illinois and thought she must live in the middle of cornfields and that suburban Boston must be so incredibly exotic and unfamiliar to her. Uh, no - suburban Boston is pretty much the same thing as suburban Chicago except it’s more hilly, and a suburban strip with Target, Bed Bath and Beyond and Panera looks the same anywhere, and going downtown to shop and fine in Boston isn’t appreciably different from doing the same in Chicago. These girls thought they were sooo sophisticated - but they really weren’t.
And if we are talking about money, there are people everywhere across the U.S. who can buy and sell most other people for lunch. Provincial people don’t get that.
Did you know people in other cities also sit with coffee and the NYTimes on Sunday morning? Lol.
This is a really bizarre thread!
Joblue-
Reading this thread made me think of that SNL video!
I have a relative who has a birthday on Christmas day. No matter where we are, in town or on holiday, we always find places open to eat. Reading the perseverative assertion that NYC is the only place to find dim sum or a movie on xmas made me think of this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png
It’s like The Onion does College Confidential. Heat apparently can be generated out of nothing.
Maybe this one belongs as a subcategory of the “why is this a thread?” thread.
A critical mass of people doing it was part of the fun for me though…a sold out theater on Christmas, a wait for a table at the crowded Chinese restaurant. As I said I have no idea if that happens in other cities. It sure doesn’t happen in the town I live in now, which rolls up the sidewalk on Christmas Eve and doesn’t reopen until the 26th.
What really sucked was waiting tables or bartending myself on Christmas, which I did throughout most of college. The fun part was the dinner and movie after our shift was over.
But not many people sit with coffee and read the Chicago Tribune in other cities on Sunday mornings 
Ms. Pizza you might be suffering from what is known as “interior-inferior-complex*” (made up term). Now, lest I be accused of being that provincial snob from either coast, well, population and demographic folks have already been placing somewhat exacting metrics on this for a time now----see–http://www.pewresearch.org/the-next-america-book/ and https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/enrico-moretti-geography-jobs and http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/0544028058
Now, obviously we have sauntered so off-course from the original discussion, I will offer this as my new posit–Why the east and west coast have better Chinese food then then rest; the paradox of preference of just better tasting food?’
That said, the following authors make a lucid presentation on why if if you just take each coast or only about 15-16 states, you have about 2/3 of the country’s GDP, also you would have about 60% of the HQs of fortune 500 companies, 60% of the electoral colleges, and home of about 80% of the colleges usually noted in most top 25 rankings. So, maybe there is a reason why the Chinese food is much tastier on either coast?
As to your whole pretense that the middle could buy and sell the rest of us–well, facts don’t prove that out, the 8 wealthiest people in the US, except for two–the affable Warren Buffett and the nauseating Charles Koch, the remainder live on either coast—Gates, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Bloomberg. They too, I hear, prefer their Chinese food on the coasts, and not in Terra Haute (although TH can be quite splendid in the early fall.)
Whats the “we”? This thread is not about the quality of ethnic food in different regions of the US. This has really jumped the shark.
Mea culpa, I’m the one who posted:
Can we make peace by saying that this happens in many places (such as the DC suburb where I live), but that it may be an even bigger social phenomenon in places where there are a lot of Jews, good Chinese restaurants, and convenient movie theaters?
The issue of bagel quality isn’t really debatable, though.
True that. Is it really the water and the humidity? Too bad the bagel stores/delis aren’t on on Christmas. They could give the Chinese restaurants a run for their money.
This is the goofiest thread hijack ever.
The Jewish Chirstmas tradition of Chinese/movie is a bigger deal in NYC than most other places because, newsflash, there’s more Jews living in NYC than other places in the U.S. NYC also has a very high concentration of Chinese restaurants.
In other news, many skiers live in Colorado and many surfers live in Hawaii. But not everyone in Colorado skiis, and not everyone in Hawaii surfs. Also many fine skiers and surfers hail from places other than Colorado/Hawaii. For example, Topeka, Kansas!
We all good now Pizzagirl?
I used to be as big a “no one in the US outside of NYC knows Chinese food” snob as anyone. But I was set straight on this 15 years ago when I worked on a project in China. Here’s what I’ve gathered …
What’s super funny to those in the Chinese culinary world about NYC snobbery is that, because of patterns of immigration and who went into the restaurant business, most Chinese food in NYC actually has its culinary origins in China’s equivalent of “flyover country” even when its not been Americanized. “Flyover country” might not be completely accurate, but the concept is that although the food is perfectly fine stuff, it’s still like talking about the fine dining tradition of New England mill workers. So the whole urban elite NYC snobbery thing makes them chuckle.
To them, the center of high cuisine is Hong Kong, and it’s California (especially LA), not NYC, where you can find the best Chinese food in the US - but only if you know where to look.
If you are in LA, dim sum, that is crazy good, King Hua and Luasia in Alhambra and Capital Seafood in Arcadia.
Where I live, the non-jews have also taken to going to the movies Christmas eve as well as Christmas day. Its not just a Jewish thing, though we do run into lots of our friends and neighbors, depending on where we dine. Now, what was this thread about again?