Tangentially related, but a point of pride as a former New Haven resident is that pizzerias are an originally American thing. The food may be Italian, but the type of restaurant is ours!
This is honestly a very proudly American phenomena for lots of cuisine. It's fair to argue that most of what we consider "Chinese Food" originated from Chinese immigrants in San Francisco back in the day, after all. Americanisation is very much a powerhouse in making new cuisines.
I've always enjoyed reading your columns in various places, even though most of the subjects aren't in my 'wheelhouse'. The articles open up my thinking in ways that very few writers do.
Come to think of it, this fits the specific subject of today's column. Even though the product isn't part of my usual consumption pattern, there's something about it that pulls me in as a paying customer.
As someone who lives in a rural-ish exurb, this feels off. As in, not matching my personal observations here and in the small towns my parents are from. For reference, the county I live in has less than 40k people, and my parents were born in a county with less than 20k, that my family on both sides had lived in for a very long time.
People in rural and exurban communities today do a LOT of online shopping, both from local merchants, picking up at meet points or events like the farmers market, and from the big retailers - so generic businesses are typically for low-margin items or items that people generally prefer to buy in person. That means generic groceries are likely to be from a big grocer or WalMart, which is the highest volume grocer in the US, and perishable groceries are often bought from the grower.
It also means if your community is rural you will likely have a feed and farm store of some sort, because fencing, barbed wire, livestock feed, and other bulky items are often impractical to ship. Specialty groceries can survive if the area is reasonably upscale and they have a hook (like offering meals and music and specialty prepared foods) but groceries are an extremely low margin business. Many fresh local food sales are ordered online from growers for pickup at the farm or at farmers market.
The net result of all that is that starting a business in rural areas and rural exurbs generally doesn’t start with a storefront, and zoning for agricultural areas generally permits a wide range of home businesses. Outside of farm stands, more won’t have a storefront than will. Those businesses are typically widely dispersed.
So you will see them at the farmers market, makers market, street festivals, Facebook, Nextdoor, and online - but not at a shop. Locally this includes (very partial list) bakers, specialty chocolates, cake pops, artists, jewelry, wood carving, local honey and wax products, fancy cupcakes, candies, barbecue sauce, soup, jams and jellies, local meat, local fruit and vegetables, flowers, plants, local eggs, 3d printing, homemade dolls and stuffed animals, pottery, bagels, candied apples, metalwork, you name it. With the vendors at the farmers market and events largely being either neighbors or from adjacent counties, they’re people we see over and over.
The farmers market and most of the festivals and events feature live music from a wide range of local musicians and food trucks with cuisine including Korean, Latino, BBQ, Creole, soul food, specialty pizzas, Asian, fusion tacos, and southern fare. You don’t need a big population to justify a food truck. We also have a modest number of restaurants, some very good.
So I am not looking for a traditional downtown shopping experience, because what I have is, to me, richer, more fun and is with people I actually know and share common interests with. It’s not under-peopled, and the richness and variety of life here comes in part from people having the space to do their own thing, because a lot of the social glue is from outdoor activities.
Social time out here generally revolves around shared common interests, hobbies, volunteering, house of worship, and meeting people through your kids. Interests might be horseback riding, fishing, gardening and Master Gardeners, arts and crafts and their groups, volunteering, hunting and hunt club, archery, writing and writers group, playing in a band, hiking, agriculture, rare livestock, attending T ball games, pretty much anything.
That pattern, of people coming together to share common interests, despite living in a community that is not dense, is typical of small towns that serve nearby agricultural areas. They’re not dense, and historically they have not been dense. If you look at these towns, they were originally designed for people to use horses and wagons to bring goods to market, to come in to shop, to attend church, and then most of them would go back home to the farm. I am familiar with this because it’s how my ancestors lived for generations. This was a very common pattern historically in Virginia, including for a big piece of the outer edges of what has been absorbed by NoVa.
The rich variety of options is generally going to be more upscale in wealthier exurban counties like where I live, but you would be surprised at the number of options you see in many small communities.
There is no reason you couldn’t reproduce at least some of that pattern of deeper common connections (versus window shopping and eating out, which strikes me as a very shallow basis for community) to build more community in suburbs. You just have to have the cultural expectation of it as a possibility.
Going into your point on most stores doing a whole bunch of different things mediocrely, I think this is an inherent aspect of car-centric market forces. When there is high vehicle mobility, business tends to concentrate in one place because this is seen as more convenient. I don't know if I can speak for most folks, but when I make a car trip, I prefer to make as few stops as possible, which reinforces this type of convenience. And since the customer-shed in car-centric places is so wide, you end up with the big box stores we have today.
Transportation policy has a huge effect on the market in ways that people often don't think about. And these days, business concentration is one of the biggest examples. One might argue that it just leads to better market efficiency, but that generally hides the government subsidies necessary to make that system viable, as well as the hidden negative externalities of travel costs. Not to mention the natural fragility of an overly-efficient system, as we saw during Covid.
I am not making a connection between this comment and your point about density, but I offered something relevant below.
"It isn’t a question of paying money for prepared food. It’s a question of whether the people who really know how to make that food are there."
The other possibility is that the people who know how to prepare the food are there and none of those people are opening those restaurants in order to serve their style of food. One thing that I only learned a few years ago is that Chinese restaurants--restaurants run by Chinese people--existed in the US before restaurants serving Chinese-styled food. For example, the first Chinese restaurants in El Paso were chop houses. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/1d827eec-5dff-4c6c-8744-662a0485a294 Similarly with Houston's first Japanese restaurant, which was also a chop house. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/okasaki-tsunekichi-tom-brown
That is actually how most all restaurants inside Japan are. Very specialized. It's mainly places that cater to tourists and such that are multi-menu.
Other point re: American "Japanese" restaurants: many if not most are owned by Chinese... something I learned form my Taiwanese wife. That's one of the reasons our favorite two NJ sushi places are 'pure' Japanese - in ownership, in artistry, and in consistent quallity.
Tangentially related, but a point of pride as a former New Haven resident is that pizzerias are an originally American thing. The food may be Italian, but the type of restaurant is ours!
This is honestly a very proudly American phenomena for lots of cuisine. It's fair to argue that most of what we consider "Chinese Food" originated from Chinese immigrants in San Francisco back in the day, after all. Americanisation is very much a powerhouse in making new cuisines.
I've always enjoyed reading your columns in various places, even though most of the subjects aren't in my 'wheelhouse'. The articles open up my thinking in ways that very few writers do.
Come to think of it, this fits the specific subject of today's column. Even though the product isn't part of my usual consumption pattern, there's something about it that pulls me in as a paying customer.
Thank you!
As someone who lives in a rural-ish exurb, this feels off. As in, not matching my personal observations here and in the small towns my parents are from. For reference, the county I live in has less than 40k people, and my parents were born in a county with less than 20k, that my family on both sides had lived in for a very long time.
People in rural and exurban communities today do a LOT of online shopping, both from local merchants, picking up at meet points or events like the farmers market, and from the big retailers - so generic businesses are typically for low-margin items or items that people generally prefer to buy in person. That means generic groceries are likely to be from a big grocer or WalMart, which is the highest volume grocer in the US, and perishable groceries are often bought from the grower.
It also means if your community is rural you will likely have a feed and farm store of some sort, because fencing, barbed wire, livestock feed, and other bulky items are often impractical to ship. Specialty groceries can survive if the area is reasonably upscale and they have a hook (like offering meals and music and specialty prepared foods) but groceries are an extremely low margin business. Many fresh local food sales are ordered online from growers for pickup at the farm or at farmers market.
The net result of all that is that starting a business in rural areas and rural exurbs generally doesn’t start with a storefront, and zoning for agricultural areas generally permits a wide range of home businesses. Outside of farm stands, more won’t have a storefront than will. Those businesses are typically widely dispersed.
So you will see them at the farmers market, makers market, street festivals, Facebook, Nextdoor, and online - but not at a shop. Locally this includes (very partial list) bakers, specialty chocolates, cake pops, artists, jewelry, wood carving, local honey and wax products, fancy cupcakes, candies, barbecue sauce, soup, jams and jellies, local meat, local fruit and vegetables, flowers, plants, local eggs, 3d printing, homemade dolls and stuffed animals, pottery, bagels, candied apples, metalwork, you name it. With the vendors at the farmers market and events largely being either neighbors or from adjacent counties, they’re people we see over and over.
The farmers market and most of the festivals and events feature live music from a wide range of local musicians and food trucks with cuisine including Korean, Latino, BBQ, Creole, soul food, specialty pizzas, Asian, fusion tacos, and southern fare. You don’t need a big population to justify a food truck. We also have a modest number of restaurants, some very good.
So I am not looking for a traditional downtown shopping experience, because what I have is, to me, richer, more fun and is with people I actually know and share common interests with. It’s not under-peopled, and the richness and variety of life here comes in part from people having the space to do their own thing, because a lot of the social glue is from outdoor activities.
Social time out here generally revolves around shared common interests, hobbies, volunteering, house of worship, and meeting people through your kids. Interests might be horseback riding, fishing, gardening and Master Gardeners, arts and crafts and their groups, volunteering, hunting and hunt club, archery, writing and writers group, playing in a band, hiking, agriculture, rare livestock, attending T ball games, pretty much anything.
That pattern, of people coming together to share common interests, despite living in a community that is not dense, is typical of small towns that serve nearby agricultural areas. They’re not dense, and historically they have not been dense. If you look at these towns, they were originally designed for people to use horses and wagons to bring goods to market, to come in to shop, to attend church, and then most of them would go back home to the farm. I am familiar with this because it’s how my ancestors lived for generations. This was a very common pattern historically in Virginia, including for a big piece of the outer edges of what has been absorbed by NoVa.
The rich variety of options is generally going to be more upscale in wealthier exurban counties like where I live, but you would be surprised at the number of options you see in many small communities.
There is no reason you couldn’t reproduce at least some of that pattern of deeper common connections (versus window shopping and eating out, which strikes me as a very shallow basis for community) to build more community in suburbs. You just have to have the cultural expectation of it as a possibility.
Going into your point on most stores doing a whole bunch of different things mediocrely, I think this is an inherent aspect of car-centric market forces. When there is high vehicle mobility, business tends to concentrate in one place because this is seen as more convenient. I don't know if I can speak for most folks, but when I make a car trip, I prefer to make as few stops as possible, which reinforces this type of convenience. And since the customer-shed in car-centric places is so wide, you end up with the big box stores we have today.
Transportation policy has a huge effect on the market in ways that people often don't think about. And these days, business concentration is one of the biggest examples. One might argue that it just leads to better market efficiency, but that generally hides the government subsidies necessary to make that system viable, as well as the hidden negative externalities of travel costs. Not to mention the natural fragility of an overly-efficient system, as we saw during Covid.
I am not making a connection between this comment and your point about density, but I offered something relevant below.
"It isn’t a question of paying money for prepared food. It’s a question of whether the people who really know how to make that food are there."
The other possibility is that the people who know how to prepare the food are there and none of those people are opening those restaurants in order to serve their style of food. One thing that I only learned a few years ago is that Chinese restaurants--restaurants run by Chinese people--existed in the US before restaurants serving Chinese-styled food. For example, the first Chinese restaurants in El Paso were chop houses. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/1d827eec-5dff-4c6c-8744-662a0485a294 Similarly with Houston's first Japanese restaurant, which was also a chop house. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/okasaki-tsunekichi-tom-brown
That is actually how most all restaurants inside Japan are. Very specialized. It's mainly places that cater to tourists and such that are multi-menu.
Other point re: American "Japanese" restaurants: many if not most are owned by Chinese... something I learned form my Taiwanese wife. That's one of the reasons our favorite two NJ sushi places are 'pure' Japanese - in ownership, in artistry, and in consistent quallity.