What's the Best 'Mid' Food?

We're talking bad pizza, good regional delicacies, punk rock, sports pages, movies and more! It's Friday at the ACBN.

There's an old saying that posits "Sex is like pizza: even when it's bad, it's still pretty good."

Anyone who believes this has never had pizza in northern Europe, or for that matter, sex in northern Europe.

(Ach, nicht dort!)

Pizza, despite its well-deserved place as one of the world's favorite foods, is in fact quite often bad, sometimes execrably so. I have had some genuinely terrible pizzas in my life, and I have no doubt that you have, too. There is a long-running social media account (first on Twitter, now on Bluesky) called "Random Restaurant Bot", and its sole purpose is to post pictures automatically scraped from the Google listings of restaurants all over the world. The one thing that I have learned from following this account is that awful-looking pizza is the world's truest shared language, one spoken from Johannesburg to Jalisco and Jakarta to Johnson City.

Not all foods have such low floors.

I love a well-made burger, whether it's a a thick, hand-formed patty made from a special blend I ground myself or a lacy smashburger at a well-regarded diner. There is an art to a good burger, and when done well (not well-done, mind you), it's a culinary thing of beauty. I'll also happily eat a crappy burger, though; an overcooked-from-frozen patty and a slice of American cheese will do the job just fine when tasked with it.

(Did I conceive of this discussion while eating lunch at the fifth-grade field trip to an amusement park that I chaperoned this week? Yes. It's called writing what you know, and all the great writers do it.)

Anyways, I got to thinking:

What are the best (and worst) mid foods?

That is, the foods where you're most (and least) likely to still enjoy the low-quality version of them.

I have some thoughts, but of course I want to hear yours, too.

First, the best mid foods:

Nachos – again, I love a good nacho. The long-closed Tribeca bar South's served a mountainous plate of aggressively-loaded nachos that I still dream about years after I last had them. This fondness for a fully-loaded nacho doesn't keep me from going to town on a tray of plain tortilla chips with a cup of orange cheese if that's what's on offer at the pool snack bar. Where pizza depends on good dough–an easy thing to get wrong–nachos of course rely on chips, which are nearly impossible to screw up.
Chili – You can spend $70 and a whole day making a Kenji-worthy pot of chili and have a good chance of winning your office cookoff. You can also toss a tube of ground beef with a can of chili beans and a can of tomatoes and still be right in the mix. I don't think I've ever had a truly bad bowl of chili, and I'm counting the time I was served chili with a rock in it. (I picked it out, and finished the chili. It was rural Arizona and the next restaurant was miles away.)
Hot Dogs – I have never walked by a streetside hot dog vendor without at least thinking about getting a hot dog. It is the great struggle of my life to only succumb to this impulse occasionally.
Baked Potatoes – There is a food truck in the UK that has gotten internet-famous for serving elaborately-loaded baked potatoes that Brits will wait in very long lines for. I will not make this a commentary on the palates of the British, because I enjoy a potato myself. I just don't see the need to wait in line for the best potato, because the baseline potato is going to be 80-90% as good.
Sushi – When formulating a list of takes, it's important to identify one that you're not 100% confident in but still commit to defending it. Did you know that Kroger is the largest seller of sushi in the United States? Wait, who would eat sushi from Kr– Me. I am the one buying it. (It's fine.)

Now, the worst mid foods:

Sandwiches – Possibly the biggest drop from ceiling to floor here, a gap bigger than the interior of St. Peter's. At the top, you have an Italian hoagie from an East Coast deli, among the truly sublime foodstuffs of the world–and at the bottom, you have a chicken Caesar wrap from an airport grab-and-go.

Barbecue – Mid barbecue is actually the most common form of barbecue. It is usually edible, but it will also be presented to you as though it were much better and priced to match. Few culinary experiences disappoint me more than paying $17/pound for pulled pork that I could make better at home with a Crock Pot, let alone on my smoker. Mediocre barbecue is so routinely passed off as good that I suggest we replace the term "gaslighting" with "applewood smoking".
Salmon – The baseline 'fancy' food, served tepid and dry to you at weddings, fundraising galas, corporate luncheons and medium-nice restaurants. It is simultaneously overcooked and undercooked, and you will wish you had ordered the chicken instead. (The chicken is also bad, but it was never pretending to be otherwise.)
Cajun food – I know I've made a bit over the years of claiming that Skyline Chili is a form of gumbo, but that's a joke. There are restaurants all over the place interpreting gumbo or jambalaya in ways that suggest an even-thinner understanding of what those dishes are supposed to be than my sarcastic one. Why is there corn in this? What are you doing??
Apples – We have Honeycrisps now. Cosmic crisps. At this point, a mealy Red Delicious apple is an insult. Unfortunately, that's all the airport lounge had after I threw out that chicken Caesar wrap.

Did I miss something? Am I totally off-base?? Do you love Kroger sushi, too???

I want to hear your thoughts on the matter.

What's the best (and worst) Mid Food?

While you ponder the psychic damage that a bad sandwich can inflict, I'm going to start the show.

It's Memorial Day Weekend, apparently? I truly forgot that that was the case until yesterday, because it is also the last day of my kids' school year and I have not sat still in a month. Nevertheless! I am ready to seize the three-day weekend with gusto, and in the service of that goal, I've got nothing but the best in food, drink, music, books, and all manner of other entertainment. (Oh, and pets, too!)