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The Slow Food Guide to New York City

Restaurants, Markets, Bars

by Patrick Martins, Ben Watson

Introduction

SUSTAINABILITY AND THE CITY

One of the oldest of old jokes is the one about the man who tells hisfriend that he just bought an 800-pound gorilla. “Where does he sleep?”his friend asks him. “Anywhere he wants to,” the man answers.

Great cities in general, and New York City especially, are a lot like that 800-pound gorilla. They make their own rules. They demand vast quantities of resources (global as well as regional) simply to exist from day today. They even create their own local microclimates, with their miles of pavement, tall skyscrapers, and other aspects of the “built environment.”

The first question we asked ourselves when we considered doing this book was the obvious one: “What is Slow about New York?”At first blush, the city appears to be a frenetic, voracious, one-way consumer of goods--the very epitome of fastness, unsustainability, and our throwaway society. Some social thinkers and rural philosophers have even gone so far as tosuggest that the world doesn’t need, and cannot support, a city the size of the Big Apple, with its roughly eight million inhabitants.

Their argument, of course, is purely academic. New York does exist, and it’s not going anywhere. But dig a little deeper, beneath the surface idea of the city, and you’ll find that there is much here to admire, and even emulate, from the standpoint of culture, efficiency, and quality of life.

New York has one of the greatest mass-transit systems in the world, both public (trains, buses, and ferries) and private (taxicabs). For such alarge place, it’s remarkably easy and affordable to get around without apersonal car, an expensive luxury that is one of the biggest contributors to lousy air quality, congestion, and global warming.

Nearly everyone (except landlords) complains about the incredibly high rents in New York. Yet this very priciness ensures that space is used efficiently and not wasted, even by the wealthy. Compare this to less densely populated areas of the U.S., where suburban sprawl and the phenomenonof building “starter castles” are eating up far more productive land and natural resources than those used by the average New Yorker.

Food is surprisingly affordable in the city, because of fierce competition, market efficiencies, and other advantages of living in a global economic hub. There are four-star and celebrity restaurants, of course, but almost every neighborhood also has a host of inexpensive options, featuring almost every ethnic cuisine you can imagine.

Which brings us to cultural diversity. New York is without a doubt the most ethnically diverse and cosmopolitan city on Earth. Immigrants from every corner of the globe have passed through New York at some point in its history, and enough of them have remained here to turn the city’s neighborhoods into a fascinating and ever-changing cultural patchwork. From expatriate Russians in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach section to the Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Mexicans in East Harlem, one of the greatest assets of the city is its diversity . . . of people and, for our purposes, of national and ethnic cuisines. One of the most exciting things about New York is the feeling that the whole world, or at least its variouscultures, lies knowable, within your reach.

So then we return to the question: what makes New York a Slow Food kind of place? Well, for one thing, the number of artisanal food producersin the city is at once staggering and impressive. There are old-time shopkeepers who continue to make their own fresh mozzarella or handmade chocolates the same way their parents and grandparents did. There are pizzamakers who turn out the quintessential New York–style pie from coal-fired brick ovens. There’s the neighborhood butcher shop, with its impeccable meats and personal service. The bakery that hand-fills your cannoli to order. The little dumpling place in Chinatown where you can buy a satisfying meal with the change you probably have under your sofa cushions. If you’re adventurous and serious about good food, New York is definitely the place to be.

What we have attempted to do in this book is provide readers—native New Yorkers and visitors alike--with a broad and yet discriminating window on the city’s incredibly rich “food landscape.” Rather than limiting ourselves to restaurants and bars or to markets, specialty shops, and food producers alone, we’ve included a little of everything, from the street cart that sells goat tacos to the fanciest French restaurants. The one common denominator is that each of these places, in its own way, exemplifies one or more of the qualities that the international Slow Food movement celebrates and tries to defend, in the face of an increasingly homogenized, onesize-fits-all world.

We, the contributors to this guide, also reflect the diversity that is NewYork, and America. Chefs and food writers, professionals and grad students, we come to this task from all walks of life and from a wide range of cultural perspectives and tastes.

That diversity is captured in the entries that follow: our styles and voices may differ slightly, but the individual distinctions and idiosyncracies are intentional, and they are intended to entertain readers as well asinform and educate.

Finally, it would be sheer folly to expect that such a large and moving target--the restaurants, food shops, and markets of New York--can ever be frozen in time. Businesses are born and die on a weekly basis, it seems. Many of the places listed here are old stalwarts, but there will inevitably be turnover, not to mention the rise of new Slow-worthy establishments. So we invite you, the readers and users of this guide, to contribute to future editions by sending your comments and critiques, updates and recommendations to us at the page dedicated to the Slow Food USA guidebooks series at our Web site: www.slowfoodusa.org.

Ben Watson