KEY POINTS:
"Do you know where Old Fulton St is?" the sweating stranger asked. The fire burning in his eyes suggested a man on a mission. We did the old "we're strangers here ourselves", and I started to get the map out, but he was gone already, hollering at a
cop on the next block.
We had spent a few happy hours wandering around Brooklyn Heights, nosing around Montague St and wondering where "the basement down the stair" might be that Dylan said he lived in Tangled Up in Blue.
We had wandered along the sunbathed Esplanade and were dawdling by a circuitous route towards where we'd been told that the best pizzas were to be had: Garibaldi's under the Brooklyn Bridge.
When we reached it, we saw it was on Old Fulton St. There was our sweating, hungry mate, 10 spots ahead of us as we waited in a queue on the footpath (or "stood on line on the sidewalk" as the New Yorkers say).
It was worth the wait. In a city where pizza is almost as widely available as hot dogs, Grimaldi's is legendary. Patsy Grimaldi, the founder, learnt how to make pizza from his uncle who, legend has it, taught the man who opened the first pizza joint in America in 1905. That may be apocryphal but the many photos on the wall of Frank Sinatra chowing down prove that the list of celebs who are claimed as regular customers is no invention.
They only do one kind of pizza - your kind. You choose from an endless list of toppings ($2.50 each) to add to the basic sauce-and-mozzarella model - $20. The thin crust, cooked in a coal-fired oven is crisp but never charred. The rough red is cheap and the place is packed.
On Manhattan, time and real estate values have caught up with cheap ethnic cuisine. Chinatown is still Chinatown but there's scarcely an Italian restaurant in Little Italy any more. It's strictly for tourists, although if you find yourself there you should blow a few bucks on some fantastic cheese at DiPalo's on Grand St.
But take the subway (New Yorkers call it the train) off the island and you can still find pockets of Europe, little enclaves where no one is talking English, not even the shop signs. The best Italian eating is to be had in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. In the Polish section of Williamsburg, just over the East River, I had a great meal of pierogi (cabbage and meat stuffed dumplings) and boiled beef in horseradish sauce for $15, which I ordered by pointing to what they were eating at the next table. Astoria in Queens is where you'll find the best Greek food; Sunset Park in Brooklyn is Little Vietnam.
The essence of the New York dining experience is the deli - which is nothing like what we call a delicatessen. Here they serve cooked food (and massive hero sandwiches; are they so called because finishing one is a heroic achievement?)
If you take longer than two seconds to give your order to the breakfast cooks ("two-over-easy-toasted-bagel-bacon-side") they know you're from out of town. And in the afternoon, when the breakfast hotplates are turned off, there are bains-marie full of good basic food - everything from lasagne and curry, to fruit salad. You fill up a container and pay by the pound (it's about $20 for a kilo, which would easily feed two).
The deli of delis is Katz's in the Lower East Side, famous for being the setting for Meg Ryan's fake climax in When Harry Met Sally. A kosher deli where the pastrami sandwiches have stacks of meat at thick as your fist, it's been running since 1888 and by the look of it, nothing much has changed since the invention of neon advertising signs.
More formal dining, in Manhattan at least, can get pricey. Main dishes at halfway decent restaurants start at $30 and end up nudging $50; by the time taxes and tips are loaded on, a main course, dessert and wine for two will leave you little change out of $200. But you can eat well and save plenty by getting wise to the pre-theatre menus. Most restaurants will do a fixed-price two-or three-course meal for about half the cost because you'll be gone by 7pm (a condition of the deal) and they can fill the table later with leisurely diners.
As to the rest, you don't always get what you pay for. I had booked well in advance for Anthony Bourdain's fabled Les Halles Brasserie, the city's temple to carnivorousness and so I ordered with some relish the entrecote de boucher - $40 worth of rib eye. It was pallid and grey, not exactly overdone but quite without the exterior crispness that a fine steak demands. The Blonde, however, was most impressed with the house-made blood sausage with an apple sauce.
The ultimate New York snack is the hot dog. But avoid the vendors who operate from little stands on virtually every street corner and pay a bit extra at the more substantial wagons. My favourite is next to the old Customhouse at the foot of Broadway. He'll pluck the standard dog from near-boiling water and put it on a bun that tastes like cotton wool. But give him time: he's making magic in there. Spicy Polish sausage on a slab of crisp baguette, drowned in onions and any kind of mustard you can name. Five bucks. It will fortify you for a further few thousand metres of pavement-pounding.