Eating your way through New York
Matt Rilkoff wishes he’d remembered a looser pair of trousers as he eats is way through the Big Apple.
There are 26,642 restaurants in New York City and this is a story about two of them. And a bagel bar, a burger bar, and a food court. But not that type of food court. A food court that makes you wish you had three stomachs.
While millions of people travel to New York every year for the monuments, museums, and sheer vitality of the city that never sleeps, I was mainly there for the food. The giant slabs of pizza, the bagels, the burgers, bakeries, and those restaurants where the waiters leave you in awe of how lowly they regard your ability to properly use a menu.
I had not prepared for this trip as I should have. A week-long fast before arriving or an obscenely loose pair of pants were both sensible precautions that I didn’t take. As luck would have it, my complete bamboozlement of the much vaunted subway system meant I nearly burned off more calories walking than I did eating.
For a genuine New York breakfast experience, and to fit in with everyone else, one thing I really wanted to do in the Big Apple was eat an overstuffed bagel. But I also had to be powerwalking down a busy street and talking loudly over the phone to my doctor about extremely personal details. I’ll admit, for a Kiwi it was a complex food fantasy.
There are bagel shops everywhere and, if you don’t know which one to trust, choose the one with the most people in it. If you have time to find the best, one of them is Black Seed Bagels on Broadway.
I choose the Sable on the black seed bagel, mostly because Sable sounded like a real New York bagel style and I figured the black seed bagel had to be the best because they’d named the bar for it.
The Sable bagel was stuffed with lox (cured salmon), onion, lettuce, and cream cheese. It was a powerful bagel. Lox, as it turns out, is extremely salty and retains a stronger fish smell than cold smoked salmon.
It was delicious but I now understand there is such a thing as fish breath, the lesser known but more offensive cousin of onion breath.
If you’re not planning to eat while you walk, the bagel bar is not far from Madison Square Park, which has two things going for it apart from being a place to sit and eat.
It’s right next to the iconic wedge that is the Flat Iron building, and it puts you just metres from another New York food experience, the Shake Shack burger bar.
I’d been warned not to miss this by numerous people. While I didn’t go there straight after the bagel, I did sneak down there the next day, an embarrassingly short time after lunch.
My arteries and life expectancy regretted the gluttonous decision, but my stomach did not.
Shake Shack isn’t fancy or complicated, it’s just really good.
Its beef burgers are top ingredients put together so well you can’t believe anyone puts them together another way. The fries make you cry for all the ones you’ve eaten that didn’t reach the mark.
No trip there is complete without also ordering a shake and some of the signature frozen custard. Like lox, I had no idea it existed until I was eating it. New York really does broaden your horizons.
Later that night I found myself in a group heading to Mercado Little Spain in the newly developed Hudson Yards. You know you’re there when you see a massive sculpture about 10 storeys high that you won’t be able to describe. It’s called the Vessel, but that doesn’t help.
Mercado is a labyrinth of three restaurants, 12 food court counters and two bars. You could stay there for a week and still miss something.
It’s the brainchild of Spanish-born chef Jose Andres, a restaurateur and humanitarian.
In 2012 and 2018, he was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. So, that means something. I think.
The atmosphere at Mercado is relaxed but it’s New York – everyone in there appears to be wildly successful and extremely good-looking. Don’t be surprised if you feel intimidated.
We started at the Spanish Diner, which served simple tapas-style dishes that initially seemed unappealing. But, with a bit of help from the waiters, we got there and, after a long dinner that included such things as fried potato with spicy