Ea-tin' Af-tah Midnight..........
Feb 20 '01
The Bottom Line Don't settle for something crappy...unless you don't care.
There are many places around the city where you can get food around the clock. Any given night (or early morning) when you're out with friends, or stumbling around drunk, you might find yourself really hungry or needing some sort of substance in your body to soak up all the alcohol.
Depending on which neighborhood your in, there is a variety of different foods. A lot of times, because it is really late you expect to find nothing but garbage (i.e White Castle, McDonalds, crappy diners) and crappy restaurants stay open all night banking on the fact that, once all the edible places close, hungry night owls will come crawling.
Most of the time this is true. For example, the "Restaurant" from Seinfeld fame, with the word "Restaurant" shining in red across the front on 110th and Broadway capitalizes off of the fact that Columbia college students, having nowhere else to go after their party ends at 2am or studying binges lead them to the sidewalk in search of food, will eat there between the hours of 1am and 7am. I was there at nearly 3am on a weekday and the place was packed as if the food was good. I found myself waiting for almost 5 minutes for a seat. In fact, it's terrible and not even worth the low prices they charge but it it 24hours so it will always get business during early morning hours.
Then there are holes in the wall like Mahmouns Falafels down on McDougal. The seating area is barely large enough to stand and hold your food and the seats are almost always taken but the food is good and it is always open. You can slide your way in, order a falafel and be back out on the street within a minute or two on a good night. They have shish kebabs with creamy sauce and vegetables and a few other things but I never check that far.
Again this is emergency food. Not the stuff that you would eat otherwise unless you were on a budget. But there is one place that is fairly cheap yet really good and open 24hrs. Yaffa Cafe.
If your down in the East Village, really hungry and there is no where else to go because everything else is closed, Yaffa is a great place to eat, even though the service is a little slow and very impersonal. The food is consistently good, quick and fresh. My favorite dishes are the Berber Chicken, the Kelast Fetuccini and the Chicken Dijon. The atmosphere is a little wacky with a multi-themed decor and the lights are dim but at 3am in the morning it doesn't matter. To me, this is one of the best places in the Southern half of the city to eat 24hrs.
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Epinions.com ID:
samadust
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Member: Douglas Flowe
Location: USA
Reviews written: 182
Trusted by: 94 members
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