e a t e r y R O W

ROTI ROLL
994 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10025
(212) 666-1500

Have you ever been eating Indian food and thought "man, this tastes great, but it's just so inconvenient!"? Have you ever just wished your Indian food could be eaten en route between point A and point B without the need for all those pesky forks? I know. Happens all the time, right? Well, cherished readers, your dreams have come true thanks to Roti Roll, Indian food's answer to the burrito.

Roti Roll's menu is primarily made up of their "Frankies", the Indian burrito I mentioned, though there are a few other items available on the bottom of the menu. Roti Roll is a tiny place, similar in size to the Luke's Lobster in the East Village. No tables, just some bar stools at the ledge that rims the walls. Mr. Dogz introduced me to this place, explaining that it was his go-to place for cheap, late night snacking, and we took our seats on some of those stools.

Mr. Dogz is kind of a quasi-vegetarian, which is one reason he likes this place so much. The menu is mostly vegetarian. I'm about as vegetarian as a grizzly bear during salmon season, but I like everything as long as it tastes good, so I made a point of trying to try as many things on the menu as the thirty bucks I had on me would allow. Lucky for me, Roti Roll is pretty cheap, so that wasn't hard.

First, the vegetarian ones: Aloo Masala Frankie: potatos and sweet peas, Unda Aloo Masala Frankie: potato and sweet peas with egg, and Aloo Gobi Muttar Frankie, potato with cauliflower and peas. If you paid attention, then you probably noticed a theme. These three were very similar. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they were virtually indistinguishable, with the last of the bunch taking a slight lead because the cauliflower gave it a bit more depth. So how was it/them? Very good. Very very good. I can absolutely see myself here again. But I won't care which one I pick randomly from the pile.

My choice for having some protein in my diet was the Lamb Roti Frankie, lamb marinated in spices. This was the weakest of the lot, in large part because the lamb was too tough. It wasn't bad, but I'd skip it for something softer like any of the above. I also wanted to try something off the non-Frankie menu and was about to go for their spiced french fries when Dogz warned me of. So I ordered the Chicken Lollipop, what they call "Bombay style" chicken wings. I don't know that I'd call them wings, as they were nothing like what I've usually eaten, wing-wise. They were tender, like a mini-tandoori dish.

Everything here averages about $5 per, give or take a buck or two.

ARTICHOKE PIZZA
328 East 14th Street
New York, NY 10003
(212) 228-2004

Pizza is conceivably the quintessential NYC food. There are so many places that make lists like "best in the city", "best in the world", "best in the universe", "best in all corporeality", and of course, the Michelin Guide, that it's virtually pointless to go trying to determine a winner. Still, with a pizza place on every corner this side of the Hudson River, we can narrow it down. Artichoke makes my short list, and, should the line out the door mean anything at all, it's also on the list of just about every single person over 21 in lower Manhattan.

Artichoke hasn't been around for two years and already feels like it's been there since 1895. It's so hard to imagine the neighborhood without it there that I'm pretty sure I've invented memories of it from when I was a kid. For weeks I was telling myself "Geez, it's been there so long and I've never been. I should go." This was, in fact, a lie. I'd been there numerous times, but it was after a hearty night of East Village bar hopping and didn't remember anything.

So this time I was determined not only to go, but to document my experience. I showed up one weekend afternoon, and after standing on line for ten minutes, ordered two slices and a 32 oz. cup of their only offered beer: Budweiser. There aren't any seats inside, only a ledge. Outside are benches and they fill up quickly. Artichoke only offers a handful of pizza styles (see the pic), and I ordered two of them, a slice of the Margarita and a slice of the Artichoke and Spinach. Except for the fact that they tend to char up the crusts some, this was some of the best non-traditional pizza I'd ever had. On the margarita (my "normal" slice), the sauce was tangy and sweet and cheese was perfect. I didn't look down to find my plate coated in that bright orange grease that you so often find dripping from the fold. If this was good, though, the artichoke and spinach was flat out insane. The softness of the toppings with the blend of the cheeses (which I'm guessing were mozzarella, Parmesan and Gruyere) made something so creamy and so delicious I think that calling it a pizza does it an injustice. It transcends pizza.

I just wish I could sit down.

UNIDENTIFIED FLYING CHICKENS
71-22 Roosevelt Avenue
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
(718) 205-6662

Chicken wings, once the exclusive playground to bars catering to guys watching football, have seen a rebranding from "food" to "cuisine", thanks in almost exclusive part to the Koreans. South Korea has had a crush on the Buffalo wing for a while now and NYC has seen a micro-explosion of Korean wing places in the past couple of years (and lets not not forget Korean BBQ). So I decided to hop on the F train to Jackson Heights, to try out Unidentified Flying Chickens, just a few blocks away from the station along the aviary that is the above-ground 7 line.

It should be noted that Jackson Heights, the neighborhood and the massive Roosevelt Avenue station, is a maze. Bring a GPS.

This late Saturday afternoon, UFC was pretty empty downstairs where the seating is. Upstairs is the takeout part and there were a few people there waiting. And wait they will. If you go with a date, bring along an extra half hour's worth of conversation. KFC this is not.

I sampled all four of the wing flavors UFC offers, Soy Garlic, Hot, BBQ Mustard, and Sweet N Spicy, and here's my breakdown. They were all good, so no complaints there. The best was the Soy Garlic. The Sweet N Spicy was my least favorite and it wasn't spicy in the least. Speaking of spicy, the Hot was far from hot. A little tangy, perhaps, but they don't hold a candle to the power of the the spices at The Dutch, my alma mater's de facto campus bar. It was closer to a tangy BBQ. Finally, the BBQ Mustard, which was also good, but not as good as the Soy Garlic. I also ordered a side of fries, which came with a seasoned salt and a sauce that was just like what I imagine ketchup would taste like with Tobasco in it. I liked it.

The main difference between Korean wings and the wings you might get elsewhere, like maybe Atomic Wings, is the texture of the batter. It's very smooth in comparison and crunchy, like the coating of a corn dog. It's very good, but it has a flavor that overpowers the taste of the chicken under it and even the sauce. Now, don't get me wrong. Nine times out of ten, normal wings overpower everything with spice or sugary honey BBQ sauce. There's a softness to traditional wings that these don't have. At first, this is a nice change, but I don't know that I'll find myself with a craving for Korean wings the same way I occasionally do with the ye olde fashioned kind.

A ten piece wing plate will cost $10, a twenty piece will cost $18. They're big wings. Big. And the menu has other items like salads, sandwiches, and some traditional Korean dishes like bulgogi.

1108 Cortelyou Road
Brooklyn, NY 11218
(718) 287-3101

A friend of mine, who's I'll call Flinker Fairy, lives in Ditmas Park, a showcase to gentrification. Love or hate the word, there's no escaping that this place is definitely seeing a restaurant boom thanks to an influx of yupsters being priced out of Williamsburg. The Farm On Adderley (on Cortelyou Road) is just such an example of this boom. It would feel right at home in the West Village or NoHo, as would its customers, and is priced as such.

Some restaurants that move into neighborhoods not known for being foodie havens can sometimes be generic and staid, relying on comfort food staples that any Joe Shmoe hired off of Craigslist can whip up. It's rare to find people willing to be experimental, but I'll say this about Brooklyn. Restaurateurs there are willing to experiment. The restaurant serves new American cuisine made almost exclusively from local farms. It prides itself on environmentally sustainable entrepreneurship and humane farming. No offense to my home borough, but I don't think you'll see this in Queens any time soon (yes, I am shaming Queens to thousands of people right now in the hopes of getting them to change gears).

FF and I arrived at about 9:30 on a Saturday night and had a 20 minute wait for a table. We grabbed a seat and a beer at the bar and waited. When the table arrived, we noshed on focaccia bread and olive oil while perusing the menu. I decided to start with The Farm's Kale and Lentil Soup, a sweet bean soup with a poached egg floating in the middle of it. It was delicious on its own, but break the egg and allow the yolk to run through the liquid and you have no idea how good it was. FF started with a side dish instead of an appetizer: the Home Made Fries, served with a curried mayonnaise. These were likewise fantastic.

For dinner, I ordered the Roasted Chicken, a simple enough dish of Amish chicken in a white wine braised red cabbage. It was very good... with a "but". The chicken was perfect. My problem was the cabbage. It was exceedingly sweet and there was simply too much of it, such that it overpowered the chicken rather than compliment it. If there was but a dollop of the cabbage, rather than a soup of it, this would have been considerably improved. FF ordered the Grilled Trout, served with green beans and a helping of dried portobello mushrooms. As with the chicken, the trout could not have been made better than it was. It was simply paired oddly. FF didn't care much for the odd mushroom chips. I, on the other hand, thought that they went very well, but that it was the green beans that should have been rotated out for another vegetable. Perhaps broccolini.

For dessert, we started with a round of coffees. I chose the Doughnuts with Tres Leches. These are basically three freshly-made, warm doughnut holes with a dusting of powdered sugar and a creamy caramel-like sauce to dip them in. They were good, but I couldn't eat the last one, lest I exploded. FF ordered the Milk Chocolate Mousse with Salted Cream. I've never cared for chocolate mousses, but she went to heaven.

Two beers, one appetizer, one side, two entrees, two coffees and two desserts, plus tax and tip, totaled just about $95.

When I started with Part One of the hamburgers series, I was not planning to review chains. I figured that Consumer Reports could do that for me (albeit not as well). Then Five Guys opened their first and, at the time, only NYC location in the boondocks neighborhood of College Point/Whitestone and I gave it a peek, not knowing that they'd expand like their customers' waistlines. Cherry broken, I started having people ask me to specifically look at more chains. Still, not wanting to cross the bridge into comparing the Big Three just yet (next time, maybe), I chose three other national chains here in the Empire City, all with a 1950s retroness about them. And to encourage intra-city tourism, I made sure that they were all in different boroughs.

JOHNNY ROCKETS
930 Third Avenue, at 56th Street
New York, NY 10002
(212) 813-0003

Of the three chains included in this post, Johnny Rockets is the one you're most likely to find in a mall food court. In fact, I can think of three malls off the top of my head that have one. Johnny Rockets is also the only burger joint of the three that humiliates its staff on a regular basis by requiring them to dance in the middle of the store while singing oldies. The Loco-Motion wasn't a good song in 1962 and it hasn't aged well with time. I can only hope these poor unfortunates get well paid...

Unsurprisingly, Johnny Rockets is decked out like a 1950s soda shoppe. Neon, chrome, classic Coca-Cola posters, those white greasy-spoon hats. It's a nostalgic fantasyland. A throwback to the 50s, when life was simple, perfect, and care-free. Of course, such an era, the likes of which various radio and TV personalities tear up about having lost, never really existed except in the movies. Naturally, I find Johnny Rockets to be an exceedingly annoying place to spend my time.

Luckily for me, I needn't return. There are dozens of other and better burger places around in NYC, and dare I say it, Burger King made a better hamburger. The burger I ordered, The Original, was mediocre. They tout how their burgers are made with 1/3 of a pound of beef, but it must be mostly fat which melts off while cooking because the burger patty that wound up on the bun was no thicker than a fast food patty and twice as greasy. The fries were decent.

CHEEBURGER CHEEBURGER
108-50 Queens Blvd
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 997-8600

Cheeburger Cheeburger operates on the guiding principal that burgers and cheese go together like peanut butter and jelly, bacon and eggs, the internet and free porn. One without the other is crazy. And thus, all burgers at Cheeburger come with cheese unless you specifically ask otherwise. This may be annoying to Kosher diets or people who are lactose-intolerant, but I don't keep Kosher and my liberal parents taught me to abhor intolerance. So this makes perfect sense to me.

Cheeburger has clearly positioned itself as a Johnny Rockets competitor. The 1950s diner theme, with it's pink neon and chrome, is everywhere. What makes the dining experience here so much more pleasant is that the wait staff doesn't randomly break into a-capella versions of oldies rock songs.

Their motto is "Big Is Better" and their burgers aren't small. You can get 1/4 pound "starter" burgers, and work your way up to burgers with a solid pound of meat in them. Cheeburger claims that the most popular one is a 1/3 pound. There are many many toppings and almost all of them are free. The burgers are a bit greasy, but nowhere near as bad as what you'd get if you went to Jackson Hole. The fries, which are served in a huge basket with a peppery garlic seasoning, were awesome.

CHECKERS
344 Baychester Avenue
Bronx, NY 10475
(718) 320-4764

Checkers is known for being drive-through or walk-up only, with no seating inside. That said, Checkers broke from the mold with their location on Court Street in Brooklyn. There, they're just like every other chain, except much smaller, and with booths so shitty that they shift sideways on the floor when you sit on them. This one here in the Baychester part of the Bronx, near Co-Op City is a little more, uh, traditional. The few seats outside this art-deco 1950s-styled hut that exist sit between I-95 and a strip mall parking lot. No effort of any kind is made to make you comfortable enough to want to stay. Drive up, get food, go away. The drive through window gets priority over the walk up customers, so it was plenty slow for what was basically a fast food burger. Still, there's something about sitting outside on a day as gorgeous as I went, even if the view was less than stellar.

But at least it's a good fast food burger. Worth 10-plus minutes? Uh... do the drive through. Also, Checkers is dirt cheap. And not cheap because you get dollar menu stuff. Normal sized burgers. On days when I get all pissed off at the nearby driving range, I will occasionally shoot over and pick up two big burgers for $5... then I feel better. That said, Checkers is bad for you. I love hamburgers. I also happen to like not being obese. I take no pleasure in saying that I was the thinnest person by a considerable margin eating here. The combo you see pictured here had but one burger and was over 1000 calories. I justified it by biking 18 miles that day.

The cheeseburger itself was the best part of the meal and I recommend skipping that which is not bunned beefy goodness. The french fries, which are seasoned, started out as "wow, these are great!" but after a few of them an aftertaste emerged that was less than pleasant. Meanwhile, the chicken nuggets were flat out bad. It was like eating a processed chicken food product sponge. Good burgers though.