Heavenly Assignment
by digby
I spent a few weekends after opening day this year bopping around to 10 American cities, where I ate my way through 12 major league ballparks. My mission: to hoover down a shameful number of hot dogs and to sample the increasingly ambitious and occasionally delicious world of ballpark cuisine beyond peanuts and Cracker Jack.[…]
[I]n the last decade or so, as aging stadiums were either renovated or replaced, the ballparks have stepped up their game, and not just for the corporate skybox crowd. New stadiums have been laid out so that nosebleed sections have decent views, the concourses aren’t dark passageways, and the food and beer offered are no longer an afterthought to the game.
Dishes from other baseball-loving cultures have made inroads, like tonkatsu, Japanese fried pork cutlets; sweet-fried plantains from Latin America; and pressed Cuban sandwiches. Of course, I also saw plenty that deserved jeers: in the cramped confines of Wrigley Field’s concourses, I watched a large man, his head thrown back, guzzling spicy curly fries from a cup like they were a beverage. I ate mushy hot links, bone-dry hot dogs and hot wings with no heat. And in Baltimore, I came face to face with a crab cake sandwich that edged out guinea pig (yes, guinea pig) as the least appetizing dish I have ever tried. But there was enough good food — a cedar-planked salmon in Seattle, a thick pastrami hero at Dodger Stadium, the classic Primanti Brothers sandwich in Pittsburgh — that I never gave into indigestion or hot dog fatigue. […]
THE leading example of upscale food might be AT&T Park in San Francisco. Opened in 2000, the stadium has a classic, arched-coliseum look, but with modern amenities like wide concourses with great sightlines to the field. If you hear the crack of a bat and the crowd beginning to roar, you can pivot around in the beer line and follow the ball as it flies over the outfield wall. And instead of ferrying your food back to your seat, or eating over a trash can in some cinderblock tunnel, the airy concourse is dotted with counter-height tables that look out over the field. But some of the best food is behind the scoreboard, where a terrace overlooking the bay, the Scoreboard Plaza, is home to an impressive array of ambitious vendors. By the seventh-inning stretch, I had sampled a peppery clam chowder served in a bread bowl dotted through with tender bits of clam; a fried catfish sandwich in a crisp, Cajun-accented crust; and a homey bowl of jerk chicken over rice, with a healthy dash of jalapeño hot sauce.
I can attest to that. You’d expect that San Francisco would have the best food. The locals would have a fit if they tried to pawn off some gross, pre-fab crap. But that ball park is so awesome in so many ways, that it’s worth going there even if you don’t like baseball. The food is actually better than in most restaurants in other places.
The article has food recommendations for every ballpark. Seattle has great sushi (called the Ichiroll.) Texas has tasty fajitas featuring freshly made tortillas. Miami has delicious sounding empanadas. Don’t tell me America isn’t a melting pot. Food is human kind’s common currency. If they’re eating this stuff while watching America’s century old pastime then we’re both assimilating and respecting other cultures in ways that our politics can’t fully appreciate.
I’ve always wanted to take the baseball stadium tour of America and this gives me one more good reason to do it.
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