I was born in Jersey. I grew up in California. I went to school in New York.

For a long time I was under the naive impression that the west coast food movement that took off in the 1960s popularizing and internationalizing what good food, bread, wine and beer meant had softened the hearts and expanded the minds of even some of the most sour east coast food and beverage pedants.

Clearly not though.

Seeing that this fellow's byline was out of Delaware I thought: oh joy a whole schmear of French wine recs, a few from South America or somewhere else, and the usual crap about California wines.

This is so silly and dated.

As of the late 1990s (when I last lived in New York) you still couldn't get a decent burrito in that city and any number of amazing cuisines were still barely if at all represented. And forget about anywhere else in the northeast corridor.

To the fogies (old and young) who populate the east coast food and wine clique the important cuisines still come from western and southern Europe (plus the usual Chinese crap - there ain't much good of that in New York either) and the important wines from France.

Of course this is all nonsense and the best, most exciting array of food and drink is now to be had on the west coast of the United States.