Pinxtos that Pinch Your Senses
Tapas have come to seem like a dining cliché—our love affair with them has brought on a small plate revolution (and a well hidden uptick in the cost of entrées). But when done right, they are a revelation.
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Köfte and Ezme: Love at First Bite
Bi Lokma means “one bite” in Turkish, and it is the newest venue of restaurant owner/cook Orhan Yegen. A strange hybrid of self-serve cafeteria and restaurant, the combo works in Midtown East, where office goers often spend their lunchtimes in nondescript food courts. A few steps above the street and many steps up in quality, Bi Lokma is another product of Yegen’s passion for Turkish food; he’s so passionate, he claims not to care that he makes no money selling it (but don’t get him started on the evils of sharing plates!).
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Good Reviews for Druze
Pita bread can be as innocuous as Wonder Bread or, if you have it at the only Druze restaurant in New York City, it becomes something else entirely. The homemade whole-wheat pita at Gazala’s is stretchy, thin and could be mistaken for a napkin if you drop a folded sheet of it in your lap. However, you won’t if you order the Labneh cheease and z’atar wrap ($6). The pita and spiced cheese, less chalky and thinner than goat cheese, is folded into a neat rectangle of simple goodness.
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Taiwanese To Go
If New York City is, indeed, a melting pot, then Korea Town’s Food Gallery 32 is evidence that the stew in it hasn’t completely melted. This “International Food Emporium” sells only Asian (mainly Korean) fare. You bring your items upstairs where food quotes from Anglophone authors line the walls—“Kissing don’t last, cookery do”*—and you chew to the beat of thumping American pop tunes while watching Crepe Monster dish out Tokyo versions of a French staple.
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Kebab Krazy
There’s something so primitively satisfying about eating food off skewers. You can imagine our distant cave-dwelling ancestors gnawing the dripping meat off sharpened sticks. Thankfully, you don’t have to sit around a fire pit wearing cheetah skins and worrying about predators at your back. Just pop into this understated Mediterranean outpost, hidden among the garish array of 14th Street shops.
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Where Cheesy Meets Over Easy
At lunch time, this grilled cheese mecca has lines snaking around the atrium of the Citicorp Center, so use my strategy: breakfast. There are no lines at the small takeout window, and your sandwich might cost $3 less than some of the lunchtime offerings—like three cheese melt ($7.95) or beef ‘n’blue ($8.95). Order the roasted tomato and Monterey jack frittata with pork sausage on a buttermilk biscuit ($5.50). I’m fussy about biscuits, and this one is made from scratch and tastes it, fluffy and dotted with herbs. The combo of a fat spicy breakfast sausage patty with lacy frittata is like a tough-talking road worker dating an elegant damsel. The pair has chemistry.
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‘Pssst…Potstickers, Perfect’
I dialed my voicemail to hear a woman’s voice, deep and raspy: “There’s a vendor outside Bank of America on West 72nd Street. They serve pot stickers. Five for $3.50. Absolutely delicious.” No name. I was a little weirded out that someone had searched for my phone number, but I knew the caller was legit; just a week before, while shopping at the West 72nd Street Trader Joe’s, I put A-Pou’s Taste, a Taiwanese cart, on my “To Eat” list.
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Obama’s Favorite Spamwich?
Shouldn’t the fact that one of President Obama’s favorite snacks is a “spam musubi” have proved definitively that he is Hawaiian born? No long-form birth certificates are necessary when the President shows a fondness for spam, a Hawaiian staple since it was introduced in World War II.
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Que Rico at Warique
The name, derived from Quechua and Spanish, refers to Incan “temple cuisine” and the hidden places where Incan foodies went for rich, bubbling stews. In our city, high restaurant turnover accomplishes this hidden quality. Those in the know catch the scent when a beauty salon-turned-Mexican restaurant suddenly morphs into a small temple of Incan cuisine named Warique.
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Teeny Weeny Panini
The simple, excellent panini I devoured in Milan bear no resemblance to panini stateside: overstuffed pressed sandwiches with oily Italian fixings, bad bread and brown grill marks. Thankfully, the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny panini at this homey neighborhood pizza joint are something else entirely: greasy, crusty garlic knots sliced in half and stuffed with a variety of fillings. You can try them all without busting your gut or your budget, because each one is only $1.50!
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