When the Tokyo chain sometimes called the Denny’s of Japan for its sheer ubiquity (somewhat unfairly, as what, then, are we supposed to call the many Dennyses—yes, the Denny’s—that also thrive there?) announced it was opening its first U.S. branch on a side street off Union Square, a cheer went up from the city’s ex-pat and wannabe communities. Offering a type of quick-service comfort food not readily available in a city now teeming with sushi palaces, izakayas, soba-yas and enough ramen to ensnarl all of the MTA, Ootoya (8 W. 18th St., ootoya.us)  both eases the patriot’s dreams of home and checks another box on the foodie’s To Eat list. But even for those who don’t have a burning desire to eat natto or dream of a curry don the way mom used to make, the restaurant has much to offer.

The gimmick here is that every entree is available as the centerpiece of a set meal called teishoku. Delivered all at once to maximize the busy office worker’s precious time, the meal covers a lacquer tray with a swath of seemingly interlocking receptacles. Lift the rounded lid on a black bowl to reveal miso soup, steam curling gently upward. Arrayed on a chunky white saucer is a rainbow of nukazuke pickles, which are fermented in rice bran rather than the usual brine. And what’s in that delicate ceramic basket, a miniature replica of a 19th-century snake charmer’s? Surprise! It’s chawanmushi, a delicate, savory egg custard.

While it’s perfectly reasonable to assemble a meal from the menu’s assortment of small dishes, sushi, grilled skewers and entrees, the teishoku set provides the most instant gratification, as well as an insurance policy against more adventurous orders. Never had tororo, mountain yam that’s been grated and whipped to a slippery frenzy, a common Japanese topping for soba and more? Order the hanabi don anyway, a rice bowl that comes loaded with slices of sashimi, soy beans, okra, a soft-cooked egg and a cloud of the snow-white tuber, safe in the knowledge that you’ve got basically a second meal waiting in the wings if it’s not to your taste. (But if textural contrasts excite you, it almost certainly will be. Give the whole thing a good stir to get warm rice, cool fish, crunchy veg and silky egg yolk all in one bite.)

For those ready to move forward sans safety net, the small dishes that make up the first half of the overwhelmingly long menu yield unusually big returns. A concise list of yakitori contains the ever-elusive tail, a tantalizing morsel of crunchy skin and fat, as well as tsukune, a chicken meatball served with a small bowl containing a single egg yolk for dipping. It’s one of the best renditions in the city, better than some dedicated houses can dream of.

That grill also transforms non-skewered meats, including a tender beef tongue, a number of mackerel never given their due in American cooking and pork belly. Ignore the candyland warning signals set off by a cinnamon-marinated version; the only sweetness comes from the fatty meat itself, the spice a surprisingly perfect savory fit. And then there’s the fryer, which turns out a perfectly bronzed breaded pork cutlet, presented atop the traditional wire grate to keep the underside from sogging up against the plate. It’s the perfect design solution to a problem you didn’t know you had.

The Denny’s moniker is not only unfair to Japan’s Denny’s outlets, it vastly maligns the experience at Ootoya. The interior is coolly wood-lined, with an elegant bar up front and a more convivial, wider bar in the main dining room behind which the merrily industrial kitchen can be glimpsed. Cold sake comes in glass decanters balanced in a bowl of ice, a single chrysanthemum placed daintily alongside. Modernist steel latticework stands in for shoji screens, separating tables and covering the soaring vent above the yakitori grill. You’ve never had a Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘n’ Fruity in a place like this.

Brunch stinks. The franken-meal manages to drag through the mud two of our most venerable dining concepts: breakfast foods and the noble art of daydrinking—perverting the latter with baby-strength mimosas and tepid bloody marys and drowning the former in a tidal wave of mediocre egg dishes and cavity-inducing French toasts. However, it’s big business here in New York. Try to leave your house on the weekend any time between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., and you’re surrounded by gaggles of women out for their weekly lady-date, awkward new couples avoiding the walk of shame and tired old couples looking for a distraction. These are the Brunch People, and they are legion.

However, there is one small but bright light in the wilderness for those of us who wake up hungry on a Sunday afternoon, and it is on First Street, a stone’s throw from Prune, the tiny institution that is one of the city’s original brunch juggernauts. The equally tiny JoeDoe (45 E. First St., chefjoedoe.com) is helmed by Chef Joe Dobias, an outspoken, occasionally belligerent champion of the much maligned meal—and given the fantastic, occasionally revelatory food he’s putting out every weekend, he’s earned the right to fight for it.

Brunch options at JoeDoe are, on their face, what you might find on hundreds of other menus across the five boroughs. Here are the egg dishes, there the French toast and pancakes, the granola and yogurt for the woman who swears she’s “not that hungry.” But look closer, and you’ll see that those eggs benedict are served with face bacon, the fatty, tender pork jowl cured into salty submission. The hash is with house-corned duck instead of the old Hormel standard, and it’s topped with bright orange-yolked duck eggs.  Meanwhile, the drink list is blessedly bellini-free, instead offering a range of prepared beers for those who want to keep it light, and a full cocktail list for the serious daydrinkers.

Staff T-shirts proclaim their style as “Aggressive American,” and often it can seem as if Dobias is daring diners to get on his level. Most of the dishes are carnivorous—bacon comes in at least three varieties (the aforementioned face, shoulder and plain old belly), brisket does double duty in chili and on sandwiches, and the biscuits and gravy have a ham hock thrown in for good measure. The Honey Beer, which combines pale ale with gin and a bracing shock of lemon juice, comes in a tall pilsner glass dripping obscenely with salted honey. Those who are too prim to lick the glass will miss out on the drink’s full-flavored glory.

But it’s not all tough-guy brawn on display here. Dobias’ signature brunch accomplishment is his biscuits, the best in the city by far. These beauties’ perfectly browned tops and tender, melting crumb belie a patience and attention to detail. They come unbidden to every table like a gift from a benevolent god, accompanied by honey butter that is entirely unnecessary (but wholly delicious).

Worthwhile eggs for brunch. Photo courtesy of JoeDoe

Dobias has a brilliant palate, and the menu is studded with dishes boasting refined, unexpected flavor combinations. Matzo brei, that lifeless classic associated with the pain of Passover deprivation, is brightened with great big stalks of cilantro, crumbled, salty cotija cheese and a honeyed sambal that pulls no punches, spice-wise, but is perfectly balanced. And the slaw that accompanies every plate is no afterthought side salad, no wilting pile of baby greens waterlogged by a too-sweet vinaigrette. No, this mound of shredded red cabbage is a bright spot of winter seasonality, tart and smoky with a spice blend that defies pinpointing. Za’atar? Cumin? It’s just enough of a teaser to make you want to come right back for dinner, where Dobias’ creativity is allowed to roam free of brunch’s eggy constraints.

By Regan Hofmann

We’re ready to declare 2012 the year of the death of the meal, and we couldn’t be happier about it. As more and more chefs embraced versatile dining, adding snacks to their menus, scaling down dishes or doing away with the old appetizer-entrée-dessert progression altogether, food got more inventive, more surprising and just plain better. For some, it was an opportunity to explore ideas that weren’t quite fully formed—instead of worrying about what the skillet cornbread should accompany, let people just order the bread and see if they like it. For others, it was a new challenge, a way to refocus their creativity after years of culinary success. And for indecisive diners (guilty as charged), it means you can order most of the menu without feeling like a monstrous glutton. From snacks to sandwiches, here are the ones you just have to try this year.

The samosa with chickpeas at Punjabi Deli (114 E. 14th St.) is a shockingly compact, intensely filling bowl of straight Indian comfort, a potato-and-pea samosa split, topped with a rich chickpea curry, tart chutneys and yogurt Jackson Pollock-ed over the top. It looks just awful, but after a bite, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world—oh, and it’s only $3.

The best Jewish deli sandwiches in New York are coming out of a Canadian kitchen, and we don’t care who hears us say it. All of the choices at Mile End Sandwich (53 Bond St., mileenddeli.com) are beyond reproach, but of them, The Beauty reigns supreme. It’s the apotheosis of the lox sandwich; a housemade, slightly sweet Montreal-style bagel, house-cured salmon, capers and thin-sliced red onion. There are no modernist flights of fancy here—the glory is in the classic elements’ flawless execution, in just the right proportions.

“Coffee tea with condensed milk toast” sounds like Menupages madlib, but is in fact the most exciting afternoon pick-me-up going. At Cha Chan Tang (45 Mott St.), the sleekest Hong Kong-style teahouse in Chinatown, bubble tea flavors range from the mundane to the exotic, but the best is this unlikely combination of two great tastes you had no idea went well together. Like a particularly strong Earl Grey minus the tannic edge, it’s excellent sipped alongside an inch-thick slice of soft white bread, barely toasted and drizzled with syrupy condensed milk.

Whatever you do, do not head directly for Bar Jamón (125 E. 17th St., casamononyc.com) to order the pan con tomate. Painful as the wait may be, hang on until summer, when tomatoes are back in season, to appreciate the pure genius of this deceptively simple Spanish mainstay. Grassy olive oil highlights the mellow sweetness of the perfectly ripe tomato smeared over crusty bread, the occasional heavy crystal of salt crackling on the tongue. Is it July yet?

M. Wells is dead; long live M. Wells! You’ll be pleased to know the fat-friendly, offal-loving mad genius of the dearly departed diner lives on in its new cafeteria home at MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens). Word of advice: Scan the menu for the most baffling combination of words and order it. That’s how the chicken liver mousse with granola ended up on our table, an inspired savory take on the breakfast parfait. Salted pistachios, golden raisins, fried shallots and parsnip chips are bound together by a breathtaking scoop of creamy, funky mousse, a baffling combination that makes perfect sense on the first bite.

In a town that’s now got more steamed pork buns than hot dogs, Fun Buns (follow @funbunsnyc for locations) has somehow managed to rekindle the city’s affair with the mini meaty bites. The secret is their Taiwanese take; pork belly is braised in rock sugar and soy for a sweet, salty edge, then topped with sharp pickled mustard greens and chopped peanuts. It’s a brand-new flavor combination, enough to get New York to fall in love all over again.

The arrival at 220 W. 44th St. of Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar, aka The Guy Fieri Restaurant, was for some the final nail in the coffin of the old Times Square, that halcyon place of peep shows and slashers, flashers and freaks. For others it represented something even larger, the decline of the state of cuisine in North America. If a man who has made his name not as a chef but as a cross-country tourist of the novelty hamburger is able to open a 500-seat mess hall in the flashiest neighborhood in the city, they cry, we’ve brought the indigestion upon ourselves, like one of the lesser biblical plagues.

For most, however, it lands on the curiosity scale somewhere between that guy you know who can open a beer bottle with his teeth and Ripley’s two-headed calf; a novelty to be gawked at, whispered about, but ultimately forgotten.

That is, unless you happen to walk past. The dizzying array of television screens blasting footage of The Guy himself, the bright signage that even in Times Square, the home of neon overkill, is really a bit much and the impossibly oversized wood-slab doors all conspire to stop you in your tracks, like a crow stopped at the edge of the field by a dazzler. You start to wonder just what it’s like on the inside. What on earth could all of this be in service of?

The promise of The Guy Fieri Experience™ is, unfortunately, more than it can deliver, whether you come ready to worship at the altar or to mock. It is relentlessly mediocre; not good enough to silence the haters, but not bad enough to delight them, either. A full 90 percent of the menu items’ names include some kind of booze; 82 percent are pun-based; and 4 percent are simply incomprehensible.

The Guy-talian Nachos, for instance, are allegedly Italian because they are topped with pepperoni and sweet Italian sausage. Then why, for the love of syntactical logic, are they served on fried wonton skins? Sangria-glazed shrimp are sweet, sticky and vaguely pink-tinted, as virgin as an Amish 16-year-old. Many dishes come with a long, unasked-for backstory; the Vegas Fries, apparently, were spawned when The Guy was in college and could only afford French fries, which he would douse in a startling number of sauces. Now they can be yours for $9.95, a price that would make any college student blanch.

You may be tempted to apply alcohol to the situation in a last-ditch effort to add a little entertainment value to the meal. Resist this urge. The cocktail list is a page of lies, real drink names assigned to bastard concoctions willy-nilly. Since when does a mojito feature blueberries and raspberry vodka? Nothing is as it seems; nor, unfortunately, is any of it strong enough to lend the necessary buzz.

But it’s the service staff that may be the most unsettling part of the whole endeavor. These poor souls have been subjected to the most rigorous training program/brainwashing camp ever devised for hospitality staff—the lesson on pronouncing the word “Fieri” alone must have been an ordeal of Clockwork Orange-level programming. One waiter couldn’t stop using the word “phenomenal”; things that were phenomenal included all of the beverages, the California egg rolls, a request for more napkins.

While the upsell is an accepted dirty little secret of the restaurant industry, this lack of finesse made little headway with our table of experienced diners. By the end of the meal, we had so subverted his script he was visibly terrified of us, and we had to flag down a passing stranger to ask him to bring us the check.

That, really, is the crux of the issue with Guy’s Place: It’s not for New York diners. It’s not even for tourists who aspire to be New York diners. It’s for the wealthy and lazy who want to eat food they recognize while being told they’re having fun, a not unsizeable market. Cry about it all you want, food-lovers, but Guy’s Place will probably be here long after we’re gone.

The dubious feminizing of self-defense products

Pink dresses, pink razors, pink tasers—oh my! It’s every woman’s dream come true. Now she can defend herself and look feminine at the same time. Because nothing says “Get back!” like a cute hot-pink can of pepper spray.

Self-defense is no longer only a precaution, but increasingly a fashion statement too. Companies target women with girly pink tasers, stun guns and pepper sprays. Though miniaturizing these items might serve some practical purpose, decorating them only belittles the seriousness they imply.

Self-defense isn’t about looking cute, or having the hottest lipstick stun gun in several classy colors, or concealing perfume pepper spray in a limited-time pink camouflage pouch. This type of marketing only serves to demean women and their reasons for wanting a weapon in the first place.

These dainty, though arguably powerful, weapons make a mockery of women seeking protection when, the truth is, women’s safety is still an issue. According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, one out of five women reports being involved in some form of sexual assault. A woman’s personal safety isn’t a joke, though it is, admittedly, hard to take seriously when confronted with female safety mascots like Pinky Sparkadero.

Pinky, a hot-pink robot who wears a pink miniskirt and crop top, is a character on the blog DefendThyself.com that presents the best in “girl-themed” self-defense products. While sporting lip gloss and a six-pack, Pinky looks anything but serious. She’s girly but macho and, on top of that, she’s not even real: She’s a robot; a fantasy and a joke. Though well-intentioned, Pinky sounds about as foolish as she looks.

She says things like “I may be pink and girly, but don’t let my appearance fool you—I can bring a big, strong man to his knees! There is no thrill greater than blasting a punk in the face with hot pepper spray. They may even cry like a little girl!”

Not only does she degrade women by portraying men as being more powerful, but she also uses the comparison to a girl as an insult. Her entire attitude serves to raise men and defame women.

Carrying a weapon is about creating a sense of security and control. It’s a serious affair and should be marketed as such; not dumbed down and accessorized. Women aren’t children, and these items aren’t toys; portraying them in this light sends the wrong message to attackers and women alike. The gimmicks and pink coloring depict women as weak and girly when the effect should be the opposite. Carrying a weapon should make a woman feel safe and empowered, not trendy.

It would be nice to argue that these types of items are irrelevant, bedazzled or not, but sadly, in a big city like New York, that isn’t the case. Whether it’s knowing not to leave drinks unattended or learning krav maga, knowing how to defend oneself is important. Carrying pepper spray may be a smart preemptive move on a woman’s part, but dyeing it pink isn’t helpful to anyone.

There is nothing more basic than a chicken dinner. Once a sign of prosperity (“Winner, winner, chicken dinner,” anyone?) and stability, it has over the years been downgraded to the most basic unit of protein, good for not much more than adding bulk to a Caesar salad or a bowl of soup. When scientists began trying to perfect a sustainable meat substitute, they went straight to the chicken breast because of its utter blandness and lack of character.

I say it’s time we took back this once-proud meal. No matter whether you’re living high on the hog (hen?) or barely scraping by, there’s an exemplary chicken dinner in this city for you.

Ask five people their favorite place for roast meats in Chinatown, and you’re likely to get five different answers. Unless one of those is Big Wong King (67 Mott St., bigwongking.com), they’re all wrong. Though other windows may beckon with shinier displays of burnished strips of pork loin and tidily hung ducks, their heads hung coyly forward, Big Wong King quietly dominates with a subtlety of flavor to their marinades and tender, juicy meats.

The true test is in the soy sauce chicken, so often a soggy afterthought to the red-cooked showstoppers. Here, it’s salty just up to, but not beyond, the point of good taste, and the bird has absorbed plenty of soy sauce’s vaunted umami boost. Couple that with the fact that Chinese chefs don’t believe in white meat (that gets saved for white-guy chicken and broccoli), and the result is chicken so fully flavored you’d swear it was duck. It’s served simply over rice to soak up the excess sauce and extend the experience, with a welcome bok choy garnish on the side, for only $5, a bargain even by neighborhood standards. Or get a pound straight up to go, and see how far you can carry your styrofoam container before ripping into it like a cartoon werewolf.

The farther east you go in the East Village, the slower news travels. Over on Avenue C, the word hasn’t arrived that the fried chicken trend was officially called last year when The Dutch opened to slavish devotion for its version, just a year after David Chang threw down the gauntlet with his massive Korean/Southern-style fried chicken feast. And thank god for that, because Bobwhite Lunch and Supper Counter (94 Ave. C, bobwhitecounter.com) is quietly serving some of the best fried chicken around.

While The Dutch’s menu has moved on and the Chang feast of the moment is Ssam Bar’s duck lunch, Bobwhite is churning out chicken and biscuits that are in the best Southern tradition (the owner is from Virginia). All of their ingredients are responsibly sourced. For $45, you can re-enact a KFC commercial without the PETA guilt and get a bucket for the whole family—12 pieces of chicken, that is, plus biscuits for four people, a salad and three of that day’s sides, which rotate seasonally but include black-eyed peas, mac and cheese and Brunswick stew. Depending on your family, you might need two.

If you’ve recently come into an inheritance, the NoMad’s (1170 Broadway, thenomadhotel.com) chicken for two is the city’s newest status symbol, neatly dividing the have-had-its and the have-nots. A cool $79 buys you entrée into this club, the benefits of which include not just the meal but bragging rights for the next six months or until a new hottest dish comes to town.

In a display of showmanship straight out of the Ancien Régime, the bird is presented tableside nestled in its own cast-iron cradle. It’s roasted whole, stuffed with black truffle brioche crumbs and foie gras, and it arrives with an elegant spray of flowering herbs clasped between its legs, like an absurd Miss Poultry America. Then it’s taken away again, carved for you (cutting your own meat is for peasants) and the dark meat fricasseed with mushrooms and enough butter to cause spontaneous gout.
It’s a meal fit for a king, to be sure. Then again, they all are.

Northern Spy Food Co. sounds like one of a thousand similar restaurants, but it’s on another playing field altogether

It’s almost embarrassing trying to explain Northern Spy Food Co. to friends.

“I found this fantastic little restaurant in the East Village,” you start. Already you can see their eyes start to glaze over, but they are polite, so they ask what sort. “It’s farm-to-table, all locally sourced with an emphasis on small producers—they even list all of their sources on their website, so you can see exactly where your scallops came from. The food is kind of a nouveau rustic American style.”

At this point they’ve begun looking for an escape. You get a little more insistent, knowing how you must sound. “The room is adorable! Almost everything is made of reclaimed wood—the tables are from old bowling alley lanes. They even have a little marketplace where you can buy handmade candy!” Before you can say another word, they’ve disappeared from you, an easily impressed rube who clearly hasn’t been out to eat in the past five years.

The best approach for introducing people to Northern Spy (511 E. 12th St., northernspyfoodco.com) is to say as little as possible and just drag them in with you. It shouldn’t be hard; its upper East Village location is handy to a multitude of other restaurants and bars, all of which are worth the effort. Say you’re going to take them to Momofuku Ssam Bar and then, when the wait is too long, wander purposefully down the street. Or have a cocktail or two at Gin Palace then whisk them away to get something to eat. “I know a good place near here,” you can say guilefully. “Trust me.”

Because once inside, there is no resisting Northern Spy’s charms. All that reclaimed wood gives the small space a cozy warmth, one welcome even in the depths of summer. Chalkboards proclaiming the day’s specials are propped casually against the wall, and the penny-candy jars full of wax paper-wrapped caramels (albeit beer and pretzel-flavored ones) are straight out of a rural general store dream.
The menu begins with a list of snacks, which could easily be incorporated into the starters section without angering any semanticists. If you’ve managed to hook a large group into coming with you, pile a few of these onto the table while you each select your two courses; if it’s just a few or you’re all pals, pick one or two and a starter and have at it, family-style. Pickled eggs are tinted a gorgeous beet red just like Great-Aunt Mildred used to make, but the aioli that comes alongside is as sophisticated as anything The NoMad is putting out. You’ll find yourself looking around the table for just about anything else to dip in it—and if you end up using your fingers, no one’ll give you any trouble.

Right now the starters are salad-heavy, which really just means they’re cold, and all the more welcome for it. Their kale salad is legendary in certain circles, crowded with cheddar and pecorino cheese and sweetened with roasted carrots. And anything with an egg on it is an easy get; eggs show their provenance more readily than most produce, and a fresh local egg is so far beyond your supermarket standards you may never go back to Eggland’s Best. For a main, pick any of the day’s specials. The menu has stalwarts, but take advantage of the kitchen’s access to the day’s best and casually breathtaking creativity (lamb with savory granola and yogurt? It works.) and let them guide you.

At some point during your meal at Northern Spy, your friends may sink into despair. They may even curse your name for bringing you there, or curse the chef for insisting on making such interesting, delicate, delicious food in the mold so many other restaurants have tried and failed to follow. Don’t worry. They’re just mad that they’re going to end up looking silly when they rave about it to their friends.

Sometimes, this kindergarten-teacher approach to world geography can be enlightening. After all, how many people knew what a Sochi was before it was named the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics? I’m looking forward to seeing some good scenes of Bob Costas trying a local delicacy (probably not vodka, sadly, though it is Russia’s most notable foodstuff) and a few majestic snowy mountain ranges when those Games roll around.

However, when the event lands somewhere closer to home, either literally (Salt Lake City? We get it, they’re not all Mormons.) or culturally (Vancouver. It’s Seattle, but cleaner.), the coverage starts to seem almost parodic. This is what we’ve been treated to this past week in London.

Everybody in the English-speaking world knows Great Britain—heck, they colonized most of ’em to begin with. We don’t need the Sesame Street montages of Buckingham Palace guards with those furry hats and busy street scenes of a melting-pot culture almost as diverse as New York City’s. And we certainly don’t need to watch Mary Carillo try this crazy thing called fish and chips—it comes wrapped in a newspaper! Knock me over with a feather.

There is an enormous wealth of British culture that has been overshadowed in international popular culture by those furry hats and fried foods for decades. British food, particularly, has come out of the closet by leaps and bounds over the past 20 years, overcoming its reputation of being as bland and soggy as the weather to revel in local produce, farmhouse traditions and that melting-pot resource of international spices.

There’s so much of it, in fact, it’s found its way to New York. April Bloomfield has been a one-woman cheer team for British food here since her first restaurant, The Spotted Pig, opened in 2004 in the vein of the gastropubs that had revolutionized London. Now, her John Dory Oyster Bar (1196 Broadway, 212-792-9000, thejohndory.com) is a more accurate representation of the state of play across the pond these days. Impeccably fresh fish and shellfish is handled with a light touch and strong flavors—a salad of marinated sardines, cucumber, melon and cottage cheese is a beguilingly fascinating combination for its simplicity—and the nose-to-tail sensibility shines through when the occasional special whole roasted fish head is offered.

The menu also reclaims a few unglamorous old favorites from the Motherland as is now all the rage. On a menu that changes regularly, two constants are kedgeree, a colonial bastardization of the Indian khichri, a rice pilaf with smoked fish and mild yellow curry powder, and Eccles cake, a buttery pastry filled with currants served with a wedge of Stilton.

Uptown, the gastropub spirit has been re-reinvented at Jones Wood Foundry (401 E. 76th St., 212-249-2700, joneswoodfoundry.com) with menus not only for lunch and dinner but for toast as well, the in-between-meals (and between drinks) snack more filling and less dainty than tea-time. Scotch eggs are the world’s gift to the drinker, hardboiled eggs wrapped in sausage meat then fried, and the true patriot can get Marmite, the potent yeast spread whose savory depth and slightly molasses-like sweetness inspires spontaneous renditions of “Auld Lang Syne.”

The London Candy Company (1442 Lexington Ave., 212-427-2129, thelondoncandycompany.com) is working to redeem the much maligned British candy industry. Yes, their hard candies are straight out of a demented grandmother’s purse, in a number of flavors that verge on the savory (and not in the good, salted caramel way), but dime-store British chocolate is of an alarmingly better qualify than American, and comes in great varieties. Try a Yorkie (“Not for Girls,” as the wrapper rather alarmingly states) which comes in great big cubes stuffed with raisins and cookie crumbs or a Crunchie, filled with a solid bar of golden honeycomb that will slowly melt on the tongue—if you can wait that long.

So the next time the Olympics coverage cuts away from water polo to reveal that the British serve their beer at room temperature, turn off the TV and go try something new instead.

While many applauded Mayor Bloomberg’s implementation of the restaurant letter grading system to bring transparency to a Byzantine health inspection process, it’s never held much sway for me; everyone knows the best restaurants are the ones most likely to inspire, at best, a grudging C grade and a passing glare from daintier patrons. Torn linoleum and stained Formica tabletops are tangible evidence a place has been frequented and loved by hundreds of regulars over time. Clean floors means the mom-and-pop staff have the time to spend their days mopping rather than churning out dishes for a steady stream of demanding, knowledgeable patrons. Got the time and money to install eight different sinks to satisfy those sanitation requirements? You’re either adding that extra buck to my bill or taking it out in low-quality ingredients.

Shanghai Café’s (100 Mott St., shanghaicafenyc.com) A grade, gleaming interior, groovy recessed neon lighting and polished dark wood booths should have scared me away faster than any laundry list of violations. Here, it seems, is a place you could safely take your local health inspector on a date.

Just don’t let him see the Kau Fu, off the cold appetizer list, a mound of ragged chunks of wheat gluten studded with black mushrooms, an abomination in brown that would look more at home in a subway grate than on your table. It’s delicious—brightly savory, the gluten that wonderfully dense texture of a meat substitute that’s not been forced to masquerade as “chicken”—but best left for more forgiving company. Wait till he’s out of sight, then order a dish of this and the pig ear, soy-marinated and sliced into thin, crunchy strips, and bask in the sidelong glances of disbelief you get from your fellow diners.

But back to your date. Lucky for you, much of Shanghainese cuisine is accessibly self-explanatory. Of course there’s xiao long bao, soup dumplings—the waiters are trained, in fact, to check all tables that somehow overlook them when ordering. “You want soup dumplings,” they say, more an instruction than a question. You should—they’re one of the best renditions of this classic in Chinatown, with skins that are acceptably thin but not puncture-prone and a rich, briny broth—but if you don’t, they won’t press the issue.

Shanghai rice cakes are slices of the world’s thickest rice noodle sautéed up with chicken, pork, shrimp and that holy trinity of Chinatown vegetable, onion, cabbage and carrot, in a savory brown sauce that doesn’t reek of white-guy takeout and despair. If he insists on it, rest assured you’ll actually find some flavor there.

Now that your friend is happy, get yourself something from the house specialties lists, traditional, harder-to-find dishes that are segregated from the rest of the menu. These are provided in rudimentary English, the translation an uncommon courtesy for most regionalized restaurants, which means that anyone willing to take a chance won’t be punished by the point-and-pray roulette gods that can bring some real gems or some unpleasant surprises.

Braised pork belly is everything you’d hope it would be, red-cooked to the point of melted, the tender meat just barely maintaining its shape, waiting for the touch of a chopstick to dissolve into shreds. Bean curd skin with preserved vegetable and green bean turned out to be flat, tagliatelle-like ribbons of chewy bean curd tossed with faintly salted greens and edamame. It’s an unexpectedly light, fresh preparation, and a daintily plated version could easily be passed off as the latest in Sino-Italian fusion in a Lower East Side hotspot.

Though the approachable grade and décor draw a decent stream of the tourist crowd, the dining room is invariably bolstered by great round tables of middle-aged men ribbing each other and passing cauldrons of fish head casserole, regulars who would be just as happy in Formica and linoleum. And if you look closely there, on the counter at the register, tucked between the toothpick dispenser and a plastic bonsai tree, a lone Siamese fighting fish floats belly up in his glass bowl. Finally, there’s that C grade spirit! Just don’t tell your date.

The automat returned briefly at Bamn!- let's bring it back again.

By Regan Hofmann

The New York Public Library’s Lunch Hour NYC exhibit is an engrossing, immersive look at how New York City invented lunch as we know it, shifting the sizable agrarian end-of-work supper to a timely pause from the day’s business. Sustenance was needed, but we city folk couldn’t be bothered to stop working long enough to go home and chow down with ma and pa—gimme a sandwich and a cuppa coffee and let me get back to work.

The greatest—and most quintessentially New York—of the institutions that arose with this new meal was the automat. It’s the apotheosis of lunch; if you’re in too much of a hurry to even talk to a server, deposit your nickel, take your bowl of soup and get on with your day. It was the perfect emblem of the contradictions of the industrial age, a shining promise of a glorious future in which machines were our slaves and mankind was free to devote itself to higher pursuits, while in reality serving nickel pie slices to the working class who were so under the boss’ thumb they couldn’t spare more than 15 minutes to feed themselves.

Ironically, while the glow of modernity was the automats’ first draw, the march of time was also their undoing. Technology couldn’t keep up with inflation, and by the 1970s, food was too expensive to be sold in machines that could only accept coins. The last branch of Horn & Hardart (on 42nd Street, natch), the original automat chain, closed in 1991.

But now that we are in another golden age of technological advance—and in a similarly precarious economic position—I say it’s high time for the automat to make a comeback.

Think about it. New Yorkers still hate dealing with people. We’re still in a rush. We like to be in control. Most importantly, we really hate dealing with people. The most popular lunch option in Midtown these days are by-the-pound salad bar delis, teeming with office drones who pile fried rice next to their shrimp scampi and cottage cheese and pineapple, drop it on the scale and get back to their desks. Wouldn’t the process be so much better if the scampi was nicely plated? The cottage cheese in its own bowl? You grab, you go, you don’t even have to stop at the scale.

Already there are restaurants incorporating elements of the mechanized, do-it-yourself system that made automats so perfect—unfortunately, none have made it past the gimmick stage. Six years ago, the return of the automat was touted on St. Mark’s Place with the opening of Bamn! Their (still brilliant) motto was “Satisfaction is automatic.” It was met with skepticism and foundered for three years before folding, but I contend it was simply a question of wrong place, wrong time (OK, and wrong name).

The college students and Japanese hipsters who patrol St. Mark’s had no fondness for the idea of an automat—many probably never heard the word before—and most of the people on that strip aren’t in a rush to get anywhere, let alone back to work. If the same place had opened on East 38th Street, it would have been a hit, goofy name and all.

Case in point: 4Food, a tech-crazy burger shop at 40th Street (286 Madison Ave., 4food.com), has been open for two years and still generates enough traffic to pay the rent. There, diners use iPads to customize their burgers from bun to patty to toppings. While you’re waiting, an LED screen displays the place’s Twitter feed, so you can have a real-time conversation with the managers while you’re waiting, all on your lonesome. So far, so good—but someone still has to hand you the food.

Asia, it turns, out, is the new epicenter for lunchtime automation. In Japan, conveyor-belt sushi restaurants have long offered diners the ability to help themselves to just the fish that looks best to them today. In Harbin, China, the Haohai Robot Restaurant is staffed by 18 mechanical men who do everything from cooking the food to bringing it to your table. A small staff in a back room monitors their power supply and keeps an eye out for any problems, just like the behind-the-scenes staff at a Horn & Hardart, but otherwise it’s just you, your robot and your sandwich—a true power lunch.