To start, when I mentioned Rochester, NY, it was to give a specific personal experience. I have tried high-end restaurants there, I said. And found them lacking. Did I mention pizzas? No. But Italians coming back from the USA in general complained about Italian food (especially over-sauced pasta) and pizzas in the States. If you have eaten Italian food in Italy you will understand why.
And size is not always a reason for diversity. I have found excellent pizza in a tiny village next to Tangiers in Morocco. Modena, Bologna, Forence are big-sized Italian cities and certainly very rich. But you'll be able to count on your fingers the number and range of foreign restaurants in the cities. Italians in general only want to eat Italian. Like the Chinese (Chinese) or the Americans (fastfood, diners, McDo...). I have talked to Ferrari's logistics Manager and he assured me that his principal job in races all over the world would be to find Italian restaurants for his team. Nothing else would do. Only the English and Indians in the team would eat something else.
Precisely most restaurants anywhere would try to adapt to their local clientele. Then if the city is big enough, you will have a larger variety of say Chinese restaurants and some will be able to be more authentic than others. Where your Chinese migrants come from also play an important part. In Spain, France, Italy for example, they usually come from Wenzhou and Zhejiang - known for their matchsticks and leather but not for their cuisine. But in London, you get many Cantonese and Hong Kongese and Cantonese cuisine is the best so you get better if not very good Chinese food in London.
NYC is cosmopolitan. As is Paris. A cosmo city is one where people of many ethnicities, religions and cultures meet and live in close proximity. Singapore is cosmo on 2 primary demographic planes : its own mutli-racial population that makes up 3.6 mil and its multi-racial foreign population that makes up the remaining 1 mil. After that you may argue on tertiary (e.g. services) grounds whether the city is cosmo enough as cosmo should be. But that would be a value i.e. subjective.
I am a foodie. I cook. I live to eat. The last time I bothered to count, I have eaten my way through 218 cities in more than 28 countries. Singapore therefore I can say has a good offering of different cuisines, some more authentic than others. After that, why certain restaurants survive better than others, it all depends on demand. Like Americans love Tex-Mex because you have loads of Mexicans and have gotten used to some form or other of Mexican food. We have a handful of them here, we could possibly enjoy some Tex-Mex now and then, but I don't think many would be passionate about it. Would we be less cosmo because we do not have as many Mexican restaurants as say NYC?
Thai and Indonesian food in Singapore is good and you have different types of said restaurants, some more Chinese-influenced (Thailand itself has alot of Chinese influence), others more centred on a certain region like Bali or Sumatra etc etc. The fact that we have so many Thai or Indonesian restaurants when these countries are so nearby is a sign that we must either have alot of their natives here or that we really enjoy their food.
Huggy I think
you are missing my point.
Why do we need frankies when we have prata and dosai? If you say we miss the cosmo mark because we do not have Kirghiz cuisine, fair enough. But frankies?
And if I said pratas are like our pizzas, that's what I said. They are not pizzas. But if pizza is hot in NYC, that's because you have loads of Italian migrants there. In which case pizza wouldn't be foreign, it could be considered native. So it's not because you have pizza that you're more cosmo than Singapore. We have pizzas too (in this case very foreign), but we have loads more prata - because pratha is sort of like our pizza as pizza is to NYC.
I could summarise by saying that a cosmo city is not defined by the number of Mexican restaurants or frankies or pizzas that it has, but by its own unique cosmo composition that exiges a certain combination of cosmo tertiary offerings. Of course, we have to agree that there has to be a certain degree of diversity for qualification. And also the cosmo population can occasionally be educated and surprised by more extra-community cosmo offerings, only making it even more cosmo.
Though if you say that because in NYC more Cosmopolitans are served any evening there than any time in Singapore, and therefore just for that Singapore cannot be cosmo, then I would have to give up.
Je pense donc je suis. Le reste du temps, je ne suis qu'une fleur.