Late October is a the perfect time of the year to eat local zucchini blossoms, those fleshy, pale orange flowers that are often found stuffed or battered on fancy restaurant menus. The first part of this sentence would be true if zucchini plants were flowering now, but they’re not. Instead, consider the pumpkin blossom: Generally overlooked in the culinary world (like zucchini flowers once were before they were trendy), pumpkin blossoms are in incredible abundance......

Lately we've had tacos on the brain, particularly those that involve organ meats and creepy crawlies some folks consider to be Fear Factor fare. Given our taste for the bizarre, it may be hard believe that there are times when we crave nothing more than a simple pork or beef tongue taco. Last night at about 1:30 a.m., we found ourselves in such a mood. As luck would have it we also found ourselves......

Freegans have been around for a while now, most recently The Times caught them dumpster diving in the NYU area just as school let out. A freegan goldmine! Now a blogger for Newsweek is getting knee deep in rubbish for a month in order to fully understand these "waste reclaimers". Raina Kelley is keeping a blog of her fairweather freeganism, and on her first day (Wednesday) she pondered, "Why would a eBay-loving, omnivorous, cigarette-smoking shopaholic......

At the Ethnic Market highlights international specialty foods and ingredients that you're very unlikely to find at your local Gristedes. Gothamist has never been a big fan of rice porridge, whether it be Chinese congee or Korean jook. The number of bowls of congee we've eaten can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And we never had occasion to try jook until just the other day. Not that rice porridge is offensive, far......

If you've lived in New York for any period of time, you know that the food here is incredible -- the variety, the quantity, and the quality. You'll also know that you don't have to pawn off your valuables to taste all that the city has to offer. This week's New York Magazine celebrates the city's cheap eats. Rob and Robin provide an extensive list of their picks, including some of our favorites: Bocca Lupo,......

Burdock root, also known as gobo, tastes something like a nutty artichoke potato. The long, slender, flexible roots don't look like much, but they have a lot of flavor if you slice them thin and braise them to bring it out. Don't bother peeling off their thin skin, which is both tasty and good for you. When we went foraging with Wildman Steve Brill last weekend, he brought this dish as part of his......

At the Ethnic Market highlights international specialty foods and ingredients that you're very unlikely to find at your local Gristedes Gothamist is no stranger to the pleasures of the izakaya, which in our case usually include copious amounts of sake and yakitori. For some reason we've shied away from such dishes as spaghetti with spicy cod roe, even though we've enjoyed spicy cod roe dumplings on several occasions. Perhaps our aversion stems from the fact......

To celebrate their first anniversary today, decadent 12th Street carb emporium S’mac is offering portions of its floor model macaroni and cheese for just $1. The “nosh” size of the All-American (nothing fancy, just domestic cheddar) at the special anniversary price will be available until 11 PM. Jamba Juice locations throughout the city should be honoring this printable, buy-one-get-one smoothie coupon. The coupon features a graphic of a smoothie with a whole lot of......

We haven’t been that impressed with much of the corn in the city so far. Much has been shrink-wrapped and as yellow as a Crayola sun, a sure sign of tough, dry ears. But not any longer. Fairway has a nice batch of bi-color corn that’s slightly sweet, juicy, and at a fairly remarkable price to back it up. At $1.99 for eight ears of corn, you’ll have enough corn for any large gathering and......

The Coupon Clipper scours the specials for the best deals in New York's big grocery stores. The peaches hit the stores this week as nearly every major chain had some special on the fuzzy stone fruits. Both Fairway and Key Food played a good game, coming in second with $.99 a pound, but it was the Met that pulled away with win at $.79. We were so excited about finding such a great deal, we......

The Coupon Clipper scours the specials for the best deals in New York's big grocery stores. We jumped a little too whole-heartily into grilling season. While were finding great deals on all kinds of meats, we momentarily forgot about our veggies. So after passing by another page filled with fine specials on meat, we turned to the produce section. While we wanted some veggies, we still needed some heft, and that led us to some......

We arrived at the Japan Day festivities in Central Park last Sunday afternoon only to find that the food had run out. Nevertheless, we enjoyed an excellent jazz combo, but soon it started to rain. In order to salvage the day, and keep with the Japanese theme, Gothamist headed downtown to give Go!Go! Curry a try. One of the reasons we waited so long to pay Go!Go! Curry a visit was that it was host......

The Coupon Clipper scours the specials for the best deals in New York's big grocery stores. Memorial Day usually conjures up some kind of natural reactions. Beyond the real reason-for-the-season aspect of the holiday, what usually comes next is food. Though hot dogs, chicken wings, and many other things could and should be used, what hits the paper plates more often than not are hamburgers. Which is all well and good, except that Memorial Day......

While that whiff of fried food is as indelible to the aura of Coney Island as the roller coaster, sometimes you just don’t want hot dogs, fried clams, onions rings, or elephant ears. The only fresh fruit option we’d ever found were from the nice ladies that stroll around with the cut up mangoes on a stick. But there are only so many of those things you can suck back before the real hunger pangs......

The Coupon Clipper scours the specials for the best deals in New York's big grocery stores. We hadn’t been to Pathmark in a while, so we were suprised to see two great deals pop up. Shrimp for $4.99 first caught our eye, but spinach was also a deal at under a dollar a pound. So when the shrimp were a no show at the store, we had to move on to the leafy green. And......

We’re pissed. After setting the date on our schedule for an excursion out to the Red Hook Ball fields this Saturday to sample some of the famous Mexican stalls, word comes from Porkchop Express that the opening has been postponed until May 5th. Apparently from the official Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park: ...administrative issues beyond our control have forced us to push this date to May 5th. We are very excited to......

We’d heard about a recently opened Singas Pizza on Columbia Street, that along with a few tables and chairs, also happened to have a post office inside. They usual jests about mailing pies were made, but not much talk about how the actual pizza was, so we decided to head over and check things out. On the front door was a newspaper clipping proclaiming that their chain, which has over 18 locations around the city,......

The Coupon Clipper scours the specials for the best deals in New York's big grocery stores. Bananas aren’t exactly the first fruit we look for in the ads. Not that we don’t have any love for quite possibly the world’s perfect food, but because of price. They normally go for around 50 cents a pound. They’d have to be very cheap before we cared. Ends up, 29 cents a pound is the perfect sum at......

In keeping with our affection for offbeat bites, Gothamist trekked out to Ridgewood this week to get a taste of Sietsema-sanctioned "Balkan Burgers." Bosna Express is a dismal little place tucked beneath the subway rail at Forest Avenue in Ridgewood, Queens. Its neighbors include a Montenegrin social club and a sprawling basketball plaza dotted with the occasional deflated ball. It's not a scenic place, or even a particularly inviting one, but it has something that......

After our disappointing foray into the world of Park Slope picnic fare, we scoffed at the neighborhood's promise of a gourmet hotdog. But Willie's Dawgs, the Technicolor lovechild of husband and wife team Ellen Lutter and Tom Anderson, may well have turned the tides. The menu features Karl Ehmer all-beef natural casing dogs ("Mutts") as well as a grass-fed "Pedigree" beef dog, Turkey and Chicken dogs and two vegetarian options. The pair have cooked......

The Coupon Clipper scours the specials for the best deals in New York's big grocery stores. Potatoes are usually a reliably cheap item, but there must be a glut in the spud market, because this week finds mounds of them all over the city at great prices. Morton Williams’ $1.49 price for a 5-pound bag might sound absurd at first, but a quick glimpse revealed that it’s not even the best price this week. No......

David’s Brisket House is an unlikely relic on a stretch of Nostrand Avenue mostly populated by 99 cent stores and West Indian delis. The space is narrow and dated, outfitted with mirrored walls (the sort mostly reserved for adult film sets) and ceiling tiles brown with the remnants of some ancient leak. It doesn’t have the fame of Carnegie Deli or the sprawling space and hypnotic neon glow of Katz’s. The clueless tourists and......

The Coupon Clipper scours the specials for the best deals in New York's big grocery stores. For the first week after the holidays, most grocery stores probably realized they had bludgeoned their customers enough with holiday sales and decided to play it cool. Food Emporium had a sale on gourmet chicken salad. Gristedes discounted bread. But Fairway apparently has no sense of shame. They lead off their post-holiday specials with $3.99 Sirloin, a price so......

The shopping mall represents, for most New Yorkers, everything that is bad about suburbia. But the Flushing Mall, which caters to a predominantly Chinese clientele, is not your usual mall. It’s a sprawling place, pieced together ad-hoc from several different buildings, and the various stores have a quirky, entrepreneurial feel. Some have no ceilings and resemble stalls in a convention hall; others are cloistered along narrow corridors like doctors’ offices. There’s one place that sells......

Pizzerias in this city are so common that sometimes you wonder if they’re all legit. Is that place on the corner really just another Ray’s Famous, or is it a front for some illicit trade? On the surface, Tony & Tina’s Pizzeria in the Bronx seems ordinary enough. But if you look a little closer, you’ll discover there’s more than one kind of dough getting baked here. It’s nothing illegal; this just happens to be......

Chinatown wakes up in the morning much the same as any other New York neighborhood—with a jolt of caffeine. Every block seems to have its own bakery where throngs perch at tiny tables to slurp hot tea or coffee before starting the day. But these are no Dunkin Donuts. The pastries everyone nibbles alongside their steaming cups are anything but ordinary—though some look familiar on the surface. What appears to be a custard doughnut is......

As any serious drinker knows, a long night of boozing is best ended with a heaping helping of carbohydrates. One good place to get your fill is the East Village deli called Punjab, which stays open into the wee hours to serve its clientele of Pakistani cabbies. But late-night Lower East Side revelers have also discovered the cheap vegetarian chow. There are potatoes over rice, potatoes wrapped in bread (roti, $2.50), potato patties (aloo tikki,......

Pizza may be one of humankind’s oldest recipes. The idea of taking a flat disk of dough and baking it quickly with a little topping is an ancient one. Versions appear in cuisines around the world. There’s focaccia from Italy, socca from France, naan from India. But one often overlooked cousin is zaatar bread, a snack usually associated with Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon. Plenty of falafel joints around town serve zaatar bread, but often it’s......

If you want fresh, it makes sense to go straight to the source. So if you crave fish and chips, why not go to a fish shop? Wild Edibles, the premiere purveyor of fresh seafood in the city, also offers a full menu of ready-to-eat dishes at its Murray Hill location. There are plenty of fancy options from shrimp gazpacho to macadamia-crusted soft-shell crabs, but what really hits the spot is plain fried fish. Here......

In suburbia’s conquest of New York, Subway and Quizno’s lead the culinary front, spreading almost as rapidly as Starbucks. But a quiet band of outsiders is fighting the good food fight, on the fringes. These are the shops that specialize in bánh mì, the French-accented Vietnamese sandwich that inspires cultish devotion among its fans (see The Porkchop Express). The latest reinforcements have risen up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill. First there was Hanco’s......