Tag: food

NYC Cheap Eats

As restaurant prices in New York City continue to soar, finding great inexpensive places becomes more of a priority — and if the food is not only delicious but also outside a diner’s previous experience, all the better. Eater critic Robert Sietsema regularly rounds up neighborhood spots and reviews standouts in the 5 boroughs and adjacent metropolitan areas. The listed are a choice collection of those restaurants, complete with menu recommendations.

2018-04-17:

New York City is not a cheap town. A Monday night dinner at an average bistro can easily run to at least $50 per person, weekday lunch salad rings in near $15, and the norm for cocktails is nearing $18. But that’s not to say there aren’t still deals available for varied, satisfying, and delightful fare — which is exactly what this guide aims to illuminate.

On here, find the best dollar slice in your neighborhood, elusive Korean-Uzbek dishes, century-old spaghetti and meatballs, late-night Ghanaian food, and other standout affordable fare across the 5 boroughs. Take yourself on a walking food tour of Chinatown, eat through the city’s top tacos, and gorge on rice noodles.

Brunch Boom

Is this the golden age of New York brunch? The city is filled with meals that will win over even the strongest brunch skeptics. Out with the same old eggs Benedict, and in with dishes like torta di scarola, apple-strudel sticky buns, and egg-filled Tunisian pastries brik. Here, a guide to everything that’s new and notable in New York brunch.

Ramen Shirts

Are you so ramen-obsessed that you feel the need to publicly declare your allegiance to Menya Musashi’s tsukemen over rival Tokyo chain Setagaya’s? Of course you are. Now, Uniqlo has come to your rescue. The clothing chain just released a collection of tees with graphics honoring Japan’s top ramen shops, so you can now wear the logo of your favorite “world-renowned Japanese ramen shop” in a $15, 100% cotton design.

Iekei-style Ramen

When E.A.K. Ramen opened, it stood out in this ramen-crazed city by serving iekei-style ramen. That style of soup — which submerges thick noodles in a creamy tonkotsu-shoyu broth blend, topped with spinach, seaweed, and chashu (roast pork belly) — was difficult, if not impossible, to previously find. “Shio ramen is often a category in Japan, but it can be boring. It’s too plain, so it needed a stronger flavor. We wanted to really differentiate our shio ramen option from the shoyu signature, since the differences are so subtle.” The team landed on the addition of butter and garlic oil, with an added aesthetic bonus of the stark broth-to-oil contrast for a “cute” visual. The body parts of a chicken (but not the wings) are added into this second-step broth pot, which also includes some previously made, fully finished broth from the day prior, kind of like the mother or starter used to make bread. “It’s not a 1-generation thing. It needs to ‘inherit’ older broth, to really change the flavor”. This 2nd, main vat of broth then cooks for 24 hours. There’s also a 3rd “sub-pot,” so when the main vat of broth gets too concentrated, some of this more-diluted broth can be poured in, typically every 30 minutes. “The broth really needs to be taken care of, almost like a baby”.

NYC Top Slices

Neighborhood pizzerias are the backbone of New York City’s vernacular cuisine — easily as important as hot dog carts, Chinese-American carry-outs, soul food cafes, and pastrami sandwiches in defining the city’s historic culinary landscape. Since the 1950s, these stalwarts have unceasingly provided delicious nourishment at astonishingly cheap prices to rich and poor alike, but their massive achievements have largely gone unsung.

PQR

Angelo Iezzi — an incredibly well-known and respected pizza maker in Rome — has teamed up with a restaurateur here to open a Roman pizzeria on the Upper East Side. Called PQR, it will sell what’s known as pizza al taglio, or by the cut. This square style of pizza has an airy dough with a crisp bottom and tender interior, and Iezzi is known as a modern master of it.

Té Company

Té Company in the West Village is that rare tearoom known as much for its excellent food as for its focused selection of meticulously sourced teas and the care with which they’re served. Credit for that goes to Frederico Ribeiro, a Portuguese-born former Per Se sous chef who eschewed predictable finger sandwiches and scones for a daily-changing menu of seasonal, Iberian-accented small plates, and whole-wheat sourdough bread better than what you could find at the city’s top bakeries.

Clean eating scams

Instagram is for dummies

The oh-so-Instagrammable food movement has been thoroughly debunked – but it shows no signs of going away. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it

and similarly for waterwater:

“Real water” should expire after a few months. His does. “It stays most fresh within one lunar cycle of delivery. If it sits around too long, it’ll turn green. People don’t even realize that because all their water’s dead, so they never see it turn green.” Mr. Singh believes that public water has been poisoned. “Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them. Chloramine, and on top of that they’re putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.” (There is no scientific evidence that fluoride is a mind-control drug, but plenty to show that it aids dental health.)

Sushi physics

Master sushi chefs in Japan spend years honing their skills in making rice, selecting and slicing fish, and other techniques. Expert chefs even form the sushi pieces in a different way than a novice does, resulting in a cohesive bite that doesn’t feel all mushed together. In this short video clip from a longer Japanology episode on sushi, they put pieces of sushi prepared by a novice and a master through a series of tests — a wind tunnel, a pressure test, and an MRI scan — to see just how different their techniques are. It sounds ridiculous and goofy (and it is!) but the results are actually interesting.