Dear Reader,

You have undoubtedly stumbled upon this page because you misspelled Upper East Side. This is understandable; you are walking down the street, navigating the throngs, looking for some address on 2nd Ave and you hit enter too quickly and now you’re here. Let me do my best to entice you to stay.

For one, this is not your mom’s food blog. If it was your mom’s food blog, you would have heard about it a long time ago, probably from her. In fact, she probably asked you to set it up for her. The point is, I’m not her. I curse and get mad at inanimate things like my remote control and very animate things like the little yappy dog next door, to whom I’ve been tempted to feed a massive amount of chocolate under the door on more than one early Saturday morning. See? I’m already getting onto the topic of food. This is a lovely start, I must say.

Another thing you should know about me is I have a shitty fucking kitchen. My fridge is college-sized and the freezer is now completely filled with that frost shit and the only recourse would be to haul this thing down my infinite stairwell to the courtyard and let the whole thing thaw and to be very fucking frank that’s just way above my level of caring. Thusly, I order a lot of seamless. Like, an enormous amount. I’m certain there is some marketing guy at seamless who is assigned solely to me, making sure I get emails every time I go more than a day without ordering from their blessed service bringing me back into the fold.

So this blog is def gonna cover delivery food. Delivery is its own animal. Even though I’m environmentally conscious as shit, I sometimes request extra packaging to ensure that I get a non soggy product. You can’t get delivery tacos with all the accoutrements and not expect them to arrive like a bunch of limp dicks in a bag 40 minutes later. Put that pico and cotija cheese in another container, amigo. Really, there’s nothing better delivery-wise than some fuckin’ chicken fingers. I be all like

. They just somehow always stay exactly as they would at the restaurant. I love that shit.

But I do eat out (that’s what she said), and you know what? My little bougie backwater is starting to get some pretty delicious food. Every day I’m seeing more Yuccies (young urban creatives, you fucking luddite. Jesus, get with the times) and they have forced the UES to branch out beyond the endless lapping sea of Italian and French holdovers from Donny Draper’s day. Just yesterday, I saw a bartender with a handlebar mustache! We’re the next Williamsburg!

For serious, though, food diversity is a significant factor in cultural awareness and community-building. When something new and exciting (and much more importantly, authentic) opens up on your block or the next, it allows you to traverse great distances by the forkful. Weird, I would not have thought to spell forkful that way. It looks, what, icelandic maybe? Anyway, you know what I’m saying, reader that has read this far into my post? If you have never had Izakaya and you walk through the little cloth blinds and the waitresses and chefs all yell “irasshaimase,” you get this little swell in your heart like when you were a kid and the teacher you really liked held your hand after you fell. It just feels nice and new.

The community aspect is also intrinsic. As we increasingly get drawn to the lit screen like moths to a flame, we don’t give ourselves much time to look at each other. And, try as you might, it’s very difficult to eat veal piccata and read a listicle on buzzfeed at the same time. So look up. Look at the other peeps shoveling their dinner down their gullets. Look how stupid that one guy is. Please tell me that’s his daughter sitting with him. Oh fuck, I really hope that’s not his daughter anymore. Like great architecture, a great restaurant is a catalyst for reinvention, for salvation. Think Vinegar Hill House. I once saw Vincent Chase getting out of a limo to go in there. Yeah, I’m cool like that. What was Vinegar Hill before that but a really unattractive neighborhood designation? Now it has its own house. Crazy, right?

In short, I want to talk about everything. I’m not particularly diligent, but I have a keen eye and a lusty stomach. I always steal food off my friends’ plates and I always mop up the sauce (the brilliant Italians have their own word for this: scarpetta). Sometimes I don’t even have any bread. I just put my finger right in there. Really, I want this to be a place you could come to find out about whether the new place that opened next door to Souther Hospitality is any good, or if that Aki Sushi is really a five star restaurant as their seamless page would indicate (the answer is definitely not). Really, I just want you to like me.

I leave you with a quote from the inimitable manhattanite, EB White:

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”