Philadelphia

Philadelphia's culinary record begins in the street: pepper pot, a thick stew of tripe, peppers, and root vegetables carried north from the Caribbean through the slave trade and made a distinctly local dish by Black Philadelphians, who sold it as one of the country's earliest street foods. Campbell's canned it into the twentieth century, discontinuing the flavor in 2010. The nineteenth-century city ate at seafood and chop houses, of which Bookbinder's on Walnut Street became the durable emblem — its advertised founding drifting from 1875 to a mythic 1865, and its "Old Original" branding adopted around 1935.

The city also shaped American drinking. In the 1840s the Bavarian immigrant John Wagner brewed what is generally credited as the first lager in the United States, in a Northern Liberties cellar with an eight-barrel capacity; the style spread from there to dominate American brewing.

South Philadelphia's Italian Market produced the twentieth century's signature sandwich, the cheesesteak, credited to Pat and Harry Olivieri, whose 1930 stand at Ninth and Passyunk still stands. Fine dining arrived with Georges Perrier's Le Bec-Fin, opened 1970 and by 1981 identified as the leader of a "Philadelphia restaurant revolution"; it won ten James Beard awards between 1992 and 2002 and closed in 2013.