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Where to Stay in NYC: An Honest Guide to Picking Your Neighborhood

Photo: Rhododendrites , CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Every week, someone books a hotel "in New York" that turns out to be a shuttle ride from an airport runway, and their whole trip inherits the mistake. Where you sleep in this city shapes everything: what you see out the window, where you eat breakfast, how much of your vacation you spend underground on the subway. The good news is that there's no single right answer — there's a right answer for you. Let's find it. First trip? Stay central, but not that central Midtown makes sense for first-timers: you can walk to Times Square, Broadway theaters, Rockefeller Center, and Central Park, and every train line in creation passes underneath. The trade-off is soul. Much of Midtown empties after office hours and the blocks immediately around Times Square never stop being Times Square. My compromise pick: stay south of the chaos, in the 20s and 30s — NoMad, Flatiron, Chelsea. You're fifteen minutes from ev...
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eBook: Eating Your Way Through New York City

New York is one of the great eating cities on earth, and this free eBook is your map to its extraordinary food landscape — from iconic slices and bagels to the deeply diverse kitchens of the outer boroughs.

Inside, we cover the foods every visitor should try and where to find the real thing, why Queens and Brooklyn reward the adventurous eater, how to order and eat like a local, and why the city’s food halls and markets are the perfect low-pressure way to taste a lot in one place.

Hungry yet? Download the full guide below — it’s free, with no sign-up required.

How New York actually eats

The mistake visitors make with food here is treating it as a list of famous restaurants to tick off. New York's real advantage is not the top of the market, which is excellent but no better than the top of the market in a handful of other cities. It is the depth of the middle and the bottom: the $4 slice that is genuinely good, the Chinatown noodle counter with eleven seats, the halal cart with a queue at 1am, the Dominican lunch counter in Washington Heights, the Greek diner that has not changed its menu since 1978.

Eat at that level and you eat better here than almost anywhere, for very little money. That is the argument this eBook makes, and then it gets specific.

Five things worth building a day around

  • Pizza by the slice. Not a novelty, a civic institution. The guide explains the difference between a classic corner slice joint and the newer wood-fired places, and why you want both for different reasons.
  • A proper bagel. Boiled, then baked, ordered without ceremony and eaten within twenty minutes. Toasting a fresh one is considered a minor crime.
  • A deli sandwich. The Jewish delicatessen tradition is thinner on the ground than it was, but the survivors are extraordinary and the portions are absurd. Share one.
  • Dumplings and noodles in one of the Chinatowns. Manhattan's is the famous one; Flushing in Queens and Sunset Park in Brooklyn are bigger and, for many dishes, better.
  • A street cart meal. Chicken and rice from a halal cart is the city's most reliable cheap dinner, and it is genuinely good food rather than a dare.

Where the neighborhoods take over

Beyond the classics, the guide is organized by neighborhood rather than by cuisine, because that is how eating here actually works. Jackson Heights for South Asian and Himalayan food, Arthur Avenue in the Bronx for Italian, Little Senegal on West 116th Street, Sunset Park for Mexican and Chinese, Greenpoint for Polish, Brighton Beach for Russian and Georgian. Each section has a short list of what to order and a note on when to go.

Practical notes that save money

Menu prices exclude both sales tax at 8.875% and the tip, which runs around 20% at sit-down restaurants. Counter service is a different matter, where a small tip or none at all is normal. Lunch specials at good restaurants often cost half what the same kitchen charges at dinner. And late August and January are the two windows when hard-to-book tables suddenly open up.

The best value in the city, though, is still a slice and a walk.

What is in the PDF

The full eBook includes the neighborhood breakdown, an ordering glossary so you do not have to guess at a deli counter, a section on eating well with dietary restrictions, and a one-page cheat sheet of dishes worth planning a trip around.

In article form, our pizza guide, our Chinatown food guide and our classic diners guide cover the same territory in more depth.

Free PDF · No sign-up required
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