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The Weekly Man v. Food Review: Cleveland Rocks?

This week, when Adam Richman traveled to Cleveland, Ohio for  "Man V. Food", he proved a point that I’ve been pondering for some time now: most of the middle states have a really awful grasp on what passes as cuisine. Case 1: people waiting on line for a gyro at a place that uses sour cream for their tzatziki sauce.  I’m not an expert on Greek culture, but doesn’t this seem a teeny bit wrong to everybody?  Case 2: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland Or. all have great restaurant scenes.  Cities like Cleveland stuff a bunch of stuff in between two pieces of bread, and it gets crowned as "the official sandwich" of the city. 

If you didn’t watch the episode, or haven’t been to the East side of the Clevelo, I’m talking about a "sandwich" called the Polish Boy: a deep fried kielbasa, fries, pork shoulder, cole slaw, and hot sauce.  Pile it all on two obscured pieces of bread and you have a bunch of stuff that actually resembles vomit. Also, can we make it a law, or an unspoken rule that when you put french fries in between slices of bread, it automatically disqualifies the tag of sandwich form the equation? Case 3: For the main challenge, Adam went to Melt Bar & Grilled.  As an advocate of grilled cheese, I can get behind what this place is doing — serving all grilled cheese and beer — but I can’t say the one that Adam ate appealed to me at all.  Consisting of American, sharp cheddar, provolone, pepper-jack, havarti, swiss, muenster, smoked gouda, blue cheese, feta, herbed cream cheese, and goat cheese, with a side of fries and vinegar cole slaw, the whole thing just screams "this is why the terrorists hate us," and would probably give me awful constipation after two bites. I don’t really have any opinion on Cleveland.  My only real connection with it was the fact that it served as the middle mark on many college road-trips, and of course it’s baseball team inspired one of the greatest sports films ever: Major League.  In terms of a challenge to our hero, the town that may or may not lose Lebron James in the coming weeks, served as a very weak competition.

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