I can’t speak to the western food now, but it was starting to get really good in Shanghai in the 00s. But as for Chinese food…it is leaps and bounds better than Taiwanese. I’m biased as I like savory and spicy food and don’t like sweet food and seafood, but there is very little local food that I enjoy in Taiwan. The noodles are awful, the hot pot is not very good, and everything seems sweet, bland, or blah. Even high end places can’t seem to get any type of spicy food right: Hunan, Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou, Yunnan, Xinjiang, and Beijing or Dongbei staples are almost completely absent or unrecognizable.
On the plus side, we don’t have a dictatorship squashing all of our rights and monitoring everything we do, so we got that going for us.
As for pizza, I’m not a huge fan of Napoli or Roma style, and I still haven’t found dependable NY style. It seems odd to me that it is much easier for me to get Chicago style pizza (which John Stewart correctly argues isn’t even real pizza…though I do still like it a lot) than NY style.