Eating New Territories

You don’t visit New York; you live it. You have to devour it selflessly, like you chomp on a slab of apple pie: trying to grasp all its juices and flavors but already thinking about the next one. It’s a whirling mix of people and cultures, barely fitted into the five boroughs – Bronx with its Yankees, Queens with its immigrant villages, Brooklyn with its prototypes of hipsterdom, Staten Island with its peaceful remoteness, and Manhattan. The nexus of it all, strategically organized in a matrix of streets and avenues, like a chocolate bar. That’s where the flavors are bubbling.
Take Harlem.
Get off the tourist’s grid and sink your teeth in this warm, sticky, taffy of a neighborhood, where the streets are well beyond one hundred, the buildings are a dusty brick red with windows that entice but don’t reveal, and the sidewalks are animated by boisterous boys in hip hop hats and women with big, doughnut round buttocks.
It’s Harlem, man.
Go to a Baptist church, it’s Sunday after all, and the folk is warm and welcoming, and all the singing and chanting and hugging your neighbor will feel like therapy to the wandering man. Then eat. Food for the body and food for the soul. The cornbread is warm, fluffy yet grainy, the perfect vehicle for soothing melting butter. The pork is crackling caramelized and the deep fried chicken is plenty. There will be greens, but don’t bother. It’s New York, man.