The City of Bad Food

One of the most annoying things about the hell that is Philadelphia is that the food is quite awful. You cannot get a decent slice of pizza. The bagels are a joke. A knish? Forget about it!

These are pretty basic food items. It is not like we are complaining about something that takes a great deal of skill or anything to make. Yet we wonder why they get these things wrong here in hell.

Take pizza. It is pretty basic, yet the troglodytes get it wrong, very wrong. We are talking worse than average Manhattan tourist trap with some variant of Famous Original Ray in the name. We are talking worse than something you would find in Kansas. We are talking something worse than you would find in some small village in the Lake District of England. When you encounter something that has appeared to have been deep fried, you know something is wrong. We have had deep fried pizza (God bless the Scots!), however it is a totally different proposition involving battering and frying as they do with Mars bars (which makes us wonder where the hell we can pick up a proper Mars bar).

Now bagels are even simpler than pizza, yet they get them glaringly wrong. We have asked for a pumpernickel bagel, one of the most common types known to mankind, and were told there wasn't such a thing. Now if they actually had such a common bagel it would probably be something that you could play hockey with. That reminds us, the two places other than the great city of five boroughs that have good bagels are somewhere where they do know what a hockey puck is - Toronto and Montreal.

As for what passes for a knish, we were so traumatized we don't want to even talk about it. Although we'll say if you want a knish, it is best to schlep to the Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery down on Houston Street in the civilized part of the world known as the Lower East Side.

Now for the two specialties of Philadelphia food we are not impressed. The "soft pretzel" is neither pretzel shaped nor soft. It is more the shape of the number eight and can be best described as chewy like rubber.

The other contribution to the world of gastronomy that is offered up by the murderriffic city probably has many dead bodies on its hands. Yes, it is the unKosher, heart attack waiting to happen sandwich known as a cheese steak. We have not sampled one, since it is meat and we don't eat it, but it appears to be a concoction of low grade meat, day glow orange off brand Cheez Wiz, and onions all fried in grease on a grill not cleaned since Prohibition and all served on a sub roll. Stupid. Then they do say you are what you eat.