To each his own, and that includes what makes a city great.

I will, however, bicker with #2. Atlanta doesn’t have everything there is to offer in cuisine. That much is true. But the variety of cuisine in New York, Boston, Chicago, &c. is due largely to the variety of immigrant communities in these cities. Atlanta’s population, however, is older and more homogenous. The word to categorize Atlanta’s distinctive food offerings isn’t “international” but rather “regional.” Furthermore, because Atlanta likes to think of itself as cosmopolitan, it frowns upon Southern food as quaint. (That’s one of the big problems with Atlanta: it’s angsty.) That’s not to say you can’t get a good gravy biscuit in town–just that you can get a much better one outside the perimeter. Regardless, if you’re looking for distinctive cuisine in Atlanta and bemoaning the lack of Turkish food, the problem is with your paradigm, not with the city’s offerings.

Finally, when I was living in England, I realized that Americans are horribly elitist about all things concerning cities. What is a city? they ask. What’s the best city–New York or L.A.? So on and so forth. At root, it’s just a pissing contest. (Oh, but NY has the MET and the East Village!) Elsewhere they don’t concern themselves with such petty definitions. By American standards, Newcastle-upon-Tyne is not a city. The only thing it really has is some clubs and a metro. But to the English it has an industry (though a dying one), a lot of people, a little grime, and some culture, and that’s all it needs to be a city. The question is why isn’t it a smoothly functioning, thriving city? And that should be the question for Atlanta as well. There’s no sense questioning its cityhood. It is what it is. But it could be a better city.