Tag: nyc

Best Wonton Soup

Be sure to ask for the coffee shop menu, available all day and labeled “Lunch,” otherwise you’ll just be handed a single menu featuring stir fries and relatively pricey seafood. On the more robust coffee shop menu, find the glorious staples of the cuisine in its commonest form: wonton soups, over-rice dishes at bargain prices, congee, and (only available until 13:00 or so when it runs out) rice noodle rolls. The wonton soup features thin-skinned wrinkly dumplings, bulging with a combination of pork and shrimp. Have the soup with noodles and duck, and enjoy the best bowl of wonton soup in the city, the broth stronger than usual to readily flavor the massed components in the bowl.

Village Cafe

In this week’s review, Times critic Pete Wells highlights Village Cafe — a restaurant in the back of a tiny Midwood parking lot with hearty Azerbaijani dishes that stand out among similar dining spots in the area. In the 2-star review, Wells commends several of the restaurant’s dishes from the qutab; a flatbread stuffed with minced chicken, lamb, or greens; to the kufta-bozbash soup, a lamb broth containing chickpeas and a single lamb-rice meatball.

NYC Street Tree Map

The NYC Parks department maintains an online map of the city’s street trees — currently 679K mapped trees from 422 different species. Our tree map includes every street tree in New York City as mapped by our TreesCount! 2015 volunteers, and is updated daily by our Forestry team. On the map, trees are represented by circles. The size of the circle represents the diameter of the tree, and the color of the circle reflects its species. You are welcome to browse our entire inventory of trees, or to select an individual tree for more information.

Food vendor cap

The city’s government isn’t interested in helping more workers become vendors. The city capped food-vendor permits in the early 1980s; there are currently just over 4000 available, often only on the black market, where they might cost $25K (the city, by comparison, charges $200 for 2-year permits, which can be renewed indefinitely). And yet a 2015 report found that New York’s vendors contributed an estimated $293M to the city’s economy and $71M in taxes. “Street vending is an inherently New York City thing. I don’t know why there needs to be a cap on permits.”

you can only get a nyc food vendor license if you sell burnt pretzels. it’s the law. see also how the mob controls these licenses.

Stale Spices

“We’re so used to thinking of spices as powders in our kitchen cabinet, not something that comes from a plant grown by a farmer. Freshness and origin aren’t things that people consider, and I don’t have a good explanation for why that is except to say because that’s the way it’s always been.”

Hoping to change that, in 2017, he launched Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company based in New York City. Frisch works directly with farmers to source the freshest and most interesting local spice varietals around the world, from lip-smackingly tart cured sumac from Gaziantep, Turkey, to Egyptian desert fennel so licoricey-sweet it tastes like candy. His spices, which sometimes sell out days after going on sale online, are now used in kitchens run by the likes of Daniel Humm, Danny Bowien and David Chang.

Manhattan Secrets

In his latest book, Manhattan’s Little Secrets, author John Tauranac leads readers on a fascinating hunt for the overlooked and under-seen around every corner of New York City. Some of the Manhattan secrets that Tauranac reveals in his book include where to find actual stones from the dungeon where Joan of Arc was held, where to find an ancient symbol of Christianity on an apartment house and how to spot an architect’s likeness worked into the statuary of a building he designed.

Kenny Shopsin

Kenny Shopsin, the chef-proprietor of Shopsin’s, the defiantly idiosyncratic general-store-cum-restaurant in the West Village and, later, the Lower East Side, was not the sort of person for whom death ever seemed a possibility. Cranky, nonconformist, uninhibited, seemingly driven by an internal engine of profane irascibility, he was a New York legend, part of the social architecture of the city, a wild-haired totem of a lower Manhattan that once was, before the degradation of Greenwich Village into a place of vacant luxury storefronts waiting to be reanimated by businesses able to pay 5- or 6-figure monthly rents. The news of Shopsin’s death, which spread like a rumor over Labor Day weekend, and was confirmed on Tuesday by his daughter Tamara, was like one of the legs being yanked off a chair. We’re still upright, but things are very wobbly.

Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop

While Paulie Gee’s serves the Neapolitanish, toppings-eccentric pies that were all the rage when it opened in 2010, Giannone has more than pizza up his sleeve. For his second act, he’s going old-school with Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop. He and his head pizza chef Andrew Brown, a 4-year alum of Paulie Gee’s, are taking inspiration in slices from these places. Take the Freddy Prince, an upside-down Sicilian with fresh mozzarella that nods to Giannone’s favorite square, Prince Street’s Soho Square. “It’s a combo of that and one from this place in Whitestone called Freddy’s, where they have sesame seeds on the bottom of their crust.

Kopitiam

Kopitiam, an all-day Malaysian spot counters that narrative. A full meal here can cost less than a typical order of avocado toast. This is where you go for milk toast sandwiches: crustless white bread as airy as angel food cake and spread with a layer of green pandan-coconut jam that’s thicker than most burgers. The cost is $5, and the bread doubles as a dipping agent for a soup of soy sauce-spiked soft boiled eggs.