Cuisine=chili: Cincinnati chili vs. chili con carne

[Hayleox]

Currently, the OSM Wiki page for the cuisine key says that cuisine=chili supposed to be used for chili con carne. However, I checked overpass-turbo for all cuisine=chili entities, and most of them are Cincinnati chili restaurants. Out of 186 results, maybe 1 or 2 dozen of them serve chili con carne; the rest are Cincinnati chili restaurants (If you’re not familiar, Cincinnati chili is a spiced sauce of Greek origin and has very little in common with chili con carne besides the name). So I wonder if the tagging scheme needs to be reconsidered. This includes two chains that are in the name suggestion index: Skyline Chili and Gold Star Chili (I started a ticket about this on the name-suggestion-index GitHub repo, and was advised to bring the discussion here).

My proposal is that we should start using cuisine=chili_con_carne and cuisine=cincinnati_chili, and cuisine=chili should be considered a deprecated tag. What do others think?

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

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:

New Tag structure food:*

In many occasion I was finding useful adding specific tags for POI related to the selling of food, this in order to know if a given location offer a specific kind of food or not, with different degree of specificity, i.e.: (fairly generic) if a amenity=fast_food offers pizza (more specific) if a shop=bakery offers strudel (a type of layered pastry) (very specific) if a shop=bakery offers açma (a type of turkish bread, salty pastry). From my understanding the current way to add this kind of…

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.