Cheap 'n' Choosy Chelsea

Tea and bickies (as we say downunder) at Port's Tea & Coffee (now closed)  West Chelsea ChEatSheet NOSH-OUTS FOR THRIFTY FOODIES in WEST CHELSEA  (plus some extra places a bit further afield) West Chelsea  (16th-30th streets between 8th and 11th Aves in my book), has a surprising concentration of good, inexpensive eats, especially as you drift west towards the Hudson, and especially on 9th Avenue. As rampant generification  of this nabe takes hold, I maintain this page as a kind of neighborhood rescue service: quite often, mediocrity gets more traffic because people keep going to the same places old they know. It takes a lot for a new place to gain momentum - it can go out of business before it even gets started. Having worked in food ,  I know that if you don't patronize a good place, one day it won't be there - Duane Reade is a such a crappy place to have a nice meal ... So without further ado, below is the content of an occasional missive I send t

Landing the most scrumptious sausage roll at the Tuck Shop NY The Tuck Shop Revisited for Tim Tams, Mint Slice, and a runny meat pie The Tuck Shop featured in my "Best Job In The World" application The Tuck Shop? Never 'eard of it! +++ HOW DO you make a sausage roll? Put it on a hill and push it. That's the über clean joke about this snack from my kindergarten days, when the local Aussie "tuck shop" or school canteen dispensed greasy, fatty pies, pasties and sausage rolls to a nutritionally unenlightened public. Oh how we loved that flaky bakey crap. The pie - something that has never taken off in the USA except in the form of a 'pot pie' - was a pastry case filled with drippy, peppery mince in a brown gravy strong on Worcestershire sauce. How did you eat it? Peel off the pastry lid and eat that first. The using your index fingers, scoop out the filling and suck it off your fingers, ouching at the temperature. Finall

$5 Chai Greek Yogurt Cup trying not to eat it too fast ... My folding bike experiment, tikit on Trial , included this visit to the Three Tarts : I visit the Three Tarts almost as often as the bathroom but I can assure you there's no direct causality ... The antithesis of supersize me, ThreeTarts is 'microsize me' with its tiny, utterly original, coin-sized cookies, tarts, muffins and parfaits, meticulously baked and priced to empty the small change in your pocket. You will find concoctions here that you will find nowhere else. Here are the absolute standout numbers in my book: 1. The Chocolate Lovely - two superfine, super thin, super dark (almost black) chocolate cookies with a dark ganache filling. There is a delayed reaction as the chocolate hits your palate then creeps slowly over it, intensifying as it goes. Wow. What a way to spend 60 cents. Shape changes from bat to penguin to megaphone depending on the whim of the Japanese patisserie me

What's the most eaten meal in Japan? It's NOT sushi. It's not even ramen. Nope, it's this thing called curry rice . Curry rice appears on practically every budget menu in Japan. You can buy it to go for around $3-4, when most simple noodle dishes or soups range from 600 yen or $US6.50. Curry rice is the staple of millions of ordinary Japanese families, and even more geeky bachelors, I bet. It's even been immortalized by this miniature curry rice meal I found at Kid Robot in NYC. So what is it? It's basically made from a pre-packaged curry rice cube that comes in a packet - they call it a roux, and the competition to make the perfect roux is stiff. Now of course, you can get this exact same kind of thing from India, China, Malaysia and so on. But if you read Japan's S&B Foods site, they'll convince you that Japanese curry is the best, because the guy who made a fortune out of it sought to refine it, whereas other countries use it t

Here's an Gal golden oldie - a short clip from my Hawaii 2005 trip where I sampled a number of cheap'n'choosy Hawaii treats like musubi, super hygienic nori rolls and even a Hawaiian McFeast. This was pre-YouTube, and before I knew how to wield a digital camera like a steadycam, but you get the idea! Hawaii Food Movie Clip (a Quicktime movie)

This one barely scrapes in under the Cheap'n'Choosy banner, but I enjoyed it so much I'm going to include it. Picture this: a rainy, drizzly day, I'm hobbling around having just returned from 5 weeks' customer evangelizing in Singapore ( eating durian of all things) and Tokyo , having put my back out on the last day of the trip. Straight from the chiropractor, I need some neutral place to chill, neither restaurant nor bar nor noisy hard-chaired cafe to grab a bite where I won't be jostled or have to suffer loud music or a cooler-tha-thou 'tude, which has a bit of cushioning behind the lumbar region. I know ... a department store cafe! A hotel would be a close second, except they tend to be, well, a bit hotelish, and they don't stop pestering you with their pricey bar menu. A museum or art gallery cafe would be a close third, except you're talking hard floors, even harder chairs and uncosy cavernous dimensions. Oh yeah, and people pushing aro

I borrowed this shot from Michael G on Yelp because I ate mine too fast. UPDATE 4/22/13: According to a reviewer, this restaurant appears to have moved to 181 W. 4th Street (b/w 6th and 7th Ave) +++ I'm off to Japan, for the first time in my life.  (UPDATE: Here's what it was like ). It will be my first visit ever visit. I confess I've been getting stuck into these addictive fried chicken wings from a little hole in the wall around the corner called Tebaya . I've eaten them THRICE in the same week, I'm ashamed to say, because I supposedly don't eat MEAT and FAT and SALT in such quantities. What's happening to me? And how can they make the middle part of a chicken wing taste so amazing? This is how . The process, called teba , involves marination then double frying - once to remove the fat but leave the collagen, then once again to crisp what's left, then sprinkled with sesame seeds. The result is incredibly tasty, and not as greasy as you

Continuing my tikit on Trial experiments, my folding friend and I ventured to Robert DeNiro's new eaterie, Locanda Verde . The place isn't cheap, but it's certainly choosy. So how on earth does an upscale brunch qualify for this blog? Justin, the Leo DeCaprio lookalike who served "il-latterate" yours truly told me why straight coffee drinkers get refills and latte drinkers don't ... Fellow illatterates, you'll just have to watch the movie to find out. MOVIE: The tikit on trial at Locanda Verde More tikit on trial experiments Left: A Brompton and a Bike Friday tikit parked just inside, the BMWs, Mercs and Aston Martins are languishing nearby in the gutter.

Looking like the mansion scene in "Eyes Wide Shut" with an orgy of socializing rather than shtupping, this cavernous restaurant/bar is total trip for the senses. It features a massive, chandelier-feastooned central dining room harking from some Edwardian era (or a Hollywood set thereof), flanked by little dark nooks and crannies and passageways crammed with people drinking and schmoozing and shouting about the meaninglessness of life and 30 Rock. It's like being in one of the big ballrooms of the Titanic before it sprung a leak. Best of all, unlike most nightspots in Chelsea, there's no velvet rope and unhappy attitude that goes with it - probably because it is a restaurant, not a nightclub, and restaurants always need all the chompers they can get. A server said "We're in the business of hospitality." And he said it with a genuine smile. Whoa! They clearly have a great boss or they're on drugs. You can always spot a bad boss - it comes out

This is my slightly healthier spin on the 5-minute Chocolate Mug Cake recipe circulating furiously around the internet. I say 3+ minutes because abandoning it in the nuker for 5 minutes can lead to burned bits - better to coax it gently to doneness ... here's me doing the dishes in County Kerry back in 1999 Galfromdownunder 3+ minute Vegan Chocolate Mug Cake ( with original, non-vegan substitutions indicated) 4 Tablespoons buckwheat pancake mix (or ordinary flour) 3-4 Tablespoons Splenda/Stevia (or sugar) 2 Tablespoons good cocoa (I used Fair Trade Organic unsweetened) 2 tbsp no-sugar fruit conserve (not in original recipe - I used Wholefoods grapejuice sweetened Raspberry spread) 1 glob of soy yoghurt (or 1 Egg) 3 Tablespoons almond milk (or regular milk/half&half) 3 Tablespoons grapeseed oil (or regular oil) Few chocolate drops/chunks (optional - I used 70% chunks because I like it dark) Few nuts (optional) 1 Mug Method: Mix dry ingredients in 1 mug. Mix wet ingredients in

Welcome Skintsters, to Cheap 'n' Choosy. This blog was originally inspired by an article I wrote for the Eugene Weekly's Back to Campus Guide in 2005 . Eugene is the land of the sliding scale, bartering for babysitting and 1001 different ways to make tofu palatable. It abounds with sub-5-10 dollar options to make you forget you're stuck in Eugene, like the amazing Pizza Research Institute's Vegan Chef Special slice, $4 , or the Keystone Cafe's famous sesame oat pancake . Even $10 is a big night out there, so the hunt for the superlative yet sub-$5 life experience has become my own private Idaho, ever since leaving Australia in 1997 to travel the world on a folding bicycle . Since then I've been sharing my finds for the discerning yet frugal fashionista, foodie and funseeker in my general Galfromdownunder blog . But today, while partaking of a $3.50 cup of the dangerously addictive New England Chowder at the Lobster Place in Manhattan's Chelsea Market,