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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Lily Ng, the manager of May Wah Vegetarian Market (and daughter of its owners), is not a vegetarian. Or, as she put it, “not yet.”

May Wah was created by Lily’s mother, who came to New York from Taiwan. Raised as a Taoist vegetarian, Lily’s mom was disappointed with the options for vegetarians in New York. In Taiwan she had hundreds of different vegetarian foods available to her, but the most she could find here was vegetables and a little tofu. Determined to bring some of vegetarian Taiwan to NYC, she created the shop in 1995 and began importing vegetarian products from Taiwan.

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Although I spent most of my time in Taiwan in Taipei, I did take a few trips to some of the smaller towns south of that city. One of those towns was Wulai, a small town that I had seen featured on Bizarre Foods — but it wasn’t just food that brought me there. I’d heard that it was a beautiful town with a nature preserve, with an impressive waterfall. I tried to board one of the crowded buses out to Wulai but so many people were ehading there for the day that most of us couldn’t get on board. I ended up sharing a taxi with 5 complete strangers, splitting the fare 6 ways. It was a quick ride out of the city, and when I got out of the taxi I was greeted by the sight you see above. Wulai is an unbelievably beautiful place, almost unreal.

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In February I went to Taiwan for a week, and had an amazing time. Because it was the week of the Lunar New Year, many restaurants (particularly the vegetarian ones) were closed. Luckily, Taiwan has a vibrant street food culture. On my first day I stopped by a road-side stand around the corner from the City God Temple for a taste of Taiwan’s signature dish: chou doufu, aka stinky tofu. Yes, that’s really what it’s called. It’s tofu, left to ferment, until it develops its signature aroma: a mix of rotting garbage and unpleasant bodily odors.

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For a few months last year I was working on the UWS, and after so many years of working here in Brooklyn the biggest challenge was finding new places to eat lunch. There are a lot of mediocre restaurants around, and very few cheap ones. I had eaten a couple of meals at Hummus Kitchen, a mini-chain which was pretty good but more upscale than I usually like my falafel places. On one of my last days working in the neighborhood I came across a place named Ali Baba, and as soon as I walked in I knew I was going to like the place. Ali Baba is an Israeli-run falafel joint, with only one table (with about eight chairs) and a bunch of freshly made salads lining the counter. I got the falafel platter, which included some of the best falafel I’ve eaten outside of Israel itself — full of herbs and spices, not merely fried chickpeas. The salads were fantastic, and tasted homemade. There was a spicy cooked onion and tomato salad, slices of fried eggplant, sweet and sour cooked carrots, a salad of raw tomatoes and cucumbers, hummus, and pickles. Pickles are my favorite falafel topping, by the way, and one that is often overlooked. Over the next week or so that I worked in the area, I would pass by and see the restaurant closed at odd hours; not just during Shabbat, but at random times as well, so if you’re in the neighborhood and hungry, it’s worth passing by to see if they are open — but make sure you have a backup plan, just in case.

Ali Baba — 515 Amsterdam Ave, NYC,

Donny: I’m pretty sure by now most of you have heard of the story behind M. Wells and ultimately M. Wells Dinette, so let’s just skip all that and go straight to the food at the new dinette.

Howard: I had never been to the original site of M. Wells. It’s true LIC was just a little too far out of the way, but that was only part of the reason. The other is that I had the impression that it wasn’t too vegetarian friendly. They might have gone over the top with bone marrow and foie gras, but I hadn’t heard anything about vegetarian food. But when Donny suggested we check out their new location at PS1 I admit I was curious. So we made the trip for lunch on a rainy day, during the NY Art Book Fair.

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