Think about a restaurant that can be described by the following: it services people from all different backgrounds, including cab drivers. It’s cheap enough that pretty much anyone can afford it. It’s completely free of any pretentions and food trends. And the food is delicious. Doesn’t all of that sound great? The other day while eating lunch at Punjabi Deli I had an epiphany — the tiny little vegetarian Indian “restaurant” is my favorite eating experience in NYC.

If you’ve never heard of it, Punjabi Deli is a small grocery store on Houston that serves great Indian food. You can eat in, standing hunched over the narrow counter, shoulder-to-shoulder with a random collection of New Yorkers. Sure, they use a microwave to heat up the food, but when you taste it you won’t mind. In the bowl in the foreground is a samosa — in this case, cut open and topped with yogurt, chickpeas, raw onions, and a variety of chutneys and sauces. It’s one of my very favorite things in the city — a mix of hot and cold, salty and sweet, crunchy and smooth.

As a food blogger I get asked a lot about my favorite restaurants in the city, and for some reason Punjabi Deli never occurs to me. That changed, as of that lunch a few weeks ago. It’s the new place I want to take out-of town guests to. Plus, il laboratorio del gelato is right across the street so you can get a little dessert to cool your mouth down from the spices.

Punjabi Deli — 114 E 1st St #3, Manhattan

I’m a big fan of Xi’an Famous Foods, so I was excited when they opened a full, sit-down restaurant in Flushing: Biang! The name is supposedly derived from the sound that the noodle dough makes as it is slammed against the counter while being worked, and make no mistake: the noodles are good. But I like to think that the exclamation point at the end of the name refers to the bold, bright flavors that characterize the best dishes at Biang! In fact the few dishes we didn’t enjoy were the ones lacking that bright, exclamatory punch. For an example of what Biang! does right, take the bao’ji mung bean jelly pictured above. Served cold, the mung bean jelly is cut into noodley strips and sits soaking in a bath of soy and vinegar. It’s a wake-up call to the palate, impossible to ignore (and nearly as impossible to stop eating).

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After returning from Taiwan (see here and here) I was kind of craving some Taiwanese food here in NYC. My friend Sophia, who has family in Taiwan and was in the country the same time I was, recommended that we meet up at TKettle, a Taiwanese snack joint on St. Marks in the East Village. TKettle is her go-to place for Taiwanese snack food in the city (Gu Shine in Flushing is her recommendation for a full Taiwanese meal). Above you see the appetizer plate, a great introduction to some traditional Taiwanese dishes. Top left you see preserved eggs, with a concentrated eggy flavor. Top right is cold pressed tofu, with a slightly sweet flavor. And at the bottom is the cold cucumber salad, which is amazing — loaded with spicy garlic, these crunchy cucumber chunks are at once shocking and refreshing.

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On a cold winter day a few months ago I met up with my friends Jeff & Eva for a warming bowl of soba at Cocoron. I’d heard a lot about Cocoron but never been there; they first opened a tiny space on Delancey, but recently opened a (slightly) bigger space on Kenmare. The didning room was still pretty small, and every other diner in the place seemed to be shouting at each other. Never mind the dining room, let’s talk about the soba. There’s been a lot of talk about the buckwheat noodles from Cocoron, and they didn’t disappoint. They are slightly slippery, chewy, and actually fun to eat. There is a whole vegetarian section of the menu, and in fact they use a vegan broth if you order one of the vegetarian dishes. I had to ruin it by adding a soft poached egg, which added some nice richness to the soup. Next time I’d like to get one of the Dip sobas, where they bring you piping hot broth and you dip the noodles in as you want to eat them. I’ve also heard that during the summer, the cold soba makes an incredibly refreshing meal. But there’s no wrong way to get the soba at Cocoron, so make the trip when you get the chance.

Cocoron — 37 Kenmare St, NYC

Since the abdication of King Adria and the closing of el bulli, the Scandinavians have taken up the mantle as the world’s most adventurous chefs. In fact it is a Danish restaurant, Noma, which is now considered the best restaurant in the world. And one of the founding chefs of Noma, Mads Refslund, is now cooking at Acme here in NYC. Refslund is quick to point out that he has nothing to do with Noma, and has not for some time. Instead he took over the space of Acme, a dive-y Cajun restaurant on Great Jones Street. They may not be doing the “world’s greatest” cooking at Acme, but the food is incredibly inventive and fun. I know this because when my parents and my sister were in town over the holidays, we met up for a meal there. Normally we go to a nice restaurant, usually Italian — we’ve done Felidia and Babbo — but this time I wanted to push the envelope a little further. Most of the dishes are meant for sharing, at least according to the menu, so we ordered a whole bunch of stuff to share.

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After attending the Dirt Candy book release party our friend Melissa joined us for dinner at Tasty Hand Pulled Noodles in Chinatown. (As I mentioned, we didn’t get much to eat at the party.) On the way over we kept going back and forth between going there or to Great New York Noodletown, and by the time we arrived at the restaurant I was really craving some noodles. I was glad to see that they offered a vegetarian broth along with their tofu noodle soup, which came with the tofu on the side. I didn’t learn until afterwards that you can order your hand-pulled noodles in different thicknesses, but the default ones were awfully good — silky smooth with just a hint of chewiness. The broth was a bit mild, but some chile oil and cilantro brightened it right up. I’d love to go back for some of the pan-friend noodles, and I’ll definitely go for some thicker ones next time.

Tasty Hand Pulled Noodles — 1 Doyers St., NYC

Back in July I had lunch with my good friend Peaches, who has been very sick for a very long time; we hadn’t seen each other in a while. We wanted to meet somewhere between the two of us — she coming from Harlem, me coming from Brooklyn. For some reason the first place that popped into my head was Veselka, the 24-hour Ukrainian diner in the East Village. If you haven’t heard of Veselka, it’s a serious NYC institution but one that I never really got familiar with. I had a mediocre meal of their famous buckwheat pancakes way back when I first moved to NYC, but that was the last of it. We met there and waited about 10 minutes to be seated — there’s no list, the servers just kind of keep an eye on who has come in and who will be seated next.

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