My 50 Favorite Restaurants in NYC: 50-41
Let’s get right into it. All photographs were taken by me unless noted otherwise.
La Placita Taqueria & Caffe - 3887 Broadway, New York, NY, 10032 (Washington Heights)
Bright blue and bright orange abound on the walls and bright green on the plates at this Washington Heights newcomer, which lies two-and-a-half blocks south of New York-Presbyterian. On the pictured taco plate, a not-particularly-reasonable $19 when ordered with a soda, and outfitted with lime, cucumber, radish, and spring onion, gaze at their delectable carne asada—the best of the bunch— along with perfectly chewy-crispy carnitas and meticulous renditions of suadero (a.k.a. pork jowl) and al pastor that all work to launch La Placita to the top ranks of unduly obscure New York taco joints. Bushwick’s wonderful and long-departed Taqueria Izucar came to mind a couple times upon first visit.
La Esquina - 114 Kenmare Street, New York, NY 10012 (SoHo)
La Esquina, 2018 I think the idea behind La Esquina is that the downstairs is “cool” and “clubby” and the upstairs looks like a classic taqueria, and that the relationship between the two is that the downstairs is rendered even cooler and clubbier for its ironic relationship to the taqueria-ish upstairs—the ol’ speakeasy-behind-the-Five-Guys trick, endemic to 21st-century Manhattan. The good news is that you don’t need to and shouldn’t hit the celebrity-friendly underground portion of this two-floor venue, and that you can even benefit from that portion’s existence while sticking to the delicious, somewhat pricey tacos upstairs: one night, I witnessed the incredible spectacle of boastful NYU-grad professional types and enthusiastic young women in sparkly dresses being turned away for trying to hit the club via the inside of the taqueria, apparently a procedural no-no (go around the building!). I laughed, they cried, I scarfed down delicious $4.50-ish tacos, they left empty-handed. Schadenfreude is forever. It’s top 50!
Famous Fish Market - 684 Saint Nicholas Avenue, New York, NY 10030 (Harlem)
Photograph taken by Yelp user Robert W. in 2015 Kind of like the also-great Burek’s Pizza in Ridgewood, Queens, Famous Fish Market, located across the street from the 145th Street A/B/C/D train station in Harlem, is nondescript, hard to find, tiny, essentially free of decorations, and has a menu that you can read in its entirety in ten seconds. You can get fish, shrimp, chips, fish and chips, shrimp and chips, fish and shrimp, and fish and shrimp and chips, and if there’s anything I forgot it’s because I don’t understand how permutations work rather than because I missed an ingredient. The prices are all right there in big workmanlike font beneath the names of the items, too. For the two college summers during which I lived in Harlem, my pick was shrimp and chimps with a can of soda and a cup of hot sauce, often consumed in a park nearby—St. Nicholas and Jackie Robinson are both under five minutes away.
The Soul Spot - 302 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11201 (Boerum Hill/Downtown Brooklyn)
The Soul Spot, 2017 I dig the vibes and ethos I sense emanating from this Caribbean- and soul food-inflected eatery near the intersection of Smith and Atlantic in Brooklyn: seven years after graduating high school in the Gambia in 1996, the seemingly eternally sharp-dressed Yaya Ceesay opened his first restaurant with a forward-thinking but cohesive menu that dips into multiple ideas as to what makes food “soulful,” corralling together shrimp scampi, cornbread, chicken and dumplings, salmon croquettes—and that’s just the á là carte menu! Ceesay clearly remains proud of his expansive catering practice, as well—it’s advertised in full on the retaurant’s website—but I most strongly recommend stopping in personally to witness and enjoy the masterful balance of comfort and adventurousness in his expert cooking.
Villa Castillo - 1474 Pitkin Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 1212 (Brownsville)
A lot of Dominican restaurants have provided me with reasonably priced comfort and consistency over the years, especially when I lived in the northernmost Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, but this one, located between a charter school that used to be a massive movie theater and the butt-end of a really dicey multi-lane intersection in Brownsville, Brooklyn, has a lunch special and a kind kitchen and counter staff that stick in my mind. For $9, order rice and beans plus your choice of roast chicken, pernil, chicharrones, stew chicken, or any number of other proteins, sit down at a small table near the back, and enjoy an oasis of soothing flavors, not least among them a tasty green garlic sauce. The orange awning helps this restaurant stand out on a business-heavy stretch of Pitkin Avenue.
Forever Taste - 27 Rutgers Street, New York, NY 10002 (Lower East Side)
This playful and eclectic Chinese restaurant on a picturesque stretch of Rutgers Street just east of the Manhattan Bridge is cash-only and extremely small but punches well above its weight class, on the strength not only of its solid hand-pulled specialties from Shaanxi (that’s the same region of China from which we derive the troubled but always-acclaimed chain of Xi’an Famous Foods restaurants) but also its odder offerings, such as absurdly good-value “chicken nuggets”, wryly hinting with scarequotes at the inaccuracy of their own nomenclature (these things have bones in them!)—only $2.50 for 4 sizable pieces of delicious fried poultry.
Daily Provisions - multiple locations
Daily Provisions, 2017 The coffee, sandwiches, and crullers at Danny Meyer’s small chain of Daily Provisions cafes, the first of them opening in 2017 near 19th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, are all a cut above—the restaurant does far more than the boring burgers at Shake Shack to establish the name-brand restaurateur as a culinary innovator who still cares a whit about accessibility. In particular, the cinnamon cruller and chicken Milanese sandwich at Daily Provisions both relay a feeling all too rare in New York’s luxury-food landscape—they’re rich but not too rich in constitution, thrumming deliciously with the energy of worthwhile sugary-savory splurge on an especially good morning in the life of one of us, rather than feeling like an expensive slog to limn the average morning of an unreasonably rich person.
Mambi - 4181 Broadway, New York, NY 10033
Washington Heights’ Dominican diner Mambi is open 24 hours and sells lottery tickets out front and has a big pig head behind the long diner counter and TVs playing and brightly lit but yellowing placards to advertise different food items above the heat lamps. The food is tasty and workmanlike and decidedly takes a backseat to the absolutely inimitable flow of conversation and community and cooking that every good restaurant both is and exceeds. Go here to experience something.
Sal & Carmine Pizza - 2671 Broadway, New York, NY 10025 (Upper West Side)
This longstanding pizzeria, for decades before the 2017 launch of hype-generating Sicilian spot Mama’s Too about three blocks north, was easily the best place to get a cheese or pepperoni pie near Columbia University, my alma mater, and I wouldn’t be so sure it’s been summarily dethroned. Warm and woody inside, this pizza spot specializes in a crust that sure tastes like something rather than functioning as a mere surface; in fact, from the piquant and tongue-clicking tomato to the perfectly salty cheese, just about every ingredient in Sal and Carmine’s slices feels extra-discernible, linking its flavor profile to Flushing standbys like Lucia and Amore, whose constituent layers feel more like they add up to a full meal than with your usual slice joints. Thoroughly nourishing, thoroughly underrated.
Birria-Landia - multiple locations
Now with locations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side and signs of its influence or the influence of things it influenced nearly everywhere, Birria-Landia’s Jackson Heights food truck is no doubt the most iconic manifestation of the adobo-marinated, consommé-cooked meat dish hailing from Jalisco, Mexico, even if seemingly every street corner in Lower Manhattan and North Brooklyn is festooned with different attempts at outdoing the culinary earthquake of the original. The flavors here, sweet and savory and intense and juicy, seem somehow more well-rendered than those found at the spin-offs, where the marinated meats can alternate between overpowering and bland, demonstrating how difficult it is to balance the intense flavors of birria. At Birria-Landia, the dynamic between the solidity of the beef itself—purportedly a mix of brisket, shank, and top round—and the intense juiciness of the consommé is somehow a hyperbolic rendition of finger-licking instead of slowly sickening, proving that nobody in New York really does it better than founding brothers José and Jesús Moreno.
#40-31 coming next week…
This has convinced me to finally try Birria and the myriad of Taco trucks in Jackson Heights.