Sitting on the back patio at Caucasus Garden in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, I was pretty convinced that I was in another country. We guzzled Ukrainian and Russian and Japanese beer, purchased at the bodega next door. The TV inside the restaurant blared Russian news at full volume. Everybody else on the patio—including my Armenian […]

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For most residents of the other four New York boroughs, Staten Island might as well be the moon or Mars or the Midwest, whichever you think is farther. I invited pretty much everybody I know in NYC to join me for Sri Lankan food in Staten Island. All but one of them just laughed in […]

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I’m not the slightest bit religious, but I have the occasional fantasy about what heaven might look like when I die.  If heaven exists, I’m pretty sure that it would have three things: friendly people, pleasant weather, and an endless supply of spicy food, preferably cooked in coconut milk. It pains me to use such […]

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I have a theory about ethnic food: if yelpers consistently whine about a restaurant’s service, the restaurant is almost surely awesome. If the service sucks and the place is still open—especially in a high-rent city like NYC—the food must be amazing, right? Banjara, an Indian restaurant in the East Village, is a perfect example of […]

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You know that I prefer to eat my meals at cheap, independently owned restaurants… many of which are in a perpetual struggle to survive, no matter how good the food is. Of the restaurants I’ve visited in the past year, at least three (Chilean restaurant Barros Luco, Canadian spot T Poutine, and Vietnamese take-out joint […]

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