New York Restaurants

Sorry smith st not court st.

Hmm, will definitely consider. Have heard good things. Any others?

Assuming by downtown you mean under 14th st.? For sushi I still love Jewel Bako and reservations are easy. Also Sushi Nakazawa if you can get in. Babbo is nice for an intimate meal (love Charlie Bird but it's loud and chaotic). If you venture uptown a bit I honestly would recommend lunch at Le Bernadin or Marea. Lunch is not as pricey as dinner but still so awesome.

Any tribeca recommendations for eating and (cocktail) drinking? I'm pretty clueless on NYC dining. Any cuisine/price range, could be lunch or dinner or both.

Also chelsea recs for dinner, someplace not too loud?

In Tribeca, Tamarind is quite nice, aesthetically and foodwise, if you'd be into fancy Indian. They have a prix fixe option at lunch.

Chelsea: go to El Quijote next to the Chelsea Hotel. It's an ageless Spanish institution which is still good imo. Lobster specials, tapas, sangria, the works. The bill tends to add up, but you do get very generous portions. It gets busy at night, but it wouldn't be loud in terms of thumping music or anything like that. At lunch they actually play soothing old-school Muzak, which is kind of a rarity nowadays. They also stay open in between lunch & dinner hours, so you could go at 3:30 or something.

I went to Tamarind the last time I was in NYC, about five years ago, I think? Enjoyed it but would like to try something different. El Quijote sounds right up my alley, thanks!

ok guys I'm in park slope and I'm starving

i used to live here but i don't know anything anymore

I stopped eating there when they closed the Chip Shop

no… I still do go to that Szechuan place on 7th Ave & 10th, where I sat a table over from Bill de Blasio about ten years back.

lol i literally found a place called "Brooklyn Burgers and Beer" so crisis averted

i forgot how high the general standard of food is in New York. i know

burgers and beer is solid enough for what it is, would've suggested Bonnie's which is right across the street

it's fine. it's what i need. exhausted and delirious after flight. will try Bonnie's for lunch tomorrow if they're open.

naruto ramen b

I used to love Bonnies. Just wanted to share that.

i forgot how high the general standard of food is in New York.

My usual complaint is that restaurants outside of NYC have more white ppl food and fewer immigrants working in them. Velveeta and canned salsa on scrambled eggs is a “Spanish omelette” and so on. It’s dreadful.

"i forgot how high the general standard of expensive food is in New York."

Anyway: sub. in "any moderate to large city or college town" for "New York." One of the only NYC things that doesn't really exist outside of NYC is the high general standard of food available, either dine in or delivery, nearly *24/7*, with the 24/7 doing the heavy lifting. There are good cooks (and immigrants) working in kitchens everywhere.

Knoxville is a college town

No good food or immigrants there?

More importantly, can you get a good omelette there? (Jesus, Velveeta and canned salsa? Where do they serve this? Reminds me of a steakhouse I went to in Omaha once that served deep fried parsley.)

the standard of food - both in restaurants and what you can expect to buy in a random corner deli - is substantially higher in New York than it is in Knoxville. willing to stand behind that.

unsurprising that the first challenge to that statement came from username “josh in CHICAGO”

Ha. There is no question whatsoever that the quality or at least certainly variety of food in NYC is greater than that in Knoxville, sure. I just always bristle at "only in NYC!" claims, or maybe just specifically that outside of NYC there is nothing but white ppl food and no immigrants. I've had great meals all over the country, in the most surprising of places, and I've had terrible meals, too, including pizza (!) in NYC (!!) that gave me a terrible case of food poisoning.

the quality of Mexican food in Knoxville has risen approx 20x in the last decade or two it is true

and mexican food in nyc is roundly terrible in my experience

you’re still kinda otm about the baseline “probably not gonna have a bad time” quality of meals here tho (it’s probably even better in chicago where they have and eat all the good food)

Yeah, the only other place that I feel like you can get as consistently high quality food of food as NYC, across a range of prices, is pretty much more focused on that country's cuisine, like Japan.

Whenever anyone asks me what I miss about NYC, I always say the food.

I kind of feel that most major cities have their particular food niche, based on immigrants and whatnot. I know people that swear by the food - quality and diversity - in Houston, for example. From Pittsburgh to Portland, this country is packed with great food.

All cities have good food somewhere, that's a given.

It's interesting to revisit the same places/cities/regions over the course of many, many years. You can really see when they start fast forward through many years of food stagnation to catch up.

i will say i have been surprised at how... peremptory the espresso drinks i have had in pk Slope have been? gorilla, clever blend, swedish espresso bar etc - they are all several notches below what I'm used to at the equivalent sorts of places in London. is it cuz London has more Australians??

Maybe it's the water?

xpost That's a good question. If I had to hazard a guess, it's that starting a hipster coffee shop is kind of a generic "I've got a great idea for a business!" sort of idea, but I'm not sure how well trained the baristas are. Factor in a pretty harried environment and probably Americans being accustomed to average (or goofy) espresso drinks, and perhaps the standards are low? I think (speaking of Australians) it's telling that the flat white has become a thing here, even at Starbucks. It was always one of my favorite things about going to Australia, its simplicity and drinkability, so perhaps the novelty of something so simple and accessible and not soaked in syrup and covered with sprinkles held some appeal here? Americans settled for shitty coffee for decades and decades, and it's only been in the last 20 years or so that they've finally started to catch up.

Or it could be the water! I remember there used to be a NY pizza place in Santa Monica whose proprietor had a cocktail of minerals and whatnot added to the water to mimic NYC drinking water and therefore better replicate his pizza dough of choice.

i mean they literally just don't make them well, to the extent that it seems pretty clear they don't even realize there is a higher standard. they look and taste like they've come out of a machine. it's not terrible by any means but these are places with like, framed vintage posters of coffee machines on the wall and little stickers saying things like "only good coffee" like the technical wizardry of coffee-making is their USP but the coffee you get could be from the unit in the breakfast room of a fair-to-middling la quinta suites

There's a question for you, now that I've brought it up: is the notion of a "hipster coffee shop" a distinctly American thing? It seems that for a long time "hipster" was conflated with "snob," and you were a snob because you actually wanted to go to a coffee shop of quality, rather than McDonald's or some chain. But in other countries they've had great coffee shops for decades, so there would be nothing "hip" about wanting a good espresso.

i think very, very few countries outside italy have had good coffee shops for decades

might be just those places? i would try grumpy, hungry ghost, or blue bottle in park slope.
but i would also believe that nyc is behind lots of cities in the us and abroad when it comes to third wave coffee.
xxp

thanks for the recs! i forgot about hungry ghost - i have had good coffee there

i have to say I'm particularly disappointed in gorilla, which i thought of as a very credible place a dozen years ago

yeah, I do agree that americans making espresso for american palates is its own thing, even if it happens subconsciously. Coffee has it's own terroir.

I always have these issues when I go from place to place and bring food or wine somewhere else. So much affects how it presents itself when you are not acclimated to the local food and water.

We totally have hipster coffee shops in chile.

Only semi-related, I remember reading about Starbucks opening its first shop in Vienna, and everyone there predicted it would fail because there was nothing someone in Vienna liked more than taking their time, sipping their coffee and smoking a cigarette. And Starbucks turned out to be a big success, because there was a big contingent of people in Vienna who, go figure, *wanted* a smoke-free coffee shop that did not require an hour-long commitment.

Park Slope is not really considered a great neighborhood for restaurants.

Yes- i went to Fausto last night though, which is terrific

I've been to a random sprinkling of diners around NY/NJ/PA/NYC, and outside of NYC the quality goes down so fast. If it's a Greek ("Greek") diner, it might be fine (shoutout to the Pompton Queen, you were phenomenal!), but places in PA are based on Germanic heritage cuisines and local preferences, and...yikes. The most flavorless starch mounds known to humankind. They will not have spinach--like literally in the whole kitchen they do not offer or use any spinach or asparagus or broccoli or any vegetable that's not frozen. They will not have feta or blue cheese. They will not use any spices at all. There will be no hot sauce available. It's bad, people.

Tbh we're finding the same thing in small Hudson Valley towns. It's almost universally terrible unless you go to a larger city known for having a "scene," like Beacon. Even then, lots of places are bad (Brothers Trattoria--red sauce and white tablecloths and nothing else; the wine was bad, the sauce was bad, I'm pretty sure they lied about the gluten-free pasta option because I got sick afterward). The good ones are ramen, Palestinian, Sri Lankan.

and mexican food in nyc is roundly terrible in my experience

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Thursday, March 14, 2019 12:36 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is ridiculous and/or a narcissism of small differences. Some is mediocre, some is good, some is really good, but nothing is as bad as Velveeta and food service watery salsa so I don't want to hear it.

Yeah, NYC is just on an entirely different level than almost anything I've experienced. Being able to get any type of cuisine and being able to get the authentic version and then the americanized version and both being good. And being able to source those directly imported ingredients yourself. There is such a high concentration of people really knowledgeable and interested in food that nothing average can really survive. Unless it's a laundering front or they own the building.

it is absolutely ridiculous and a narcissism of small differences to the point, i can't account for why a burrito in san francisco is perfect while every burrito i've had in new york over the past nine years is overloaded to the point of being unwieldy, and tasteless on top of it

to the point where*

Aren't all the burritos in NY really done in the California burrito style?

I've had some really amazing tacos (cecinas, lenguas, carnitas) and huaraches in ny.