A guide to New York by word of mouth recomendations

How do you feed yourself on holiday? While the first answer might be with great enthusiasm, the second is probably by using Google. But just because we’ve been doing things a certain way for as long as we can remember doesn’t mean it’s the best way of doing something. I know this to be true because of cabbages. It took me years of attempting and failing to thinly slice the cruciferous sphere with a knife before eventually learning that gliding a potato peeler over the leaves produces the finest shred. In a similar vein, I’ve been on autopilot using search engines to scout out restaurants, bars, cafés and street food on holiday for as long as my mobile phone didn’t require a phone charm and credit. But I’ve recently learnt that this tool, which was designed to help us discover places, has become increasingly unhelpful in doing so. Is it time to break up with Google?

The problem with Google isn’t a lack of communication, incompatibility or that it never folds the laundry. The issue is in its size. As the many o’s in Google’s page scroller suggest, this colossus of a search engine indexes hundreds of billions of web pages with every search. The goal of publications, blogs, and companies is to rank on page one so that they’re seen by the masses, but this pole position doesn’t come by luck. It comes by caressing Google’s sweet spots, a technique known as search engine optimisation (SEO). Now, a guide to the best pizza in Naples has become a code you must crack. Are these restaurants included because they’re commonly searched? Have great spots been excluded because their website is a shoddy Facebook page, their interiors unaesthetic, and their imagery a heavily saturated, low-resolution mess? Has the writer even visited the destination? Not all but countless dining-out guides are penned by people who have never visited any of these places, written for publications that don’t even have a presence in the city they’re writing about. So, it comes as no surprise that half the recommendations are about as undiscovered as the Eiffel Tower.

A traffic intersection near Frankel’s Delicatessen in Greenpoint with New York’s iconic green street signs

Christy Spring

Using these guides is like cooking from a well-stocked kitchen with only half the ingredients you need for a recipe. It’s less about what’s there that’s problematic, but what’s left behind – cuisines, dishes, or drinks you might adore but are yet to know exist. Being handcuffed to Google dampens our curiosity and prohibits the magic of the everyday encounter: the very event-ness of eating and drinking in a city. I want to see if there’s a way to travel without them, so I’ve decided to cut search engines out of the equation entirely and see whether planning a city break purely by word-of-mouth recommendations could be a potato peeler to the problem. They say no one should come to New York unless he is willing to be lucky, so there’s no better place to gamble than the Big Apple to try my luck at discovering a city without Google. 

What does word of mouth entail exactly? Much as the Sahara has never been wet, and the dentist has never been fun, I have never been particularly risk-taking. So, as much as I’d love to say the plan was to step off the plane with enough chutzpah to garner all my recommendations from passers-by when I arrived, that felt like a cortisol-blasting hellscape. Instead, the research started a month or so before the visit, putting out question boxes on Instagram and calling for people who had visited New York or lived there to send me their recommendations on where to eat and drink. This, supplemented by the odd message to a celebrity who lives there asking for suggestions (you’d be surprised how many respond), provided me with a skeleton to start. I then rifled through this bible of suggestions from friends, celebrities and online strangers like a squirrel organising his acorns. Resisting the urge to fall into the abyss of Google reviews and images, I formed an itinerary based on gut instinct.

A plate of tacos at Taqueria Ramirez

Adam Friedlander for The New York Times 

When I eventually touch down in New York after eight hours of consuming individually wrapped cheese chunks and Elvis-themed movies, I’m spanked with a sizeable déjà vu. Whether I’d consciously realised it or not, I’d been staring at the city’s emblems and skylines on television screens, t-shirts and fridge magnets long before my arrival – the yellow cabs, brownstone stoops, pizza slices, and rat-pervaded subways. I take the J line to my first pitstop in Brooklyn, armed with my list of word-of-mouth recs. She’s the larger sister to Manhattan both in land mass and population, separated from her sibling by a ribbon of the East River. If Manhattan typically wears brogues, then you could assume Brooklyn is the one sporting the suede clogs.

If Manhattan wears brogues, then you could assume Brooklyn is the one sporting the suede clogs

I head to Williamsburg, a place once pure bohemia and a home for artists like Patti Smith, priced out of Manhattan in the 1990s, where rents were low and abandoned warehouses plentiful. With extensive gentrification, I’m told visiting the neighbourhood now is a little like running into a friend who’s had substantial plastic surgery. I’m in Williamsburg to eat at The Four Horsemen – a pint-sized, hygge-rich, wine-focussed spot by James Murphy of the band LCD Soundsystem, recommended by a friend. With its burlap ceiling shelves of low-intervention wine and utility-jacket-wearing hordes, it could have well been transplanted from Stoke Newington, and part of me wonders whether my gut took me here because it sounded like a well-trodden path. I park up at the horseshoe counter that curls around the bar, ears tuned into nearby whispers of chilled brouilly and Opinel steak knives. While this spot may lack lumbar support, it has a bountiful supply of strangers and potential new friends to talk to.

Frankel's exterior

Studio Session

Confit leeks on toast and a glass of low-intervention wine served at The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Giada Paoloni

Call it beginner’s luck, or perhaps it’s good karma for my past life as the Dalai Lama, but I’m sitting next to a man named Andrew, who is celebrating his birthday. Like any person who shares their birthday with St Patrick’s Day, he’s as likely to be sober as your aunt at Christmas, and this saucing provides the perfect conversation lubricant. He tells me he is a regular at The Four Horsemen (coming here at least 12 times a year, to be exact) and says there’s only one dish he hasn’t enjoyed. I’m ambivalent about ordering the sweetbreads, but he insists. They arrive threaded onto two wooden skewers with a soy-cured egg yolk – a delicate, smoky and tender transformation. More well-presented plates of food follow – a soft-boiled egg cloaked in a shawl of mayonnaise stained black with squid ink, sesame-crusted tuna with brown butter, ricotta gnudi reminiscent of deep pile carpet and warm slices of house bread with butter. As we finish the last forkfuls, I decide it’s time to pop the question to Andrew. 

“Anywhere good I should go while visiting New York?” I ask. Andrew is clearly an epicure, and he and his friend Jen, who sits next to him, erupt with recommendations from favourite taquerias and amaro bars to pizza joints and nightclubs. I scribble into my notebook with grease-stained fingers, words sliding between page lines. “This is why I’ve never left New York in my ten years of living here,” he laughs. “Because of moments like this.”

This American readiness to chat is alien to a Brit and, at points, a little disconcerting. But it pays to push away the deeply entrenched English fear of sparking up a conversation in case you won’t be able to extricate yourself from it – I’ve learnt of the places someone eats on the regular, which represents more than just a meal. To celebrate, I head to an audiophile bar called Eavesdrop in Greenpoint. It’s modelled off Japanese kissa bars – a place where the experience is as much about the listening as the sipping. The space is designed to mimic hanging out with friends on a Friday night, taking turns mixing on a cheap controller and feeling as much like a living room as a cocktail bar. I let Anita Baker do the talking while I tend to a whisper-thin coupe of Velvet Falernum, Contratto Fernet and pineapple.

Eavesdrop audiophile bar in Greenpoint

The next morning I wake with my lids grouted shut from the fluid of jetlagged, hungover eyes. I grab my notebook from my bedside table, trying to decipher my notes written from the night prior. To the naked eye, they could well be written in Cyrillic. A breakfast sandwich feels apt (if not medically necessary), so I head to Frankel’s Jewish delicatessen on Andrews’ instruction. The shop wraps around the corner of Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn, where Williamsburg meets Greenpoint. I amble through the latter to get there – it’s a happening, hip neighbourhood with enough morning runners, cold brew-drinking swarms, and farmers market enthusiasts to start a small revolution.

The Jewish deli is a defining part of New York, and the city was once a checkerboard of Jewish neighbourhoods where each enclave housed at least one kosher deli, upholding kosher dietary law separating meat from milk and removing pork from the equation. By one count, New York had upward of 1,500 Jewish delis in the 1930s, but this number has dwindled in recent decades. The venerable Katz’s Delicatessen and Russ & Daughters are some of the last stalwarts and entice mass hordes of tourists nowadays. But there’s a new species unleashed in the mix dubbed the ‘designer deli’, and Frankel’s is one of these. Opened in 2016 by brothers Zach and Alex Frankel, it pays homage to the greatest hits of deli food, bodega sandwiches and the local smoked fish emporiums of their childhood. Expect lox, bagels, matzo ball soup, and challah, but also the odd rasher of bacon, too.

Andrew vehemently told me to order the pastrami, egg and cheese on challah, so I do as instructed. I take the greaseproof-wrapped bounty outside and settle at a metal table to undress the beast. It’s fair to say that civil engineers should study the architecture of this sandwich because it makes little sense how a feather-light challah can support such a girthy filling of salt beef, scrambled eggs and American cheese, preserving structural integrity with each bite. It’s an Olympic weightlifter and a ballerina simultaneously. As I polish off the final morsel, I recall having a heated conversation with an American friend back home where I staunchly defended the Full English as the best breakfast. I stand corrected.

The lacquered bodies of Cantonese ducks hang triumphantly in steamy windows like pendant earrings

Flushing is next on my agenda – a neighbourhood in the north-central portion of Queens, sometimes called Chinese Manhattan. It’s a centre of commerce, transformation, and finance, and in many ways, it feels like an Asian city as soon as you walk off the subway. Hawkers with megaphones sell everything from Chinese newspapers and boxes of strawberries to fans and jumper de-bobblers. Old men curl over plastic cafeteria trays of knife-cut noodles in food halls, families encircle bamboo steamers, and the lacquered bodies of Cantonese ducks hang triumphantly in steamy windows like polished pendant earrings. Flushing’s Chinatown is a culinary destination for New Yorkers at large, and no part of Queen’s presents a more bafflingly spectacular array of restaurant options than here.

I was particularly keen to visit Flushing because it is one of those places that are best for bypassing research with the aid of Google. Firstly because you’d likely become a skeleton by the time you’d trawled through the hundreds of reviews of places to eat here. Secondly, because these pages only cover a small slice of how much there is to devour here (many restaurants don’t have signage, let alone PR, websites and professional images); and thirdly, because neighbourhoods like this are ones Google reviews notoriously serve the least. 

Bilingual shop signs on a street in Flushing’s Chinatown

NYC & Company

Google Reviews is a place where people go when they have strong feelings, so navigating Flushing this way is ultimately a bad idea. Despite the debunking of the MSG myth, you’ll find plenty of one-star reviews for restaurants here, carping about the amount of the flavour enhancer in the cooking. Some other favourites I found retrospectively when trawling through places I ate in Flushing included one-star reviews complaining that chilli oil had “stained their top”, a hole-in-the-wall dumpling spot was “cash-only and takeaway”, and that the Chinese people who worked in this Chinese restaurant, were in fact, “speaking Chinese”. Google and Yelp reviews also tend to attribute food poisoning in Asian (and also Latin American) restaurants to low health grades, even though statistically lower health ratings aren’t tied to food poisoning outbreaks. This stigma also extends beyond Google to articles in publications too. A recent piece written by the co-founder of The Infatuation said you can “get gross” and roll around Chinatown or Flushing, and that you rarely find a “hip, cool, fun Chinese restaurant that’s free of meat sweats and MSG”.

Keen to avoid the above biases, I head to Flushing armed with one recommendation from a friend and the plan to use my nose, eyes and stomach to suss out the rest. I start at White Bear – a cash-only, hole-in-the-wall dumpling vendor with a paper menu taped to the window listing 34 items ranging from wontons and dumplings to bean threads and rice cakes. I grab a no.6 (a dozen pork wontons in chilli oil) and eat them curbside behind a man and woman whose altercation is becoming as heated as the condiment coating my food. The dumplings are thick-skinned, chewy and slippery with chilli oil – by no means the best I’ve eaten, but a satisfying $10 feed. I scamper to a nearby shop for a cha yen – a Thai milk tea fragrant with rooibos, star anise and cloves and sweet with condensed milk. It’s so saccharine my dentist would probably have an aneurysm if he found out what I was up to. 

A street vendor selling corn on the cob, bread and cakes

NYC & Company

The next port of call was The New World Mall – a glass-walled building that looks about as new as a Sony Walkman, where a sprawling Asian supermarket and dozens of food vendors dominate the three-story metropolis. I take the escalator to the lower level, ready to slam my senses in this underground lair of Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles and Japanese takoyaki. Apart from neon signage, there’s nothing unified about the stalls here, serving distinct cuisines that are often homogenised under one country umbrella back home. There are cumin lamb skewers that hail from the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group that primarily lives in Xinjiang province in Northwestern China, Cantonese soup dumplings (xiao long bao) that explode with piping hot broth when you sink your molars into them, and biang biang noodles from Xi’an in central China, made by slapping the dough vigorously onto a wooden surface (hence the onomatopoeic name). Doing no prior research in malls like this is part of the thrill – it’s a roulette. Statistically, you’ll make some bad calls, but where’s the fun in being perfect?

The next few days, I channel the metabolic endurance of a pubescent boy and crawl the city’s sidewalks, ticking off places to eat on my list like a pig unearthing truffles. It dawns on me that apart from the pepperoni pizza slice I ate at L’Industrie (which was so good I seared the roof of my mouth from hasty consumption), the many places I was eating, and all of my favourites weren’t those rite-of-passage dishes you’d see plastered over online city guides. That’s not to discredit the wonder of a mustard-laced beef hot dog or wedge of New York cheesecake – but it’s a delicious symptom of the city’s diverse population reflected in its culinary landscape that makes eating here so enlightening.

 A 7 train rides the New York subway tracks, in front of the twinkling Manhattan skyline at dusk

NYC & Company

Devilled eggs with dill at Agi’s Counter

Take Bolivian Llama Party, a spot in a neighbourhood called Sunnyside known for its deep bench of Colombian and Ecuadorian spots that serves a mouth-widening diablada chicken sandwich spiked with locoto chile powder and piping hot salteñas. Or Agi’s Counter in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighbourhood known for its large Hasidic Jewish community, where I inhale pillow-soft palacsinta (warm, buttered Hungarian crepes) alongside a plate of paprika sausages and fried eggs on buttered grits. Taqueria Ramirez in Greenpoint is where I try my first suadero taco – a milky, pale pink cut of beef known to many as the twitch muscle or fly shaker with almost no market in the US but which is ubiquitous in South American cooking.

At Taqueria Ramirez, the suadero bathes in a large metal jacuzzi of lard, broth, beef intestines and tripe

At Ramirez, the suadero bathes in a large metal jacuzzi of lard, broth, beef intestines and tripe and is hooked out of the cauldron and piled onto soft corn tortillas with spoonfuls of salsa roja. It takes all but 30 seconds to finish each taco, but you can sit at the counter for far longer, watching the spit of chile-rubbed pork rotate hypnotically as shavings of flesh are carved off it to make tacos al pastor.

The bubbling choricera of meat at Taqueria Ramirez

Adam Friedlander for The New York Times 

Being born and living in a city as diverse as London means that many of my edible first times have existed within the confines of the city, so having my eyes opened elsewhere with such a gut-busting amount of choice is a special feeling. I even notice a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach at the thought of not having regular access to this corpulent choricera and ask myself whether it’s possible to stow ladles of its meaty nectar in my clear plastic liquid bag. I conclude that I should probably ease off the Pacificos.

New York is a feast, and I’m leaving full in more ways than one. Jeans in need of a loft conversion? Yes. But full of insight, too. Eating and drinking without Google forces you to be organised before you come and connect with people who call it home when you’re there, all without falling into the bottomless cavity of SEO-optimised guides. Gorging in the parts of this city that friends have cherished and strangers return to every week makes for the most satisfying meal of all. Of course, New York is the perfect test subject. She’s brimming with choice, people eager to share the city with you and friends back at home who have been before. That said, there’s no reason you can’t sack off search engines for any other city, hunt down your own Andrew and find your fly shaker.

New York City by word of mouth: where to go

Eat

• Bolivian Llama Party: diablada deep fried chicken sandwich
• White Bear: a dozen pork wontons in lashings of chilli oil
• The Four Horsemen: veal sweetbread skewers with soy-cured egg yolk
• Birria Landia: birria tacos with consommé
• Taqueria Ramirez: taco pastor and salsa roja Frankel’s Delicatessen: pastrami, egg and cheese challah L’Industrie Pizzeria: pepperoni pizza slice
• Agis Counter: Agi hashbrowns with horseradish-spiked scallion sour cream

Drink

• Bar Blondeau: Hundy P cocktail and blondeau fried chicken
• El Nico: sunset happy hour $10 chiqui martinis
• Teddy’s: pickleback
• Panorama Room: Panoloma cocktail drank at sunset on the terrace
• El Pengúino: Amaro Montenegro on ice with a side of gildas
• Ornithology Jazz Club: live Jazz and $8 margaritas