“Stack up nicely”? “Excellent restaurants all over”? The Mission District alone — a neighborhood — has better Latino food than all of RI, and probably Boston too. Ditto the Richmond and Sunset for Asian food, which crushes Boston’s and wouldn’t bother dignifying RI’s smattering of mostly bland, substandard fare. RI has SF beat for seafood, and maybe Italian, but that’s about it.

I don’t know where you lived in SF or what you ate, but the two are miles apart culinarily. RI’s only real claim to fame is in comparison to other small cities, where it does punch above its weight. But it cannot go head to head with much bigger and more diverse metro areas, and having Johnson and Wales does not change that …