when you want, where you want.
Our Summer Eating Guide, Mapped
Photo: Scott Semler
This week, we published our summer-eating guide, a big annual collection of advice on places to find delicious food and — we hope — a yearly spotlight for some deserving-but-under-covered aspect of New York dining. As always, putting it together meant months of eating across all five boroughs and leaning hard on our food team’s vast institutional knowledge of the city’s bodegas.
That last part was doubly true this year as we trained our collective eye on “markets,” which we chose at the outset to define in the broadest possible terms. It became clear pretty early in the process, when we were still thinking about what this guide would be about, that there was a particular energy to this kind of eating, but it took a while before we were able to nail down exactly what we were trying to say: that grab-and-go has gone gourmet.
It took a while, I think, because there is nothing new about markets with prepared food, and living in the city makes it easy to take them for granted. But stepping back to look at so many at once gave us a new perspective on just how good they are. As we started to assemble the list of spots we’d want to cover, we also started to see that across price points and neighborhoods, the “experiences” that many of these shops offered were the same, and the joy came from identifying all the different backgrounds and points of view informing them.
Yes, I’ve seen the comments that call this list anti-restaurant. It’s not; we still like restaurants. But there’s a utility to this eating and a need for endless adaptability that doesn’t exist for most, or really any, full-service restaurants. (There’s a reason they’re called “convenience stores.”) Our goal was to celebrate the creativity and skill that are on display in settings that are about as far removed from jewel-box tasting-menu counters as it gets.
We don’t really expect anyone to work their way down this guide one shopstaurant at a time. (Even though it would be an entertaining and varied way to eat through the summer, and to help with that endeavor, we’ve put together this Google Map.) Instead, we hope that its breadth helps New Yorkers understand how much good food is hiding everywhere in this city. Every summer, we set out to build something that is less expected than a list of the best ice cream shops or the best hot dogs that tend to run this time of year — our hope for this grocery guide is that it feels more surprising, and even more useful.
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