Questions about local food and restaurants

Question

Recently, we have received a number of questions about "restaurants that serve local food" and "what's a traditional dish in country X". We have one about Leipzig, Reyjkavik, Chicago, Budapest, Japan and Peru, to name a few that came up with minimum searching.

Does the community think those are useful, acceptable and fit the SE format? These questions are virtually indistinguishable from one another, sans the location. Invariably, the OP would also ask for a place to try the dishes, essentially soliciting recommendations, which off-topic for us.

Should any more of these questions be accepted? Should we close them?

Personally, I don't see much value in having them. There are multiple other resources to obtain much more relevant, complete and up-to-date information. Wikipedia should be a decent starting point for local cuisine, and recommendation sites such as Tripadvisor for restaurants and venues. Failing that, a good ol' web search should do the trick.

Answer 1

I find Q&A about typical dishes and foodstuffs useful, I don't think this information is so easy to come by. Specific restaurant recommendations can be useful too but are obviously more problematic (basically asking for personal opinions, information prone to become outdated as restaurants open and close all the time). Still, some restaurants are older than most ski resorts and amusement parks and can be the main reason for a trip. Rather than establish some hard rules, I think we should try to keep an open mind and stir questions in the right direction if their original formulation appears to invite too much speculation.

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Incidentally, for France, there is a whole series of books called “Inventaire du patrimoine culinaire de la France” covering these sorts of things (with detailed descriptions of local products covering their history, their production, their characteristics, recipes complete with information about where and when they were collected and a bibliography), so it's not all fleeting opinions, there are in fact authoritative but hard-to-find sources about these topics.

Answer 2

The more specific they are, the happier I am. "Where can I eat Chinese in San Francisco?" is NOT specific enough. "Where can I find the first restaurant in San Francisco that serves fortune cookies?" IS specific enough.

I think the line should be - is is asking for recommendations - if so, we close unless it's insanely specific (a particular dish - say, where can I eat cuy (guinea pig) in Cusco?").

Answer 3

In general, I would keep restaurant recommendation out of here. Not so sure about the food in general though. The restaurants are ALWAYS recommendation and always subjective. Just the question if a 5 USD pizza is the best or a 35 USD is simply far out of the scope here.

Regarding the typical food, I am also not in favor of, but for different reasons. Typical food for a country would require often whole books to be written unless someone becomes so superficial that wikipedia would be the best alternative anyhow.

One would have to be VERY specific and localized to be accepted. I would be fine with this question for example:

I heard that there is a dish called "Beggar's Chicken" in China. I am traveling to Hong Kong this month and would like to taste it. Can someone tell me the minimum and maximum price range the dish is available for and 2-3 restaurants along the scale of the price?

Since this is not a recommendation but a more factual approach, I would let that go through. Every "I do not know anything about a place and it's food and want someone to write a guidebook for me"-type question is in my opinion a no-go.