Major League Dining
When the vendors cry out “PEANUTS, POPCORN,” and the crowd cheers at the crack of a bat I am always distracted by the scent of the ballpark franks. It doesn’t matter how nail biting the score is, I make my way out to the vending strip. This article I found from the New York Times Travel section discovers a variety of wide range ballpark menus. Read more below from, Buy Me Some Sushi and Baby Back Ribs.
“THE sandwich was perfectly executed: an overgenerous helping of fresh Dungeness crab meat, dressed in a gossamer coating of mayonnaise and piled between two warm slices of sourdough bread that had been scrubbed with garlic and griddled crisp. The drinks were excellent, too: a split of Laurent-Perrier Champagne for my girlfriend; a tall, ice-cold glass of hoppy Anchor Steam Beer for me. And the view at our walk-up, alfresco table was impossible to beat: palm trees swayed, sailboat masts bobbed and, in the distance, the Bay Bridge stretched out across foggy San Francisco Bay.
The service was unobtrusive, except for one thing: we were encouraged to put down our sandwiches and stand up when the national anthem came over the public address system. We were, after all, dining in the company of about 40,000 other people, at AT&T Park in San Francisco.
I spent a few weekends after opening day this year bopping around to 10 American cities, where I ate my way through 12 major league ballparks. My mission: to hoover down a shameful number of hot dogs and to sample the increasingly ambitious and occasionally delicious world of ballpark cuisine beyond peanuts and Cracker Jack.
I leapt at the chance: after nearly four years of writing the $25 and under restaurant reviews for the Dining section of The Times, this was a chance to jump from the local hot dog beat to the national one. Plenty of friends wrinkled their noses at the prospect, and with good reason — if you’ve been to enough professional sporting events in your life, you’ve certainly encountered some edible disappointments along the way. And since I grew up in the 1980s, my memory of ballpark food involved frozen pizzas, sodden hot dogs on sullen buns and bad fast-food chains.
But in the last decade or so, as aging stadiums were either renovated or replaced, the ballparks have stepped up their game, and not just for the corporate skybox crowd. New stadiums have been laid out so that nosebleed sections have decent views, the concourses aren’t dark passageways, and the food and beer offered are no longer an afterthought to the game.”
For more check out New York Times Travel.
