Should Chicago be its own category for the Beard Awards?
Or: Why won’t Chicago stop picking on Cleveland?
New York is sui generis. The New York metro area has more than 100% higher population than the Chicago Metro and Nearly 50% higher than the Los Angeles Metro. New York also has nearly 500% higher foreign tourist visits than Chicago and nearly 200% higher than Los Angeles. It’s also worth noting that Michelin has done New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas but not Chicago. New York has 31 Michelin starred restaurants. Los Angeles and Las Vegas have 18 and 16 respectively.
It’s not simply that New York has more. If any other American city made a case to be singled out by Beard, they would have to make a case by drawing favorable comparisons to other cities but New York is so different that they’re unique (at least in the United States). Furthermore, if Chicago were the city making such comparisons then I think they’d have a tough job convincing a neutral observer that they were more worthy than Los Angeles or San Francisco.
The fact is that someone has to be stuck competing Chicago. It’s natural for those cities to look across the border of and complain about how arbitrary it is Kansas City and Milwaukee have the relatively lucky assignment of competing with one another while Cleveland and Cincinnati have to compete with Chicago but the line has to be drawn somewhere.