That's not as easy as it sounds in a lot of places. Not every city is lucky enough to be the home of Buffalo wings, Kansas City barbecue, Chicago-style pizza, or Philly cheesesteaks.
And since we're here in Vancouver, we felt obligated to eat our way to the answer, apologies to Craig LaBan.
A quick and unscientific survey of passersby on Granville Street, a main thoroughfare in the heart of this fetching city's downtown, determined that its most popular fast food isn't fast at all. It's the Dungeness crab and all its mealtime manifestations.
Dungeness crabs are a little bigger, meatier, and sweeter than the blue crabs that Northeasterners - speaking of crabs - fancy.
Their home is in the eelgrass that grows in the Pacific Ocean's depths from Alaska's Aleutians all the way south to Santa Cruz, Calif.
Dungeness is prepared in a variety of ways here, though you won't find the soft-shell Easterners enjoy. And given this city's powerful Asian presence, it's hardly surprising that some of the best ways to eat it originated on that continent.
Most Vancouver residents, of course, eat crabs the way we consume ours - seasoned, steamed, cracked, and accompanied by great quantities of beer. And here there's the added bonus of being able to do so on the water. But you'd be cheating yourself if you didn't sample some of the other tasty preparations.
One of the most popular and ubiquitous of Vancouver's Dungeness dishes is Singapore Chili Crab. At the Banana Leaf restaurant on West Broadway, they prepare it, shell on, in a spicy chili sauce blended with lemongrass, tomato, and egg.
You can also find a lot of Vietnamese Tamarind Crab, the best of which reportedly is at the Hai Phong Vietnamese Restaurant on Kingsway.
There, they quick-fry the meat-crammed legs and combine them with the sweet, savory tamarind fruit and its seeds, plus salt, pepper, oil, and garlic. Yo, put it on an Amoroso roll and it would be huge at Ninth and Passayunk.
At the Sea Harbour Seafood Restaurant in nearby Richmond, site of the Olympic speedskating oval, the Dungeness is used in a traditional Chinese hot-pot dish. There the crab is wok-fried and then simmered with black beans and sweet chunks of pumpkin squash.
There are dozens more ways residents here enjoy Dungeness and I vow to do my journalistic best to sample them - just as any visitor from Vancouver would do with cheesesteaks in Philly.
Contact staff writer Frank Fitzpatrick at 215-854-5068 or ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com.
