Tag Archives: St. Paul Sandwich

“…The hell is wrong with your taste buds?”

~AFFotD’s Resident Food Critic

St. Louis.  We don’t ever really know how to talk about the second largest city in the state of Missouri.  For a time in the 1800s, it appeared that St. Louis, and not Chicago, would grow into the main population center of the Midwest, but the city’s leaders actively fought against the proliferation of railroads and greatly stunted its growth during the largest population boon the area would ever see.  Still, it’s by no means a small town—while the population of 300,000 ranks it as the 58^th largest city in the nation, the whole metro area has nearly three million residents, good enough for the 19^th largest market in the nation.  Hell, they’re big enough to warrant a good hockey team, a usually not that good football team, and a baseball team filled with the most frustratingly smug fans in all of the nation.  They’re a real city, and honestly it’s kind of condescending of us to spend so much effort trying to bring that point home.

St. Louis has culture, is what we’re saying—you could probably argue that they have more regionally specific cultural touchstones than most similarly sized cities, but that might be us giving the Arch too much credit.  And where there is culture, there is food.  And in St. Louis’s case, where there’s food…well, things get weird.  We’ve talked about it before in passing, but we’re going to go into some more detail for you, because so far, in our extensive search for weird food in America, St. Louis has the title of…

St. Louis:  America’s Weirdest Culinary City

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