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To me, Italian food, though it has its variations, emphasizes fresh, natural ingredients and flavors with a minimum of artifice -- the best that nature has to offer, well-prepared. In California, because we have a Mediterranean climate with a wide variety of fresh vegetables, what's called California cuisine or nouvelle cuisine partakes a lot of Italian cooking although with different ingredients. Anyway, I love it. I've never had the will to make it to Europe, or the cash now, frankly, but if I ever do I'll spend most of my time in Italy and eat my way from one end to the other.
There's a lot of good USA food, but it's mainly regional and ethnic food that has been spread widely; these are often foods that started in poorer segments of society and then became popularized. BBQ, corn bread, chili and fajitas and other Tex-Mex food, Northeastern chowder and seafood dishes, a whole lot of desserts like Apple Crisp that came out of the Northeast and particularly the Pennsylvania Dutch culture -- this is American food.
Even ethnic food here in America is, in a way, American food. Tex-Mex is not really Mexican, and the Chinese food you get in many restaurants is really American-Chinese, not so much like what's eaten back in the old country. Even American-style pizza isn't really what Europeans invented. What's American about cuisine in this country is how we mix and match influences from different ethnic cuisines into new things. Like, I know a Mexican chef who works in an Italian restaurant, and what he'd really like to do is open a restaurant that fuses the two cuisines. I could definitely see where that could work.
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