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Welcome to New York

Food is never just about food its access to an experience, a moment. To buy cheese, a baguette and olives and then lie back in the summertime grass of Manhattans Central Park with thousands of other picnickers as the Metropolitan Opera performs a free public show is to steep in beauty and community and the thrill of something astonishing and grand regardless of how good the cheese is.

To rise from a thoughtfully served, exquisitely prepared meal; to stroll through a late-spring farmers market on the first Saturday that the tiny, sweet strawberries arrive; or to enter the cosy thrum of a Brooklyn beer hall on a snowy winter evening is to feel a part of something, to know a place a little better and to feel just a little more alive.

New York City has five boroughs Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Most visitors like most New Yorkers, really will become most familiar with the first three, if not the first two, or one. But all five have been shaped by the immigrants who over the centuries, the decades and the last few years have made this place home. New York is a celebration of cultures, creativity and diversity which makes for some pretty incredible eating.

It isnt a simple or easy city, though not in the way that simply beautiful places are. Rents are expensive, public transport is crowded and smelly, and competition is fierce for everything, from subway seats to table reservations. But, one comes to realise, thats part of its appeal. The challenges make the adventure that much sweeter.

Explore the City

Manhattan

Manhattans Downtown encompasses the neighbourhoods long thought of as impossibly cool: the West Village , with its tiny, picture-perfect bistros; the younger, more eclectic East Village , with its strong multicultural options; the jumble of casual eating and shopping that is Chinatown ; and Soho once an artists enclave and now a cobblestoned centre of high-end commerce and curated dining.

Chelsea, Gramercy and the Flatiron districts are home to the citys growing start-up scene and are a band of hip, young neighbourhoods with interesting restaurants, including Manhattans pocket of south Asian cuisine.

Midtown , the band below Central Park, is where office workers commute to and tourists flock for the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the MoMA. It has long been considered a dining dead zone by locals, full of chain restaurants, office lunch spots and traps for tourists; but that makes its gems that much more delightful.

Uptown flanks Central Park: the tweedy, movie-ready Upper West Side , with its deli-based institutions and its less bookish, more ostentatious equivalent, the Upper East Side .

And still north of those is Upper Manhattan, which includes Harlem with its increasingly serious dining scene Washington Heights and Inwood . Theyre generally working-class, ethnically diverse neighbourhoods that are light on pretension and rich in potential, both in terms of culture and dining.

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is fast changing and hyper young its worth exploring the neighbourhoods constituting hipster headquarters: Red Hook, Williamsburg and Greenpoint , all hugging the waters edge, as well as the more interior Crown Heights , Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Theyre neighbourhoods full of artisans, chefs and earnest and absurdist types. One can as easily stumble upon exquisite oysters as the offer of a straight-razor shave or bread made from hand-ground local grains, The flipside is brownstone Brooklyn. Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights and Fort Green include immensely strollable blocks of architectural delights. The dining here is generally tamer, relaxed and family friendly. But there are happy exceptions, with young chefs vying to create something compelling and lasting if not just a darn good cocktail.

Queens

Queens is one of the most diverse places on Earth. Residents hail from across Asia, Europe, Africa and South and Central America, making it home to some of the best and most unusual eating in New York. Astoria and Jackson Heights laid out in easy-to-walk grids are its most celebrated neighbourhoods and come up in nearly every conversation about where to find the best food and drink, whether its a beer garden or home-style Greek, Pakistani, Colombian or Guyanese youre after.

Staten Island & The Bronx

These lesser-known boroughs are the citys most suburban and car-centric Staten Island most of all. The Bronx is celebrated for having a strong immigrant culture thats represented in pockets of neighbourhoods and its largely informal but authentic restaurant scene. Its off the beaten path, but the richest rewards tend to be the hardest won.

Meet the Locals

Michelle Maisto

michellemaisto.com

Michelle Maisto is a food and technology writer in New York. Shes the author of The Gastronomy of Marriage: A Memoir of Food and Love and has contributed to The New York Times, Gourmet, Saveur and a dozen tech sites.

Alex French

@FrenchAlexM

A freelance writer whose work has appeared in GQ, New York Magazine, Details, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Mens Journal, Grantland, This American Life and numerous others.

Raquel Cepeda

djalirancher.com

A native New Yorker of Dominican parentage who currently works as an author, documentary filmmaker and cultural activist. She has written about varied subjects including music, culture, race and identity for publications such as People, The New York Times and Time Out New York.

Alana Hoye Barnaba

ahoynewyorkfoodtours.com

Owner of Ahoy New York Food Tours, an independent company offering food tours of Chinatown and Little Italy. She has formed solid relationships with the local shops and restaurants and considers this part of the city her second home.

Olivia & Jennie

@hungrygrls

The brains behind Hungrygrls, an Instagram account dedicated to all things food from daily eats to the most coveted cuisines. Olivia and Jennie use captions, photography, food staging and as much humour as possible to shine a positive and engaging light on the (often overlooked) specific relationship that women and girls have with food.

Karl Wilder

secretfoodtours.com

A food-loving globetrotter who has worked in Italy, the Dominican Republic and Paris. Combining his passion for travel and eating, Karl currently works for Secret Food Tours in New York, where he helps runs gastronomical tours of Greenwich Village.

Laura Ferrara

@lauraferraranyc

A New York-based stylist and fashion editor who has worked with magazines such as Allure and Glamour. She also runs a certified organic orchard and cidery in Hudson Valley.

Vinh Nguyen

eatdrinkvinh.com

Restaurateur, chef and seafood expert, Vinh opened (the now defunct) Silent H in Williamsburg in 2005, kicking off the still-thriving bahn mi craze in New York City.