Bring them down to Tucson in Baja AZ. We just got designated the first UNESCO World City of Gastronomy in the United States. You can read about it here. And here.
And here's a little cut and paste from the first article in Edible Baja Arizona to pique your interest:
What makes Tucson worthy? Like a Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for an author’s body of work rather than a single publication, there is no single reason for Tucson to earn the accolade.
There is what came before: Tucson has the longest agricultural history of any city in North America, extending back more than 4,000 years. Three thousand years after the first farmers of the Sonoran Desert settled in the Santa Cruz River valley, missionary Father Eusebio Francisco Kino traveled on horseback from Mexico to an O’odham village called Schookshon—meaning “below the black hill”—and found a community of 750 people thriving on cactus and mesquite, tepary beans and sunflowers, corn and squash. In 2000, archeologists dug below the surface of a decidedly modern city and “found evidence of habitation preserved in every layer, going back 4,000 years,” says Jonathan Mabry, the historic preservation officer for the City of Tucson...
By the way, that black hill is an extinct volcano. You can still see evidence of lava on parts of it and where I live, the rains often expose black ash from when it blew.
Growing up in San Antonio, TX, I always felt like we were where the south meets the west. I can't remember a time when I didn't eat Mexican food or BBQ or venison sausage or sauerkraut (my mother made it) or okra or biscuits and gravy or black-eyed peas or collards or summer squash or crabs or fresh or saltwater fish or oysters or shrimp or pinto beans and rice or tomatoes and other veggies on a vegetable plate. Vegetarians and vegans, don't get too excited. Many of those vegetables were cooked with a good chunk of ham hock. Lovers of the bland may blanch, but we used what we called "pepper sauce," Trappey's hot peppers in vinegar from Louisiana, on most of the veggies, too.
So all that and a lot more was "American" to me. If I still lived in TX, it's those kinds of foods I'd take people to eat.
Here in Tucson, it would definitely be for some of our Sonoran style Mexican food, Sonoran hot dogs and out to Mission San Xavier del Bac for some fry bread from one of the Tohono O'odham vendors in the square out in front of the mission.
