Like Berlin, Hamburg doesn’t rate too highly when considering international gastronomic destinations. This is also a fair designation, but it’s worth noting that not only is it’s cuisine significantly different from that of the adjoining Prussian sphere, it’s situated in another milieu entirely. Unlike Berlin, which was the seat of an empire but never a vital trade crossroads, Hamburg is one of two (formerly three) independently governed German city-states, all of whom operated as dynamic medieval trade nodes, creating a far more cosmopolitan character overall. Along with Bremen (and their former partner Lübeck) they were anchors of the vaunted Hanseatic League, a continent-spanning guild that for centuries dominated international commerce throughout the North and Baltic Seas.
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It seems like American chip flavors just keep getting crazier, with each trip to the grocery store yielding a rogue’s gallery of strange new monstrosities. But this craziness is also circumscribed, pushed toward ever more extreme, overdriven concoctions, mash-ups and combinations, as well as eerily faithful reenactments of foods that have no business existing as chips. On the fast-food side of this equation, Pizza Hut has recently launched the latest attempt at challenging the Doritos Locos Taco. This hulking abomination expands the humble Cheez-It to mammoth proportions. A Cheez-It is obviously not a chip, but it's pizza-fied offspring (the end-result of years of desperate promiscuity by Sunshine, a company that needs to realize the inherent perfection of its star product and stick with it) is so wrongheaded, and so representative of the grotesquerie which defines the current state of processed food culture, that I would be remiss not to mention it. I should also mention that Extra Toasty Cheez-Its are a godsend, and almost singlehandedly balance out the damage inflicted by the last 15 years of lab-spawned, misbegotten oddities.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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