According to tonight’s New York Post, Dunkin’ Donuts is the top national food retailer in New York. It has a staggering 484 shops, up 18 in the past year across the 5 boroughs of New York. There are as many people in New York city as there are in London (both just over 8 million). It always amazed me how many branches there were: just how many doughnuts (donuts) can Americans eat? Second on the list is the sandwich specialist shop, Subway. This is the city of the sandwich: it will be freshly made, stuffed with mayo and calories and be absolutely huge! It will come as no surprise that third on the list is Starbucks, with an incredible 272 stores and 200 of them in Manhattan alone. Starbucks is always busy, full of people staring at screens of various shapes and sizes, nursing drinks for hours. Or, what I witnessed this weekend, people sat alone with the New York Times (whose Sunday edition takes all week to read) eating their packed lunch with no Starbucks mug in sight. At least they looked a bit guilty whilst trying to hide it behind the Style section. Not so stylish.
Category Archives: Food
Open all hours
It’s funny to think about Ronnie Barker on the streets of Manhattan, but it did strike me that Arkwright is alive and well here. The supermarket is open until midnight every night (no Sunday trading laws to scupper business here) and the pharmacy is open 24 hours. The pharmacy has gone way beyond its drug dispensing remit and sells pretty much everything. I am yet to see Nurse Gladys Emmanuel, the object of Arkwright’s affections, in the queue (that’s ‘on line’ here in the US, apparently queues don’t exist here) at CVS. I like it at CVS because it doesn’t have cashiers and the self service tills take all of the change I keep accumulating because I’m too slow to count it out in normal shops.
I love our local deli, open 8am till 9pm 7 days a week, which makes its own cakes in front of you. I think they may start charging me and E for watching them several times a week. So nice. I am gradually trying them all out. In true New York style we don’t cook and get take out from the deli – don’t want to boil those sprouts? Then buy them ready cooked, as the guy in front of me did. Want chicken for dinner? Well, how about 8 different types cooked and ready to eat. I frighten the man in front of me by saying I will have the other half of the chicken he has just ordered; he looks at me like I’ve just proposed to him. Nearly home and there’s a delivery guy in the lift (elevator) with a small brown bag that says Luke’s on it. I ask him what he’s delivering. Lobster. He’s delivering 2 lobster and prawn (shrimp) sandwiches and 2 fish soups. Now that’s true New York. You don’t go out to get your food, you get it delivered. Granville used his push bike, up and down the hills of his Doncaster suburb to deliver barm cakes to local housewives. The delivery guys here use mountain bikes to deliver lobster. Not so different from 1976, eh?
Milking it
Most weeks when I was in the UK, I would buy 2 four pint bottles of milk, semi skimmed organic from Sainsbury’s preferably. Never really thought much of it until I got here. There is a ridiculous number of types of milk in New York supermarkets. We start with your ordinary milk, it is low fat, 1 or 2 per cent. Is that semi skimmed? 3 per cent seems to mean whole milk, so is that full fat? Or maybe I should opt for some DHA Omega 3 milk? What is that about? I think it might be closely related to the milk with added vitamin A and D. Soy and goats milk I’ve seen before, seems reasonable for bodies that can’t cope with milk, but here they go one step further and have lactose free (probably flavour free too). There is rice milk, coconut milk, buttermilk and organic milk from cows which are grass fed. There is almond milk for those nutty moments and local milk for local people. Half and half anyone? Half of what? Is that semi skimmed? And a whole selection of creamer, what’s that, surely it is just thick milk? No. It is specifically for coffee (not tea, of course, there’s a whole other piece begging to be written on what Americans do to tea). And I still don’t know which one to get!
Alcohol free
My beer bottle tells me not to drink when driving and not to drink when pregnant but it doesn’t tell me how alcoholic the content is. When I bought the beer, I had to tell the cashier my month and year of birth when I am clearly, very clearly over 21. But beer bottles do come in matching carry cases, so I can look stylish whilst kidding myself that someone thought I looked young and falling over drunk because I have no idea how strong the beer is. Cheers!
Plastic fantastic
In the UK, there is a strong drive to reduce plastic bag usage. Visit the major supermarkets and you now have to ask for a plastic bag and those that are available are so thin, they are hardly worth using. Anya Hindmarch led the style crowd with her I’m not a Plastic Bag which came out in a heavy canvas with thick rope handles in 2007 and instantly sold out. Every major retailer, museum, even school has their own hessian bag of sorts as we all salve our environmental conscience. Every week I would take my bag of bags off to Sainsbury’s smug in the knowledge I would not need a bag, annoying the sales assistant when I refused to put my loose veg in a bag and it rolling off on to the floor. So I brought this attitude to New York and thought it would be pretty much the same. I already have a massive collection of plastic bags: double bagging at the supermarket and just in case, let’s stick yet another bag over that chicken, which has already been aggresively shrink wrapped. One bag for the washing liquid in case it escapes from the child locked bottle. Agh, i cannot bear all these bags, even in the health food shop they’re at it and you’d think they would at least make an effort! I do refuse bags but that seems to be unusual. I haven’t quite summoned up the courage to recycle my Fairways bags – mostly because they pack for you and I’m too scared to ask them not to. I had this romantic notion that everyone in the US used large brown paper sacks and held their groceries like a small baby, but I’ve only seen brown bags in use once: when they were inside a plastic bag.
I am a former fat person
Now, like most women, I am conscious of my weight and as per my previous post am figuring out how to remain well and truly in my jeans whilst in New York. Puzzling over which cake to buy for J’s birthday we met a self confessed ‘former fat person’. I have never heard this phrase before. How is it possible to work behind the bakery counter and not eat the cake? She showed me how large her bakery clothes were and how she never wants to be that large ever again. We bought the smallest chocolate cake, munched on oatmeal cookie samples and I pondered on this vignette of New York life. The battle with food is a constant here.
A taste of home
Fairways sells Heinz Baked Beans.
Foot and mouth
I am amazed at the number of nail bars in our neighbourhood. I think there is one on every street. Why is this? I love a pedicure, even in Winter and am eying up the nail spa near our building but how do they keep going all year round? Same goes for eating places. I think there must be dozens of cuisines within a street or two. I see now why the realtor who showed us the flats (apartments now) said that New Yorkers don’t cook. I am more worried about putting on masses of weight due to the portion size. R was delighted to learn yesterday that you can get a half sandwich – which to any non American means a normal sized sandwich. We went to 40 Carrots in Bloomingdales at the weekend – chosen purely because of the name – and discovered frozen yoghurt ( check pronunciation before ordering to save blank looks). Horrible. Why would you do that to perfectly fine yoghurt? Our waitress, with her fabulous retro 50’s hair and carefully drawn on eyebrows, was called Betty. Perfect. And of course, my favourite food place so far has to be ‘you don’t know nothing’ food and produce. Fabulous. Joey from Friends would be proud although probably hanging out in the ubiquitous Starbucks and not Central Perk which would have gone bust by now or taken over by the green mermaid.
nw3 to nyc 