• Potatoes served cut fried and hot, cold macaroni salad, white hots (or any other beef/chicken/pork protein), a greek-inspired meat hot sauce, chopped raw onions, and yellow mustard. It ain’t the prettiest dish, but it’s ours.

• Dipped in flour, egg, and fried chicken with a white wine lemon butter sauce, (and in my house) resting on angel hair pasta and sauteed spinach. A french dish made by Italians in Rochester, and we made it famous.

• Glaciers cut the limestone bed rock of the mid New York region and left almost two full hands of lakes in their wake, giving us some of the deepest and cleanest fresh water bodies in the country. How many fingers does your state have?

• Born of German immigrants, survived the great “Noble Experiment“ that is Prohibition, and perfector of an ale that has no dairy in its recipe despite its name, and yet, takes no water from the river that shares its name.

• Achieved through ingenuity and passion of immigrants George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry, expanded through creative genius like James Vick, and maintained by Charles Crosman, Brown Brothers, Horace Hooker, and the Glen Brothers, among others, we established a horticultural dynasty in the 1850s that lasted into the 20th century. We were the country’s Flower City.

• Frankfort Brown, Elisha Johnson, Ebenezer Allen, Oliver Phelps, Nathaniel Gorham, Nathaniel Rochester, Charles Carroll, William Fitzhugh, all founding names to our original and most famous industry: flour production. There was a time when the English Royal Family would only order their grain and flour from this region (Queen Victoria’s reign). By the 1830s we were the world’s Flour City.

Here in Rochester, we have some stories to tell.