If someone were to visit your hometown for a day, where would you send them to eat? What specific dishes would you recommend? What meals best represent your hometown’s people and culture? Why would you recommend these dishes?
In “The 25 Essential Dishes to Eat in New York City,” writers from T Magazine asked six chefs and food experts to create a list of the most delicious and memorable meals they’ve had in New York. Kurt Soller writes that the final list “is nothing like what any of us expected going into this challenge.” He continues:
Pizza and tacos aside, almost none of the classics commonly associated with New York are represented, whether bagels, dirty-water hot dogs, xiao long bao or emblematic sweets like rainbow cookies or Cronuts. In their place is a creamy, pungent sauce, from a recently opened Middle Eastern restaurant, meant for smearing on anything in sight, and a rotating spread from a two-table Indonesian place in Elmhurst, Queens, that can only be described as “weekly lunch.” Our choices span many neighborhoods and every borough except Staten Island, though there was lots of discussion about what we might include from there, even if our panelists ultimately decided that nothing quite made the cut. (We also spent lots of time talking about the pizza from Razza in Jersey City, which surely would have earned a spot had it not been a river away.) Ultimately, though, conversations like this are always subjective — a different menu of worthy picks would have emerged from a different panel, or even from this same group on a different day. The list should, nonetheless, get you excited to try new flavors around town as New York’s ever-changing culinary scene comes (carefully) back to life post-lockdown — or at least make you very hungry.
The first dish on the list is the albondigas at La Morada, a restaurant in the Bronx that serves Oaxacan food. Amiel Stanek writes:
A shallow bowl of albondigas, golf-ball-size spheres of beef, crowned with a sprig of cilantro and luxuriating in a tomato-chile sauce the color of sun-baked clay — in many ways, this modest dish, which is only sometimes on the menu at La Morada, is an apt metaphor for the restaurant itself. Just as each supple orb splits open to reveal the pimiento-stuffed green cocktail olive buried in its center, this casual spot represents so much more than its unassuming storefront might suggest. The chef, Natalia Mendez, and her family, who opened La Morada in 2009, serve Mexican food, sure. But look beyond the tacos and burritos and you’ll find the menu’s true standouts: complex, idiosyncratic dishes from their native Oaxaca, such as elaborately spiced moles and those perfect little albondigas. Still, to focus too tightly on the food, excellent though it is, is to elide the larger significance of the restaurant as a bastion of local activism. Mendez and many of her family members who own and work at La Morada are openly undocumented, and the day-to-day operations of the restaurant run parallel to their fierce advocacy work with and for the city’s immigrant community, as well as to their vigorous mutual-aid efforts to support those most affected by the ongoing pandemic. To eat a humble plate of meatballs here is to be reminded not just of what a great restaurant is but of what a great restaurant can do.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
What are the essential foods to eat from your city or town? Put together a list of dishes that showcase the local food in your hometown. What makes these foods so special?
Are there any restaurants in your area that you would recommend to visitors — places that capture something unique about where you’re from? Are there hidden gems that only locals know about? What makes these dining spots so worthwhile?
Pick one of the dishes or restaurants on your list and write a descriptive paragraph, using the article as a model. Use vivid language to draw on the reader’s five senses. We hope you’ll share your description in the comments section.
Which of the 25 dishes listed in the article stand out to you the most? Which dishes would you want to try? Which are you least likely to try?
Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
