I might be to blame for coining cuisine=chili
, or at least promoting it as an early adopter in 2009. At the time, cuisine=*
values mostly referred to cuisines, as in general cooking traditions or restaurant genres, as opposed to specific dishes. Most regional American cuisines tended to get tagged as simply cuisine=regional
, but I found that unhelpfully vague. Growing up in Cincinnati, I was familiar with chili parlor as a genre and the five-way was practically a staple food. I had little idea that restaurants elsewhere could specialize in chili con carne as a genre too, so chili
sounded specific enough.
Nowadays, many of the cuisine=*
values refer to specific dishes, to the point that some mappers try to encode a whole menu in that key (not a good idea, in my opinion). There’s been some discussion about distinguishing the two characteristics:
I should’ve documented this tag, knowing the potential for confusion. @Graptemys didn’t have this context when documenting it as chili con carne a couple years ago.
Disambiguating it as cuisine=cincinnati_chili
sounds perfectly reasonable to me if there’s any potential for geographical overlap. Otherwise, maybe we could simply chalk it up to different regions applying their own take on the same cuisine, just as American Chinese food is unrecognizable and inedible in China. Anyhow, the good news is that, apart from Skyline, Gold Star, and a few landmark independents, there are relatively few other (Cincinnati) chili parlors to track down and retag.