New york can be ferociously expensive but I’m a great believer that every place presents its own opportunities to live well without spending like it’s going out of fashion.
Often the people of this city and elsewhere in the US seem to spend hand-over-fist because everybody else is doing it and if everybody is doing it then it can’t be a bad idea right?
Well, Wrong…
The truth is that a great deal of what people eat in this city, primarily out of convenience, is expensive, bad for your health and just bang average.
If I go out for a meal, I expect to eat delicious food that is FAR beyond what I could prepare myself. OR I expect such wonderful and gratifying service that I can fully focus on socialising and/or drinking myself silly.
Now, don’t get me wrong, those restaurants do exist in New York but in my experience only maybe one in ten meals I’ve eaten out fulfil the criteria above, the rest have been distinctly average at best.
In fact, if you want to eat really well in New York at a restaurant, then unless you go somewhere mega-pricey and high end then there are few guarantees that you’ll get something special and memorable and even in those cases it’s probably the cheque that you’ll remember most clearly out of the whole experience!
In my experience the consistently best food in New York can be found in the smallest, weirdest places and if you are willing to sacrifice even a little convenience and do some exploration in this city you’ll not only dine like a French Monarch at reasonable prices but you’ll get a much richer, rounded experience of the place you’re in.
This rule of thumb works even better when visiting cities and countries beyond the European/US borders, so make a point of getting your walking shoes on and finding the places without the people who look and sound like you… you’ll have a much richer experience when dining like you’re poor.
So, Back to New York…
The best way to eat well in this city is to cook for yourself. This is something of a controversial view among New Yorkers with apartment after apartment of dusty cupboards and untouched kitchen surfaces the usual approach in this city.
As a super-motivated meal-prepper and reformed ready-meal addict from my younger days, I have drilled myself on the benefits and importance of cooking at home and it was something I was dead-set on continuing when I made the move to New York.
My first thought before arriving was to do a massive shop at Costco over in East Harlem and get a taxi back to my apartment with sacks and sacks of dried goods, meats frozen veg etc etc.
I realized quite quickly that my Manhattan Airbnb apartment didn’t quite have the storage capacity for that type of shop and the savings I’d gain from doing a much smaller shop wouldn’t offset the cost of the cab, score 1-0 NYC.
I have since migrated down the grocery store food-chain; starting at Whole foods then taking in Fairways, Trader Joe’s and now finally Gristedes and Chinatown.
The experience taught me that there are trade offs and tactics that need to be employed to get decent food at reasonable prices in this city, something that is a bit alien to a Brit with our selection of very competitive and good value supermarkets driving prices down and quality of service to really high levels, something that I hadn’t really appreciated until I moved to New York.
Whole Foods is just ridiculous, it’s a weird place that seems to be more about conspicuous consumption and being seen than buying a loaf and some milk for the week.
Everybody is dressed immaculately and flounces from aisle to aisle checking that they have been noticed shopping in this hugely overpriced abomination. Anyway, suffice to say I was unimpressed with my $150 small basket of basics for the week and resolved I needed to find some better options.
My next stop was Trader Joe’s, which is actually one of the best value places you can shop in New York, albeit with a restricted range in the things you might want to eat as a functioning adult and a perplexingly huge range of chocolate spreads. It’s like a supermarket designed by me when I was 15, addicted to Jaffa Cakes, snickers and Red Bull.
The other thing to say about Trader Joe’s is that this is a place where the best tactic to get in and out is to enter, pick up your basket and immediately join the back of the queue to pay. Seriously, the queues often snake down every aisle in the place and the majority of the staff are employed explicitly to create gaps with actual flags saying things like “queue starts here” and “queue continues here”!
It’s even worse than it sounds and probably says a lot that the only time I now visit the place is in the brand new shop they have opened up near my office that nobody knows exists yet. Sorry, not telling…
Fairways is a good option with a nice layout and OK prices and feels like a very similar experience to Whole Foods, it can be pretty pricey too though so in some ways it’s not too much of an improvement.
I have only just discovered Gristedes. It looks and feels like I remember British supermarkets being like in the early 90s, only that Gristedes was probably built around the same time as the ones they have torn down in the UK but remains stubbornly un-renovated.
The upside of the shitty interiors and weird layout is actually pretty well priced food, a good range and no shop encompassing queues. There must be a catch but I’m yet to discover it (yet).
If you want to eat even better and at ridiculously low prices though, there really is one option in New York, Chinatown.
Shopping in the supermarkets in Chinatown can be overwhelming, I draw the comparison between the weird smells, sights and sounds you see in a supermarket in Chinatown and those scenes you see in Sci-fi movies where the protagonist walks between the stalls in the bazaar in some strange alien world. They see strange creatures chained up in cages and odd produce and services that they have never noticed before, it’s weird but it’s intoxicating…
Seriously, the main place I go to has live crabs squirming in a basket on entry rather than the offer of the week on dishwasher soap or DVDs you might expect from a typical western supermarket.
It also has a wall made of fish tanks with huge freshwater fish swimming rhymically side by side as the main entrance wall.
Once I saw a little old lady order what must have been a 1m long bass from the ‘fish counter’. The guy behind the counter reached down, pulled out a fucking spear, reached into one of the tanks and pierced a fish in one swift motion and pulled it out gasping and flapping onto the counter before the old lady. She nodded and he threw it into a bag. You don’t get that in Sainsbury’s Chiswick High Street London…
Fantastic scenes aside, so long as you go relatively early in the day then you’ll find meat and vegetables that are at least as good as anywhere else in the city, usually at ⅓ of the cost. You can also find some really pretty key ingredients for curries and other Asian style food that simply cannot be found elsewhere but are relatively easy to find in the UK. You’ll even find some stuff which for all I know does come from another planet, let me know if anybody knows what this stuff is?
More usefully I have not found lemongrass or holy basil anywhere else in the city aside from Chinatown, both of which are essential to Thai cooking.
I have created a set of articles detailing some of the best meals that can easily be whipped up from the delicious fare you’ll find in chinatown, I strongly suggest you check it out and indeed go out of your way to visit the supermarkets in chinatown, purely for the experience. For fun I’ve also compared the equivalent costs of the meal in Whole Foods, Fairways and Trader Joe’s.
Happy Hunting!
