For specific foods, bagel with cream cheese, Nova, red onion, and capers. Pastrami sandwich. In the outer boroughs, Jamaican patty and coco bread, fried plantains. Puerto Rican pernil, “yellow rice” and maduros.
I think of them as “American” because it’s what me and mine eat, and it’s what I miss the most in California.
I’ll still take the atmosphere and food at Barney Greengrass uptown over Russ & Daughters…I’d enjoy either one…bagel, chive cream cheese, smoked sable, latkes/applesauce/sour cream and choc babka is pretty much an ideal meal for me at barney gg…
Unfortunately, I can’t do raw clams or oysters. So- I eat them smoked, fried, Rockefellered or Casinoed.
I haven’t tried roasted oysters or an oyster pan roast, but I know I don’t like oyster stews.
Veselka also serves Egg Creams.
check out grilled ones!
And duck sauce with the egg rolls or other fried stuff is something you see in NYC and the Tri-State area. It’s plum sauce with the egg rolls in Canada.
I have had bbqed oysters in Morro Bay. Which were pretty good.
Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Cafe, on 110th Street in Harlem has a welcoming vibe and wonderful soul food. I am a Long Island native who has lived in the Boston area the last 2/3 of my life. When I visited a midwestern friend who was spending a week in Manhattan, we took a cab up because the sisters who own the restaurant had been featured on Martha Stewart’s show. Martha knows good food, and was it ever! This goes back over 15 years but I still remember the smothered greens, mac and cheese, fried chicken, and sweet potato pie.
https://spoonbreadinc.com
That looks delicious 
This looks great - I actually suggested that he look for soul food in Orlando, but I’ll add it to the list!
NYC has great bbq these days. My favorite is Hometown in Red Hook. Mighty Quinn is good and has more locations. Second Gage & Tollner. Red Rooster in Harlem would be good to add to the mix. I also think you should add some “ethnic” which has been thoroughly adopted and transmogrified like Italian American and Chinese American. Ain’t gonna find that in Europe.
and so is the stink from them. A peculiar smell of rancid nuts with burnt sugar.
At least ten years ago I had my first meal from a halal cart in Astoria. It was fabulous so I went back and asked the vendor, “What kind of food is this?” He laughed and said, “American food. We are in America, so this is American food.”
Doughnut Plant has fancy schmancy doughnuts. For classic doughnuts, go to Peter Pan in Greenpoint–it’s not far from the G train.
I strongly endorse what BKeats says about NYC barbecue. I am a little bit of a barbecue fanatic and have planned quite a few vacations around eating barbecue in different parts of the US. We’ve even tried US-style barbecue in Beirut (pretty good) and London (truly awful).
I had never eaten barbecue in NYC until recently, however. My wife and I are usually here for only a few days at a time and given the glorious diversity of foods in New York, barbecue has never risen to the top of the list. Snobbery about the very idea of barbecue in New York probably played a role too.
But my wife and I just finished up a 30-day vacation in Bed-Stuy, so we were able to eat more leisurely and tried a couple of the better known barbecue places.
Fette Sau in Williamsburg is very good barbecue — we had the fatty brisket and the pork belly. This is definitely Texas-style barbecue done well, if not quite at the level of the best places in the country. If Williamsburg is convenient for you and your friend, Fette Sau will give a solid example of American barbecue.
But the real star — maybe the best meal of our 30 days in New York — is Hometown Barbecue in Red Hook. It’s expensive, there is a long line, they screwed up our order, and Red Hook isn’t easy to get to on public transportation. But the barbecue we had here is in the very top rank of all the hundreds of barbecue places we’ve eaten in the US. I rank it with places like Joe’s in Kansas City, Lexington Barbecue # 1 in Lexington, NC, Payne’s in Memphis, and ZZQ in Richmond.
We had the fatty brisket, the beef rib, the pastrami sandwich, and collards. All were wonderful. We would have tried the ribs too, but as I said they screwed up our order.
Daniel Vaughn, the full-time barbecue editor for the Texas Monthly, who has probably eaten at more different barbecue places than anyone else in the world, called his meal at Hometown “great.” Johnny Fugitt, who traveled around the US for a year eating in more than 300 barbecue places, for his book on the hundred best barbecue places, rated Hometown the # 2 barbecue place in the country. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I would definitely put it in my top ten.
Another option would be one of the local branches of Dinosaur Barbecue (there’s one in Harlem and some other places that I can’t remember). The original location of Dinosaur in Syracuse is superb, but I haven’t eaten in any of the NYC locations, so I can’t personally vouch for them.
I keep a spreadsheet of barbecue places around the country that are highly recommended by critics. There’s nowhere in Orlando on the list, but Food and Wine Magazine named Mr. Powell’s in Albuquerque one of the best in New Mexico.
I guess we should have asked where he’ll be staying and how far he wants to travel - might help focus in specific recs for each type of food.
I don’t know, and I don’t think he knows yet either - he’s sort of a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants traveler. I’ll post back when I get more detail.
Grand Central oyster pan roast as an appetizer for a nearby dinner or a mid-afternoon snack.
What is that other than a name for a girl/woman?
I think a Rachel has turkey in it, instead of corned beef.
