East Village Restaurants: JoeDough & Puddin’
Is there a neighborhood in Manhattan with more satisfying, inexpensive restraurants than the East Village? The correct answer is no. Witness: old-school cafes like Veselka and Yaffa and Mogador; first-rate ramen shops such as Ippudo and Rai Rai Ken; sandwich stop-ins Caracas Arepa, This Little Piggy, and Porchetta; dessert joints like Spot, Jane's Sweet Buns, […]

Geeky Coffee in Chelsea Means A Blue Bottle Coffee Siphon Bar
In the race to see which town can be the most coffee-nerdiest, New York City has long been playing catch-up to our second-best-in-everything-else friends in the northwest, in places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. But with the second Manhattan Stumptown coming this spring to the West Village, the continued successful expansion of the likes […]

The Bowery Diner Downtown: Chef Palombino Adds Flair to Classic NYC Bites
For months the signage outside promised that Motorino's Chef Mathieu Palombino would be opening his intriguing-sounding Bowery Diner "soon". Our eagerness was understandable: could Chef Palombino do for traditional New York City diner food what he had done for pizza at his excellent Motorino? Early reviews were mixed after Palombino finally opened The Bowery Diner […]

La Churreria: Delicious Spanish Snacks in Downtown Manhattan
Part bakery, part hot-chocolate bar (there’s coffee, too), part sandwich spot, and all with the distinct flavor of Spanish cuisine, the new La Churreria on Mulberry Street does a great job of offering weary Soho and Nolita shoppers and on-the-go quick-bite seekers cozy relief on a dreary February day. Opened in December by Jesus Manso, […]

Asian Fusion NYC: Top Chef Dale Talde’s Talde in Brooklyn
Sure, it's pretty normal for food- (and fun-) loving New Yorkers to impersonate a flash mob when an on-fire chef's restaurant opens in the trendy precincts of Soho, the West Village, the upper Bowery, et al. The Dutch. The new Acme. Tertulia. Miss Lily's. Dozens more, mobbed from day one. But out among the stroller […]

Tabata Noodle Ramen: First-Rate Asian Food in Midtown
There's never a bad time to eat a big bowl of first-rate ramen as far as we're considered. Heck, one of our favorite ramen bowls last summer was at Midtown Manhattan's Totto Ramen, on one of those miserable muggy evenings, when the last thing in the world you want to do is to pour hot […]

2 Reasons February is Amazing: Hot Chocolate Festival & National Pancake Month
Even though it's so far been kind of a fake winter here in the big town (which, by the way, we'll gladly take over last year's epic frozen slog of a season), there are still plenty of reasons to get excited over two of our favorite cold-weather New York City February festivals, both starting tomorrow, […]

Danny Meyer’s Blue Smoke BBQ NYC Opens in Battery Park City
Restaurateur extraordinaire Danny Meyer has already conquered great swaths of our fair city: the Flatiron and Madison Square (Shake Shack, Blue Smoke BBQ, Eleven Madison Park); Union Square and Gramercy (Union Square Cafe and Maialino); the Whitney and the MoMA (Untitled and the Modern) and, really, everywhere in this town that he's set down his […]

Snack Box & Nuchas in Times Square NYC
We don't pass through Times Square NYC very often, for obvious reasons, but every once in a while fate (or, more likely, out-of-town visitors) has a way of landing us smack in the middle of all of those crossroads-of-the-world hordes. Now, wading through 700 million tourists can make us feel many different things, from irritation […]

Fatty ‘Cue West Village: Better Than the Brooklyn Original?
Chef Zakary Pelaccio and his kitchens of mad-genius chefs have whipped up some of our favorite meals of the last few years: at the original Maylasian-y Fatty Crab on Hudson Street, and then the Upper West Side version of the same.  The temporary "ham restaurant," Fatty Johnsons, where his late lamented taco spot Cabrito also once […]