Which major cities have the best variety of ethnic foods?

DIna00

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I have lived in a few different cities and am always surprised how some ethic food is almost absent from an area. I love cooking all different varieties of food. When I move to a new city I find I can't cook some of the foods I like because there are no ethnic grocery stores that carry the ingredients.
Which cities do you think have the best variety of ethnicities represented? And which do you think are lacking in variety?
 
I live in Canada and one of the best cities in my region for ethnic foods would be Toronto, Ontario. You can find everything there. Of course with a population of over 2 million people that isn't hard to believe.
 
In London you can find ethnic foods from all around the world. There are plenty of specialist stores, market stalls and supermarkets selling ingredients for ethnic dishes. There are also many restaurants and cafes specializing in different types traditional food.
 
Honestly, the best city I've been in for a variety of cuisines was Tokyo. Not just Asian food either - I had the best Italian meal of my life there, there's amazing French places and so on.

It's really a foodies paradise there, I feel!
 
I live in the Metro DC area where there is just about every nationally represented. We have all kinds of restaurants and grocery stores here. I do believe you can find what you want someplace in this area.
 
London , if you can't find it you don't want to eat it , from the original to the modern , every culture and more , never ceases to amaze me , the diversity of culinary establishments
 
London , if you can't find it you don't want to eat it , from the original to the modern , every culture and more , never ceases to amaze me , the diversity of culinary establishments
London has it all. We are a small island. That means we've been invaded a lot in the past and that we have lots of immigrant communities. Its just wonderful. So eclectic. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else as far as food is concerned. You name it, we've got it! And apart from London, many of our towns and cities also have a huge and dynamic range of ethnic food. I really think that there is nowhere with such a diverse cuisine. Possibly Australia comes closest...not sure. America is more regional, I think, though I am sure in NewYork or California there must be a good range of ethnic?
 
Las Vegas is catching up. We have Ethiopian, Indian, Brazilian, Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, French, Italian, Middle Eastern and even British restaurants. (a pub called The Crown and Anchor). And those are only the ones I can think of right now. One of our local celebrity chefs is Julian Serrano who is Spanish and runs Picasso and a tapas restaurant at Aria named Julian Serrano and he just opened an Italian restaurant called Lago. We have a multitude of mom and pop ethnic food shops of all kinds and of course, my favorite, The International Marketplace where they have everything. We have our own China town with an Asian supermarket. We may not be London or New York City, but we are getting there.
 
Las Vegas is catching up. We have Ethiopian, Indian, Brazilian, Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, French, Italian, Middle Eastern and even British restaurants. (a pub called The Crown and Anchor). And those are only the ones I can think of right now. One of our local celebrity chefs is Julian Serrano who is Spanish and runs Picasso and a tapas restaurant at Aria named Julian Serrano and he just opened an Italian restaurant called Lago. We have a multitude of mom and pop ethnic food shops of all kinds and of course, my favorite, The International Marketplace where they have everything. We have our own China town with an Asian supermarket. We may not be London or New York City, but we are getting there.

I lived in Vegas for a few years, and I actually thought Vegas was pretty good for food options too! Although I'm a little bummed that I never got to try Ethiopian food there - I don't have that option where I live now!
 
London has it all. We are a small island. That means we've been invaded a lot in the past and that we have lots of immigrant communities. Its just wonderful. So eclectic. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else as far as food is concerned. You name it, we've got it! And apart from London, many of our towns and cities also have a huge and dynamic range of ethnic food. I really think that there is nowhere with such a diverse cuisine. Possibly Australia comes closest...not sure. America is more regional, I think, though I am sure in NewYork or California there must be a good range of ethnic?
Not too sure about the being invaded bit - these islands haven't actually been invaded since the romans although the Norman conquest could be called an invasion it was more a merging of peoples. The boundaries of France and England having been blurred for many years. Food wise there was very little difference between the two [for the nobility - the poor ate anything they could] and we have very few remnants of either of their cuisines. What we do have is a vast variation of people from all over the world who have made their homes here in much later times and of course brought their food with them.
PS - London is not really the food - centre of the country, it's just a bit bigger and thus seems to have more diversity. For example the finest curry was found in Bradford but we guys oop north do tend to send missionarys down to try to civilize those darn sarf :wink:
 
The Boston area has a very diverse population, and a wide variety of foods and food products available. I loved growing up there and being exposed to all the different types of foods. When I was growing up, they lacked in the Mexican food department, and I was exposed to that down here, but the availability of Mexican and other Latin foods has increased there over the years. The good part is that the area is more densely populated, so within walking distance, you can encounter many different types of food. Houston is becoming more of an international city, but it's so huge (larger than the state of Rhode Island) that it's prohibitive to try to get from end to end and side to side to pick up ingredients from the various differing markets, so I often just shop for ethnic ingredients online.
 
In Europe, most capital cities have quite a range of food, though I'd agree that London probably ranks as one of the most diverse. It's always interesting to find something unexpected, though - one of the best curries I've had (outside of the Indian sub-continent) was in Budapest.
 
I grew up in Portland and they seemed to have quite a wide variety of ethnic cuisine. My family did not like to go to these kinds of restaurants so my requests to try new things were almost universally denied. Now I don't have the money to go out to eat, so I still have not had much in the way of traditional ethnic cooking. Someday though, I hope to try Indian food and Thai food.
 
Everywhere I've lived has had a good selection of ethnic foods. The town I grew up in wasn't huge, but it had large Italian and Polish populations with the accompanying restaurants. It also had a large liberal arts university and I think that brought a lot of culinary diversity to our Main Street.

The town I live in now is probably a similar size, and adjacent to a large city, and we have a street with Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Jamaican, Ethiopian, Bangladeshi, and other cuisines.
 
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