During the frenetic few days that I spent in New York last week I splurged, as always, on enjoying the city’s dining diversity. Compared to home, it’s a gastronome’s playground far from Maine’s more preciously focused seas and fields. It’s like stepping out of an exiguous puddle into the vast ocean, from food trucks to haute fare.
On West 46th Street the food trucks are an international lineup
This led me to enjoy Chomp Chomp, Obica and Marta, which respectively took in Singaporean hawker fare in Greenwich Village; a midtown mozzarella bar on Madison Avenue and in NoMad the thinnest crust wood-oven pizza imaginable—that in addition to a divinely urbane menu of Roman style cooking in the pop-culture panache of restaurant guru Danny Meyer and chef Nick Anderer.
What’s immediately apparent is how New York restaurants fixate less on local fare than we obsessively (and gladly) feed on eating local. That’s not to say that their greenmarkets aren’t cherished both by residents and restaurant chefs.
The dining room at Chomp Chomp on Cornelia Street
I read about Chomp Chomp in a New York Times review from 2015 and filed it away. I made a beeline for it on my first night in New York joined by a trendy downtown friend who frequents these places. Hawker fare, he said, is popping up in a lot of places. And fancy chefs are recreating street food in various guises. (Hairy crab en papillote?)
