The Food Wasn't That Bad

15 Jul, 2026

The 2026 World Cup gave millions of visitors a chance to discover that American food is far better than its reputation.

The 2026 World Cup drew the largest crowds in the tournament's history this summer, and a great many of them went home talking about lunch. That was not the plan. The plan was stadiums in Dallas and Kansas City and Seattle, the plan was group-stage arithmetic and a long train ride to a semifinal, and the plan involved a quiet resignation about what one would be forced to eat in between. Visitors arrived carrying a picture of the United States assembled from thirty years of exported television, drive-through windows glimpsed in films, and the confident assurances of friends who had never been. What a striking number of them encountered instead was a country whose reputation abroad has fallen badly out of step with the thing itself, and the gap between the two turns out to be one of the more interesting stories of the tournament.

I am not arguing that America has overtaken Italy, or bested France, or won some imaginary contest that nobody outside a comment section believes exists. Italy remains the benchmark for pizza and will remain so, for reasons rooted in soil and water and an unbroken chain of practice that no amount of enthusiasm can shortcut. The argument is narrower and, I think, more defensible: the United States has matured into a serious cultural and culinary destination, that maturation happened faster than the outside world updated its priors, and a global sporting event that scattered visitors across sixteen host cities was an unusually good instrument for exposing the lag.

Pizza makes the strongest case precisely because it is the hardest one. Consider Francesco Martucci, whose I Masanielli in Caserta has spent years at or near the summit of every serious ranking, and whose work demonstrates exactly what the benchmark consists of: dough that has been thought about for years rather than months, ingredients that come from somewhere specific, a willingness to innovate that never curdles into gimmickry. Martucci is the standard against which everyone else is measured, which is what makes it notable that he now also operates in Miami, and that his Florida restaurant placed fifth in the 2026 American rankings. The benchmark has moved into the neighborhood. Meanwhile the guide that publishes those rankings, an Italian outfit called 50 Top Pizza, expanded its American coverage this year to 116 establishments across twenty-nine states, with New York accounting for twenty-seven of them, California thirteen, and Florida ten. The top fifteen American pizzerias automatically qualify for the global hundred, a list that will be finalized in Naples in September, and on recent form the American contingent will be substantial.

pizza

Classic Italian pizza photographed in Apulia, Italy, in 2006. Italy remains the world's benchmark for pizza, but the craft has spread far beyond its birthplace, with American pizzerias now ranked among the world's best. Photograph by Sergio Russo, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

At the top of the American list, for the fifth consecutive year, sits Anthony Mangieri's Una Pizza Napoletana on the Lower East Side, and the reason it sits there is worth dwelling on, because it points at the idea that ties this whole essay together. Mangieri makes every pizza in his restaurant himself, and when he is not there, the restaurant does not open. There is a version of that fact that reads as eccentricity, and a version that reads as the entire point. Almost any competent kitchen can produce one transcendent meal. What separates a world-class establishment from a merely good one is the capacity to produce that meal on a wet Tuesday in February for a room full of strangers who will never know how hard it was, and to do it again the next day, and the next. Consistency is not the absence of craftsmanship, it is the highest expression of it, and it is the quality that visitors kept describing without quite having a word for it.

Once you have that frame, the rest of the American food story stops looking like a collection of curiosities and starts looking like a pattern. The 1976 Judgment of Paris, in which French judges tasting blind ranked California wines above their Bordeaux and Burgundy counterparts, is usually told as a David and Goliath anecdote, but its real significance is what came afterward. The result did not make Napa better than France, it made Napa legible, and half a century of steady work has since turned the American West Coast into a wine region that other regions study rather than pity. The hamburger, whatever it owes to Hamburg steak, became something else entirely on American ground and is now so thoroughly global that its origins are a pub-quiz question rather than a live fact. Craft beer went further still, since the movement that started in a handful of American garages in the 1970s rewrote what breweries in Britain, Scandinavia, and increasingly Italy consider possible, and did so by exporting a method rather than a product.

Barbecue deserves its own paragraph because it is the one thing on this list with no foreign parent at all. It is American in the way that flamenco is Andalusian, which is to say it is regional before it is national, and the regions do not much like each other. Texas treats brisket as a test of patience and salt and pepper and nothing else, the Carolinas argue internally about vinegar and mustard with a seriousness that outsiders find alarming, Kansas City wraps everything in sweet tomato and calls it hospitality, and Memphis puts the dry rub on the ribs and dares you to reach for sauce. Visitors who wandered into any of these traditions during the tournament encountered something they had not been warned about, which is that America contains genuinely distinct food cultures separated by hundreds of miles and centuries of argument, and that the word "American" flattens them in a way no local would accept.

The deepest layer, and the one most invisible from abroad, is what has happened to immigrant cooking. Mexican, Korean, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Indian, Salvadoran, and Filipino kitchens across the country have not simply preserved their traditions in amber, they have done what cuisines always do when they move, which is to adapt to new ingredients and new customers and eventually become something that exists nowhere else. Korean food in Los Angeles is not Korean food in Seoul and has not been for a generation. The taquerias of Houston and the Vietnamese restaurants of Orange County and the Ethiopian corridor in Washington are not outposts of somewhere else, they are American regional cuisines with foreign parentage, which is the only kind of American regional cuisine there has ever been. A visitor who spent a week following the group stage through host cities ate across more culinary traditions than a month in most European capitals would offer.

None of which amounts to a victory lap, and I would resist writing one even if the material supported it. Countries are not teams and cultural reputation is not a scoreboard, and the moment this argument becomes a matter of national pride it stops being interesting and starts being noise. What the World Cup provided was something more useful than a verdict: a natural experiment in which several million people with fixed expectations were distributed across an enormous and varied country and given three weeks to compare the picture in their heads against the thing in front of them. Reputations update slowly, particularly reputations built from a distance out of a nation's most exportable and least representative products, and the American reputation abroad has been running roughly a generation behind the American reality. Anyone who came for the football and stayed for a plate of brisket in Kansas City or a pizza on Orchard Street has already done the recalibration, and the rest of us can only take their word for it until we go and look ourselves.

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The Food Wasn't That Bad

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