I guess the presentation could use some work, but the price was more than right

When I moved to New York last summer, I pretty much crapped myself during my first trip to our local grocery store here in Midtown. A relatively normal box of cereal cost $6 if it was on sale, $8 if the grocery store really hates you. One day, my girlfriend brought home a $20 bottle of laundry detergent–and it turned out to be crappy faux-natural soap that didn’t even come close to taking the stink out of my shirts.

I got used to the New York prices pretty quickly, though. I just assume that $50 will magically fly out of my wallet as soon as I step out of my apartment. As soon as I step into a bar, I just assume that another $50 will fly out of my wallet, in addition to the $50 that escaped on my way out of my apartment. And it doesn’t even bother me anymore–my savings account is about as robust as a shriveled turnip, but I figure that it’s just part of living in Manhattan. Everything is expensive as all hell… oh, well.

So imagine my shock when I managed to take home a solid dinner for two people, and it only cost $10.25.

I'm not as good-looking as my girlfriend or her burrito

Now, let me explain something: my girlfriend eats like a truck driver. (Though she doesn’t look like one–click here to see a gorgeous picture of her without clothes on.) My girlfriend sometimes calls me her “boar”, since I eat even more than she does (trust me: you don’t want to see a picture of me naked). So this isn’t about to be a stupid story about how, like, we split a take-out meal and it was soooooo much food that we could just share one entree for dinner and still be happy. That never, ever, ever happens to us.

No, we actually ate meals. Well, OK: we ate assloads of dumplings. But I swear it was pretty much a balanced meal.

kinda like a good slice of pizza, only without the cheese and sauce and Italian-ness

All of this was pretty much dumb luck. I wandered into the Chinatown location of Vanessa’s Dumpling House, and randomly called out numbers to the cashier. Thanks to the magic of receipts, I found out that I’d ordered basil & chicken dumplings (8 for $3.75), one steamed cabbage and pork bun ($1.50), one steamed vegetable bun ($1.50), a sesame pancake stuffed with vegetables ($1.50), and a sesame pancake with roasted pork ($2).

Total: $10.25. And I’d call it a balanced meal… we had carbs with vegetables, carbs with meat, boiled carbs, and carbs with lots of oil.

Who could ask for anything more?

Look, I’m not an expert on dumplings, and I’m not going to even try to critique a place that has received several hundred reviews

juicy, healthy, and spicy... just the way I like my buns

on yelp, as well as attention from nearly every major NYC food critic. I adored the basil and chicken dumplings, and probably wouldn’t have batted an eye if I’d paid twice as much for them in a full-service restaurant. The vegetable buns were a little bit on the salty side, but had a surprisingly dense pocket of vegetables inside. The sesame pancakes (imagine a slice of pan-fried pizza dough, covered with sesame seeds and stuffed with a thin layer of vegetable or animal) were a little bit on the greasy side, but still awfully tasty.

Best dumplings ever? I have no idea. Probably not, I guess. But they were damned good, and my wallet felt like it had finally escaped Manhattan, at least for one meal.

Vanessa’s Dumpling House
118A Eldridge Street, Chinatown
Subway: Essex-Delancey (F, J, M, Z trains) or Grand (B, D trains)

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If you’ve read any of my other posts, you know that I’m not a typical wannabe food critic. I’m trying to eat food from everywhere because I really like food, but this whole thing is also a social experiment of sorts (I’ll be weaseling my way into many kitchens over the next year or two), and it’s a good way to see whether New York City is really as awesome as Alicia Keys says it is. The food isn’t always the point–hell, sometimes I say barely anything about the food itself.

my crappy photos are not worthy of the great Cafe Katja

So it’s rare that I spend an entire post gushing about the awesomeness of a particular restaurant’s food. Cafe Katja deserves all of the obsessive praise that I can dish out.

Look, I have no particular love for Austrian food.  Frankly, I know almost nothing about Austrian food.  I had no expectations at all–I was just trying to cross another small European country off my list.  Cafe Katja was the closest Austrian place I could find, so we ate there.  It wasn’t supposed to be great.

But it was obscenely great.  For starters, it’s a small, intimate, welcoming sort of place.  My pal Ryan and I sat at the bar, and were served by a genuinely warm bartender who seemed to know absolutely everything about the entire menu, including the fine details of all of the Austrian and German beers on tap (mmm… Stiegl).

For our entrees, I felt obligated to order something Austrian and sausage-y, but I confessed to the bartender that I sometimes have a little bit of sausage anxiety.  Sausage isn’t really my thing.  The lovely bartender talked me into the emmentaler sausage ($14) anyway.

I deserve a prize for making great food look like ass

She’s my new hero.  Somehow, she convinced me that the sausage would be “relatively light” because it was made from pork.  That made no sense to me at all, but she was absolutely correct.  It’s hard to describe exactly what makes an emmentaler cheese-stuffed sausage outrageously good, but this was probably the best sausage I’ve ever eaten.  It was served with quark dumplings (imagine large, flat spatzle or slightly oversized gnocchi that have been thrown against a wall) and savoy cabbage in a very gentle cream sauce.

Let me bottom-line this:  I hate cream sauce, and I rarely get excited about sausage.  And this was still one of the best meals I’ve eaten in the last few months… and that’s saying something.

Everything else was equally ridiculous.  My buddy Ryan ordered cheese spatzle ($14), which was better than any mac-and-cheese I’ve ever eaten (also a serious achievement).  Wise

even the bathroom artwork had great sausages

Ryan also ordered lame-sounding roasted carrots ($4), which turned out to have an absolutely magical charred sweetness to them;  the cucumber potato salad ($3) was an amazing dill-filled treat that reminded me of my Ukrainian grandmother’s salads.

We stood outside the restaurant for just a moment after we paid our bill, and the owner came outside–in the middle of a Friday night dinner rush–to thank us for coming and ask us if we were from the neighborhood.  Clearly, the man loves his restaurant… and so do I.

Cafe Katja
79 Orchard Street
Subway: Essex-Delancey (F, J, M, Z trains) or Grand (B, D trains)

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For the most part, I loathe French restaurants in the United States.  I like dingy dives, I love street food, and I despise haughty, overpriced bistros.  Sadly, most French places are either miserably pretentious, or simply out of my price range.  Really, would a working-class Frenchman ever eat in the sorts of French restaurants that are all over the high-rent parts of Manhattan?

not your typical diner omelette... er, omelet

That said, I loved eating in France.  I spent three weeks backpacking around on a skin-tight budget, and ate the cheapest-ass crap I could find.  Amazingly, none of it was ever crap.  Cheap Chinese food and street crepes and convenience-store sandwiches and neighborhood bakeries all served fresh, flawless food.  I can’t pretend that three weeks in the country made me any sort of expert on French eating habits, but I had the feeling that nearly every piece of food in France is carefully prepared, even if it’s cheap as dirt.

So in the spirit of eating cheap, reasonably-authentic French food, I thought I’d just visit the cheapest French place I could find in NYC.  That proved to be a relatively difficult task–seriously, it was almost impossible to find a plate of “typical French food” for less than $15, and there were only a few odds and ends available for less than $25 on most French menus.  Screw that.

arguably the best part of the meal... they grow amazing grapefruits in France

Luckily, a French immigrant decided to open a bakery/cafe in Bushwick.  Little Athom Cafe has a grand total of eight seats, and it’s pretty much the last thing you’d expect to see on that particular stretch of Broadway.

Did we eat French food?  Well, do carefully-prepared omelettes count?  It’s a French word, after all, and the French pretty much invented the modern omelette, though the ancient Persians apparently had a precursor to our current version.  I think it counts.  The delicious goat cheese and roasted pepper omelette at Athom was an immaculately groomed little creature, with a cute little handful of perfectly cubed potatoes and a cute little salad and grilled wheat bread.  I could easily imagine eating exactly that dish at a cafe in France… and maybe that’s just my imagination, but I thought it was pretty great.

Of course, we also chowed down on a chocolate croissant, baked onsite.  For your breakfast pleasure, Athom also serves a nice variety of breads and muffins, as well as magnificent fresh-squeezed juice.

Prices were dirt-cheap, at least to my Manhattanite eyes–I paid a mighty $13.75 for the omelette, a massive cup of fresh grapefruit juice, a large brewed coffee, and a fresh chocolate croissant.

In Bushwick, of all places.  Who knew?

Athom Cafe
1096 Broadway, Brooklyn
Subway: Koskiusko Street (J train)

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I decided to make this Eurotrash week, which means that I’ve eaten relatively unremarkable food so far–nobody would try to argue that German or Belgian food is likely to be as surprising as, say, Barbadian leadpipe or Liberian palm butter.  But the bathrooms in the German and Belgian places were surprisingly intimate–just the way I like it.

for $20, you get a Stella and all-you-can-eat mussels and frites... and if you ask real nice, they might throw in a ride on the cute little Vespa

A few nights ago, I herded a fleet of friends into BXL Cafe, a Belgian restaurant in the theater district. The place is known for two things: a great selection of Belgian beers and a $20 all-you-can eat mussels and frites special on Sunday and Monday nights. It even comes with a Stella Artois. You can’t beat that deal in that part of NYC–unless, of course, you hate mussels and frites.

Before we headed over there, I googled “national dish of Belgium,” and found a bunch of websites that cited completely different national dishes. Only one of those dishes, carbonnades flammades, was available at BXL. The dish consists of beef stewed in brown ale, served with a side of frites. Sounds kind of intriguing, right?

Too bad it sucked. (I should have been wary when I ordered “carbonnades flamandes,” and the waitress said, “oh, you mean the beef stew?” in response.) Imagine six large cubes of pot roast with an unappetizing, nondescript brown gravy and French fries. If the gravy didn’t have a few dates in it to break up the brown, stringy pot-roast monotony, the dish would have been a mild disaster. I should have ordered the mussels–my friends were all thrilled with theirs.

bright and cozy... just the way German bathrooms should be

The bathroom was more interesting than the beef stew. Maybe this is the wickedly strong Belgian beer talking, but I felt really weird when I peed in BXL Cafe. It took me a minute to realize that only a few inches separated the urinal from the sink–it was a little bit awkward, and kind of gross, if you think about it.

The next day, I discovered a similar bathroom layout at the Upper East Side’s legendary Heidelberg Restaurant. The sink, urinals, and trash can were all disturbingly close together, which would be really awkward if you were in that bathroom with other men (men’s bathroom motto: death before eye contact). And the lights in the bathroom were incredibly bright, which was a little bit odd, considering that the restaurant itself barely has any natural light, and feels like an upscale medieval cave.

Oh yeah, Heidelberg also has German food and beer and stuff. My buddy asked our waiter for recommendations, and the waiter responded with an enthusiastic, “Everything! Everything’s good! Get anything you want, it’s all great!”

So my friend tried to order the sauerbraten sandwich. The very same waiter intervened: “Naw, you don’t want that. Get the sauerbraten with potato dumplings instead.” Hilarious.

I wanted to order something that sounded deeply German, so I ordered the schweinebraten, which is very fun to say

Heidelberg's s(ch)trudel, which was every bit as good as the schweinebraten and s(ch)paten

after you’ve had a few S(ch)paten lagers. Both of our meals were very precise and conservative–gently rounded cuts of meat in a careful blanket of gravy, immaculately-arranged potatoes or potato dumplings, and a neat little mound of cabbage or sauerkraut. It all felt very well-behaved.

Frankly, the place is absolutely hysterical, in a very well-behaved sort of way. The other patrons were all elderly Germanic types, one of whom politely berated us for having our cell phones on the table during a meal: “you know, dat izz very bad for ze digestion.”  The staff and owners also seemed like good, friendly, down-to-earth people, and that counts for something.  None of them wore anything unusual, but we could tell from the look in their eyes that they sometimes love to wear lederhosen on a Tuesday afternoon.

So yeah, there’s a reason that Heidelberg is a landmark. The food was a little bit too reserved for my taste, but they deserve some credit for execution, friendliness, and the imminent threat of lederhosen.

Heidelberg Restaurant
1648 2nd Avenue @ 86th
Subway: 86th Ave. (4, 5, 6 trains)

BXL Cafe
125 West 43rd Street
Subway: Times Square or Bryant Park (any train you want)

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Whenever I eat a burger in Manhattan, I can’t help but think that I’m getting completely hosed. A few nights ago, I was sitting in a nondescript Midtown bar, watching the Sox-Yankees game and texting an old buddy of mine who lives in a small city in Iowa. I was eating a nondescript burger ($11.95, plus an extra buck for cheese) and drinking a pint… and thinking about how I was spending about $25 for the burger and beer, including tax and tip.

I stupidly asked my Iowan friend how much the priciest burger in his town would cost. His response: $5 or $6, max.

Crap, I totally got hosed again.  Gotta love NYC.

kinda pretty, but we still got hosed

And as if I wasn’t offended enough by the $11.95 burger on Sunday, I decided to go to Nelson Blue for a New Zealand-style burger today… which cost a mighty $15.50.

My wallet officially hates Manhattan. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any New Zealand restaurants in Queens, so we had to settle for a trip to the South Street Seaport, which explains the kiwi hamburger robbery.

In case you’re wondering, the burger was fine. It was a standard burger on a standard bun served with standard industrial food-service French fries. The exotic part was that it came with grilled pineapple, a fried egg, and some pickled vegetables. That’s some serious burger excitement. It’s not $15.50 worth of excitement, though… especially since we received the wrong burger at first, and had to wait for a new one.

there's no "i" in team, but there is an "i" in meat pie... not much meat or cheese, though

In an attempt to stick to a kiwi theme, we ordered the D.U.B. (Down Under Bakery) beef & cheese pie, served with fried potatoes and mushroom gravy. The pie was pretty runty–a little bit larger than a snack, and it contained exactly zero cheese. Tasty enough, but sure as hell not worth $14. (I shoulda known better: the Hitchhiker’s Guide to New Zealand warned me that the pies can never be rated above “good”.)

I love cheapass, grungy international peasant food. Nelson Blue doesn’t pretend to serve anything of the sort, and it’s in one of the most tourist-saturated areas of Manhattan… surely, I shouldn’t have expected anything other than inflated prices for uninspiring food.

I can’t really pick on the restaurant too much–it’s a cute little place, the staff seemed friendly and professional, and the kiwi Steinlager beer was stronger than most crappy American beers. But now I’m absolutely dying to get out to Woodhaven or Jackson Heights or Flushing for some real food.

Nelson Blue
233-235 Front Street, Manhattan
Subway: Fulton Street (2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, J, M, Z)

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