Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I have found Balthazar's baguette to be maddeningly inconsistent: good some days, bad on others. I'm beginning to think there is a limit to how good a mass-produced baguette can be.

This unanswerable question's answer is Calvin Trillin. A man who lures his daughter back from California with bagels, who enlists his wife's Chinese students to decipher the Chinatown menus, who refuses to ever dine at "le maison de la casa house", who taught us how to pack a proper airplane meal, is a man who deserves his place in the Pantheon. He discovered American cuisine while it was learning to crawl. Nothing has been the same since.

In a time when food writing is bursting with more talent than the '27 Yankees, we must honor the Ur-men: Ruth. Escoffier. Trillin.

Last year, I moved to New York shortly before my birthday. It proved to be a truly awful birthday - I had to wake up at 5 am to dress up as the Pillsbury Doughboy (no joke!) for a temp job. Coming to New York seemed like the biggest mistake of my life: what city could be worth the humiliation I'd just suffered through? Then my roommate gave me a birthday present - a copy of Robert Sietsema's Food Lovers Guide to the Best Ethnic Eating in New York City. I started flipping through the chapters, and I think I just about read the whole thing cover to cover that night. Sietsema introduced me to the city as a collection of edible jewels, to be sought out and prized, there for the brave diner to seek out and enjoy. I found several listings for eateries in my own neightborhood of Crown Heights, and a few days later I made my way to AA Bake & Doubles to try the cheap Trinidadian chickpea sandwiches known as doubles. Thanks to Sietsema, I knew I that "doubles" applies even if one is only buying a single sandwich ("I'll have a doubles, please"), and I felt at ease in the tiny storefront even as I stood out like a sore thumb. But on a larger scale, I knew that I was in the right place, that the sacrifices I would make to survive in New York would be well worth it. A year later, whenever I feel frustrated or dispirited by a crowded train or the sight of another Starbucks, I pull out that slim yellow book and set off, in person or in my mind, to try the best dish I've never heard of.