New York Food On Foot Tour

- and other meals!

Last year when I visited New York on my own I was very disappointed with the food, but in fairness, eating alone is not conducive to getting out and about and experimenting.

For starters the bread in the entire of North America is utterly disgusting!

Indeed we have taken to baking our own as the only way to get bread that is edible and a glorious olive bread is in the bread-maker verily as I type.

Pity we don’t have e-smell facilities

However, I couldn’t help thinking that New York as a melting pot of cultures must have a glorious depth of fusion gastronomy, if only we could find it.

It was therefore with some delight that we noticed that a new venture was included in the New York Pass, a New York Food On Foot Tour, promising to show us how to eat well for little money just as the locals do.

There are many ‘New York Food On Foot Tours’ operated by the same guy, but they are targeted mainly in the summer when it is more pleasant to eat outdoors.

In winter there is just a mid-town tour which runs on Saturdays, which was perfect for us as it was the first day our pass was valid.

Full price of the New York Food On Foot Tour, had we paid for it, was around $49 I think and you buy your own food as you go, probably around $15 each. Very good value.

On our first night in New York we had wandered down to Little Italy which was clearly a tourist trap selling very expensive Italian food. Very expensive!

We chose a place which was less extortionate than most and we had an excellent duo of pasta dishes, but is a bowl of spaghetti really worth over twenty quid?

We met our guide at Penn Station and after a brief introduction he took our group of around 20 people on our food tour.

He described himself as a ‘foodie’, a native New Yorker who had lost his job a couple of years ago and set up the food tours business. And what a brilliant idea it is.

Our first stop was a family pizza shop just opposite the station, then onto a Japanese Sushi, thankfully for fried prawn dumplings, a family owned Greek bakery, onto a sandwich shop owned by a long standing New York family, The Little Pie Company for ‘the best cheesecake in New York, and finally to a the Papaya Dog, which as the name suggests, was a traditional hot dog outlet.

Our guide was knowledgeable about each business, described the food as the type of food he grew up with, which was no longer available in many places, and gave us background on each establishment.

The bakery for example only existed because the family had had the foresight to buy the building many years ago or they would not be able to pay current rents.

The pizza place used special flour, handmade the dough and all the sauces.

All good stuff and I would definitely take another of his tours, but Carolyn and I were both coming independently to the same conclusion.

The food was….well…okay! Nothing more!

Nothing wrong with it, perfectly acceptable, but nothing to write home about.

The pizza was good…but not great, the cheesecake? I’ve had better from most supermarket home brands in the UK and the hot dog was…well, a hot dog!

Don’t get me wrong, the food was acceptable, but nothing out of the ordinary, and if this is supposedly the best New York can offer it could be why I was disappointed last year.

This is not a criticism of the guy nor the tour, if you are raised on tasteless New York fodder then maybe it does make you a foodie when you find a place that rises to the dizzy heights of mediocrity.

As Carolyn pointed out, if a business tailors its food to New York tastes what you end up with is bland, or the business goes under.

Our New York Food On Foot Tour guy did give us a list of restaurants to try on our own and we resolved to visit some of them.

One place he recommended was the New York Noodle Town, cheap and within easy walking distance from our hotel in Chinatown, so we took a walk down.

From the outside it didn’t look much so we were considering moving on to somewhere else when an American couple came out absolutely gushing, nay eulogising about the place, “the best Chinese in New York, you have to try it”…so we did!

Bland, uninteresting and certainly nowhere near the standard I’d expect from a normal Chorley takeaway on a Friday night, in fact if this was a new place opening up in Chorley and I was trying it for the first time I wouldn’t be going back.

The night before we had dined at Vietnamese place near the hotel which was infinitely better, but only average for a typical UK Oriental restaurant.

Another of his recommendations was ‘The Five Napkin Burger’ offering what he described as ‘good burgers, typical American fare’.

The place was rammed to the gunwhales on a Sunday night, not a table to be had, so we sat at the bar and drank a $7 beer whilst we waited for the pager they had given us to go off, an interesting way of introducing your diners to the table.

Again same old feeling, the burger was fine..just fine..but not as good as those I make myself and I left feeling somewhat of a pillock having just paid fifteen quid for a burger in a (not very nice) bun.

The feeling was pretty much to continue for most meals we had, it was food, but not great food!

The Carnegie Deli was an experience, again the queues stretched out of the deli and down the road, and that would normally indicate that a gastronomic experience was coming your way…maybe!

The deli is worth visiting if only for the theatre, rammed packed and jammed in like sardines, they are making a fortune.

You get the biggest meal you’ve ever had in your life, the sandwiches contain half a cow, far more than even the biggest glutton could eat…but was it a great sandwich?

Sadly no, it was fine..but no better!

This seemed to repeat, New Yorkers seem to judge a meal on quantity and not quality.

We did however find a couple of places worth the visit, one such was Junior’s in Brooklyn which boasted of the best cheesecake in New York. Was it?

Well I don’t know but it was certainly the best we had while we were there.

Another find was pure serendipity, we had a forty metre walk from our hotel to the metro and every night we had walked past a tiny Italian restaurant in the basement of one of the buildings in our block.

Now meals in basements had limited appeal, especially considering the number of rats running around the place but  we were too tired to travel and popped in for a meal.

I could hardly read the menu as the place was so dark, the table candle being put to good effect.

We weren’t starving and so resolved to share a starter and then have main courses.

Our starter order was Antipasto Misto and not only was it superb it was huge, enough for a full meal for two. In fact the remains sustained Carolyn on the journey home the following day!

Our main courses were delicious and Carolyn declared her risotto amongst the best she had tasted. It was expensive but at last we felt we had been fed.

In conclusion we were disappointed with New York food.

If I had to use one word it would be ‘bland’.

Even the mustard is bland! You need half a gallon to taste it!

I’m sure that great food is available in New York, at a price, but as we were on a budget it was a price too great.

I know that tastes vary and food is very subjective but on the whole I feel that bland rules in New York.

It would be an interesting experiment to take a New Yorker and let him eat in similar restaurants in the UK.

He’d just have to go easy with English mustard on his hot dog!

 

 

 

New York Food On Foot Tour – and other meals!