Why Small Cities Are the Best Places to Eat in America

Why Small Cities Are the Best Places to Eat in America

You don’t have to travel to New York or San Francisco for first-rate food. Now, cities like Spokane and Omaha, Raleigh-Durham and Columbus are serving up similarly ambitious meals

By Joshua Ozersky in the Wall Street Journal

NOT CURIOSITY, not caution, but anger and dismay: That’s what other New Yorkers expressed when I told them I was moving away. And the reason, hilariously, was food. “You’ll starve out there,” I was told. “Out there,” of course, meant “everywhere else.” No doubt San Franciscans give their apostates similarly dire warnings, and Chicagoans, too.

It’s time for them to wake up and smell the Stumptown coffee. Because if there is one thing I’ve learned in traveling the country as a dining critic over the last few years, it’s that big cities don’t matter the way they used to. It’s 2015, and everybody has ramen bars now. Everybody has craft cocktails. From Tacoma to Tampa, we are one great restaurant nation.

The reasons are obvious. It’s prohibitively expensive to do business in certain places. When a restaurant’s rent is $20,000, it can sell a piece of chicken for $25, and possibly make two or three dollars from it. Does not compute.

Clearly a city like New York is always going to be a dining destination; while high-profile restaurateurs such as Danny Meyer and Drew Nieporent have publicly bemoaned the impact of high rents on their businesses, the number of permits granted in the city for restaurants, cafes and bars has actually risen over the last decade. A breakdown of how many permits went to each of the different categories of establishment is not available. But considering takeout and fast-casual restaurants are widely acknowledged as driving growth in this sector, how many of those new permits are for actual sit-down restaurants, the kind where ambitious chefs break new ground?

These are the restaurants I’m talking about here, the ones that are contributing to a national discourse around eating. Smaller cities and towns have always had good places to eat that are fine expressions of a particular place and its local traditions. What’s struck me in recent years is the way in which those same cities and towns are increasingly part of a nationwide network of culinary innovation.

The contagion of foodie culture, once the special preserve of a few urban enclaves, travels at the speed of light via the Internet and a hundred food-themed TV shows. There are cooks and customers knowledgeable about and excited by the work once done only in a few major metro areas, and ready to see it in their towns.

Ask Gavin Kaysen, former chef de cuisine at New York’s celebrated Café Boulud, now opening the highly anticipated Spoon and Stable in his native Minneapolis. Or Fred Dexheimer, a Master Sommelier, who just launched Rx Wine Lab, a pop-up wine bar, in Durham, N.C. Or Dylan Fultineer, who worked under Paul Kahan for eight years at Chicago’s Blackbird, now cooking up a storm in Richmond, Va., at Rappahannock.

For Mr. Dexheimer, the move to Durham came about because of a combination of push and pull factors. Like many sommeliers, mixologists and chefs, he lived in a city (New York) he considered too expensive to launch his own business in. But even stronger than the pressure of big-city economics was the promise of a different life in Durham. The costs are low and the customers eager. “People are really excited about this,” Mr. Dexheimer said. “They tell me, ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’ I’m waiting for them, too.”

And then there’s this: These are places where chefs can make a difference. The most dynamic food cities in the country right now are the two Portlands (Ore. and Maine), Nashville, Tenn., Charleston, S.C., Houston and Philadelphia. All took off in the past decade thanks to the arrival of a few gifted chefs who pioneered a new dining scene. My new home, Portland, Ore., a city of just over 600,000, has produced three of the last four regional winners of the James Beard Award (often likened to the Oscars of the food world). Nashville has seen three places open in the last three years—the Catbird Seat, Rolf & Daughters and Husk Nashville—that are reckoned by many critics to be among the best in all the U.S. Already you see, in the six cities called out in the chart below, the expanding culinary frontier. This year, the James Beard Awards themselves, for the first time in their 25-year history, will be held outside of New York.

Not every city in the country will become a culinary mecca. But the dining scenes in some smaller cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Sacramento, Calif., are benefitting from local influxes of capital, particularly in the tech sector. Columbus claims to have added more than 12,000 jobs just since September; Sacramento saw a 185% increase in venture capital investment in the last year. Durham was just chosen by Google as one of seven tech hubs in the U.S. In some cases that means a local population with the resources to pay for the kind of food they used to have to travel for, as well as emigrants from larger cities arriving to work or start businesses—and arriving hungry.

An ambitious restaurant has another great resource in many smaller cities: the all-important ingredients that have become a full-on fetish in contemporary American cooking. In a city like Omaha, a handful of very good restaurants have some of the best beef in the world available to them, and the fruits of thousands of miles of surrounding farms. (In Nebraska, ranches and farms account for 92% of the land, as compared with 23% in New York state.) The region around Columbus has some of the best dairies in the country, as anyone who has ever eaten Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, founded there in 2002, can tell you. Snowville Creamery’s full and luscious milk was the foundation of those lauded ice creams, and to source it company founder Jeni Britton Bauer had to look no farther than rural Meigs County, a little over an hour’s drive away.

Jeni’s might be my favorite example of the state of the food union right now. The brand, now nationally famous and sold all over the country, started as a single, quirky ice cream parlor. They used microdairy milk and cream and other ingredients whose cost would be unthinkable in a community where the only frame of reference was Baskin Robbins—in other words, in the sort of place some of my fellow New Yorkers, lamenting my departure, imagined the entire rest of the country to be. But Columbus embraced Jeni’s, with long lines of customers more than willing to pay a few extra dollars for roasted strawberry buttermilk ice cream, or chocolate made from beans curated by Springfield, Mo.-based cocoa guru Shawn Askinosie. Soon there were multiple parlors around town, and soon after that they started popping up in other cities. No Brooklyn or Berkeley ice cream parlor was doing anything as ambitious or, in my opinion, as good. The playing field continues to expand for culinary innovators and entrepreneurs like Ms. Britton Bauer. And as far as this former New Yorker is concerned, that’s a win for everybody.