Name your favorite cultural/ethnic area in your city or town...
 

I love the different ethnic and cultural areas of San Francisco (though gentrification has eroded a lot of these areas :( ). Today I spent a nice relaxing couple of hours in Japantown mall checking out the wonderful little shops and getting some good food at the Japanese market.

What areas of your city that have a strong ethnic or cultural influence that you like to visit regularly? And what do you learn from these areas?

St. Louis has "The Hill". It is mostly an Italian neighborhood on the south side with wonderful restaurants and a few Italian bakeries and grocery stores.

I go to the restaurants about 2-3 times a year and the grocery about the same. I am not a huge Italian food fan but enjoy a good Carbonara once in awhile!

One of the disadvantages of DC is that the best cultural/ethnic areas are not in the city itself but instead in the suburbs. Places like the Eden Center, which is the hub of Northern Virginia's Vietnamese Community. Or Langley Park or Bailey's Crossroads where there are huge enclaves of Latinos.

Not any ethnic areas in my small city ilovetotravel although there are a few businesses throughtout the area owned by noncaucasian people, but no central point so to speak.

In SF I miss the "old" NorthBeach where Italians actually lived, where mass was said in Italian at St Peter and Pauls etc. But I still enjoy North Beach although I long for the way it was.

ChinaTown is always interesting if one wonders off of the main area such as Grant. Haven't been to Japantown Mall in years..thanks for the reminder.

I live smack in the middle of an ethnic area. We have a Japaneese, Korean, Indian grocery store. Restaurants range from Mexican to Afganistan. My neighbors are Chineese, Black, Turkish, Spanish, Lebanese. MIT and Harvard flank us.

I long for the neighborhood I grew up in. It was one of Buffalo's biggest ethnic areas - the Italian west side. It is Italian no more and, unfortunately, it has become a huge ghetto.

The neighborhood I live in now is still pretty much Italian (it was always a secondary Italian neighborhood, but not the same as the west side). There are many Italian restaurants, bakeries, butchers, etc. And they're good, but not the same.

So for now, my own neighborhood is my favorite ethnic area.