The pizza discourse in NYC is tangled and fierce, and the top slice shops are often packed with those judging crust-to-sauce ratios with the use of a ring light. When you need to get away, head to Amore. We aren’t going to tell you that this Flushing spot makes the absolute best pizza in the city. That sort of talk has no place here. (But, you know, you could make the argument.) Amore is just Amore. The cheese is greasy, the lights are fluorescent, and the crust-to-sauce ratio is, yes, on point.

The next time you get the urge to move to a seaside cottage and become an oyster farmer, go to Red Hook instead. First, to Louis Valentino Jr. Pier, to stare at the Statue of Liberty, and then to Red Hook Tavern, where everybody orders the burger, and nobody shares. That means that at any given moment, 40 burgers are being consumed by 40 people at 40 seats. The silent, side-by-side consumption might make you feel closer to 39 complete strangers than you have to anyone in months.

A big part of living here involves finding out about cool, unexpected little places and then gatekeeping the sh*t out of them. Which is why it hurts a little every time we tell a new person about Studio 151. Situated on top of a jazz club, this sushi speakeasy in the East Village is like a house party, in a house that also happens to have a standout $80 omakase meal. Bring the coolest New Yorker you know, but only if they can keep a secret.

If it’s skyscrapers and traffic noises that put NYC on your sh*t list, Kashkar Cafe is pretty much as far removed from those as you can get. The Uyghur restaurant is in Brighton Beach, so you can combine a visit with some tanning, or a polar plunge, depending on the season. Once the waves have washed away your anxiety, walk a block off the water to Kashkar, where you'll find some of the city's most comforting, reassuring food, like stir-fried, lamb-filled bosu lagman, and juicy veal kebabs.

Grand Central Station is one of the most stressful spots to navigate in the city, packed with equal parts tourists staring at the celestial ceilings, and people who will never budget enough time to get from the subway to the Metro North, and are sprinting. But down below it all is the Grand Central Oyster Bar. This cavernous seafood spot opened in 1913, and while it was once full of businessmen slurping oysters, now it's just a break from the noise, and an oasis for perfectly fine clam chowder.

According to legend, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray was invented in Brooklyn in 1868. A few decades later, the knish took off on the Lower East Side. Then, in 1952, the original Knish Nosh was established in Queens. Today, you can still stop by the shop—now in Rego Park—and enjoy a very historically New York City meal that consists of dense, pastry-wrapped potato with a side of celery soda. Would you like some pierogi? Trick question. You don’t have a choice.

By design, a visit to La Morada in Mott Haven takes you out of your boring daily routine: the restaurant with an activist heart and a selection of lick-the-plate-clean moles is only open on weekdays, until 5pm. It’s the perfect excuse to play hooky, or take a long lunch break on a work-from-home day. Have a seat in the stripped-down, canteen-like space and rifle through various pamphlets for causes they support, while digging into a hearty meal of Oaxacan classics.

It could be your neighbor, your dentist, or your Uber driver, but someone you’ve met grew up going to this Chino Latino spot, and loves their platter of boneless chicken cracklings, squeezed over with lemon and dipped in a not-so-secret green sauce. Inside, old framed photos of celebrity visitors line the walls, and large booths fill up with Upper West Siders who have been eating pork chops in this exact spot since it opened in 1986. A lot has changed on 72nd Street, but La Dinastia remains.

This tiny East Harlem restaurant is the only place we know where you can browse through shelves of vintage denim clothing, listen to Thai psychedelic rock, and drink BYOB beer with your friends while waiting for your food. Bangklyn’s owner—who, among other things, founded a vintage clothing fair in Bangkok—cooks dishes to order behind a counter, and though the menu is short and mostly geared towards takeout, you’ll find plenty to fill your table and satisfy your hunger too.

B&H Dairy is the kind of place where you can walk in with today's copy of The Times under your arm, make conversation with the people next to you, and be transported to a previous East Village era. It’s been around since the 1940s, and there’s something about eating a tuna sandwich on their airy, baked-in-house challah bread, or eight perfect pierogies, that leads to thoughts about how everyone from Lou Reed to Keith Haring might have refueled here, after a late-night show around the corner.

Perhaps the most useful perk of living in New York is how easily you can get a big, saucy bowl of carbs and cheese when you need it. There are a lot of spots where you can make big hand gestures and ask for “mod-zarell,” but one of our favorites is a low-key restaurant on Arthur Ave. in the Bronx, opened by a married couple in 2002, though it feels much older. The Italian-born husband cooks carbonara, while his very NY wife is Tra Di Noi’s head host, explaining the chalkboard specials.

This East Harlem restaurant looks like the Mexico City mercado of your dreams, or a TikTok trap. But after a meal at El Kallejon, it’s clear that there was no social media strategy involved in its creation—just a few hoarder tendencies and a lot of love for the motherland. The tapas are just as colorful as the digs, with Japanese, French, and Mediterranean influences mixed into beautifully presented dishes like escargots in pasilla sauce and bubbling huitlacoche shiitake flatbreads.

Sometimes you just need a good burger without all the fanfare, and that's exactly what you'll get at this diner-like spot in Cobble Hill, which also has an affinity for colorful string lights, a handful of leather booths, and a polished bar where someone will mix you a perfect white Negroni as if their life depends on it. If you're feeling particularly spendy, consider adding a bottle of champagne to your burger order. It's a legitimate menu item (Add Bottle Of Champagne), and it costs $100.

A restaurant that’s also a decades-long art installation, Mombar has been a fixture in Astoria’s Little Egypt since 2000. Plastered with found objects, mosaics, and Egyptian motifs, it’s part-MoMA and part Temple of Dendur, with some hippy touches, like booths separated by bedsheets. The artist/chef is also the host, and he’ll come over to tell you what’s available, then go back behind a counter to cook your dinner. With simple dishes, this is above all just a place to exist among other people.