5 Places to Eat in NYC Without Breaking the Bank (Mostly)

New York City is known for many things - Broadway, Wall Street, Times Square - and I recently spent two consecutive weekends there playing the tourist and visiting these famous sites. While I was there, some of my non-tourist friends made sure I didn’t miss another big part of the city - the incredible food scene. As we partook in some of the best (affordable) food NYC has to offer, I quickly learned that there’s so much more to New York cuisine beyond cronuts and Shake Shack. 

Totto Ramen

If I could only have one type of meal for the rest of my life, I would be quite content to have it be ramen. We came here my first weekend in the city to sate my craving for ramen, and I returned again the next week because it was just that good. Totto has all the bases covered with firm chewy noodles and flavorful pork pieces. But what really sets them apart is the broth. Instead of using a pork base for the soup, Totto uses a chicken based broth. The result is a lighter, clearer flavor that wonderfully complements the rest of the ingredients instead of overwhelming them as some other places’ broth tend to do. And for about $10-15 a bowl, it’s great value for what you pay, especially with NYC food prices.

Paiten (regular) Ramen at Totto

Joe’s Shanghai/Ginger

If you’re looking for food in NYC’s Chinatown, most guide books will recommend Joe’s Shanghai, known for their pork soup dumplings. Instead, we went to Joe’s Ginger just down the street for basically the same food but with less crowds. We ordered both the pork and the crab dumplings. Whenever I have soup dumplings, I can’t help but compare them with the ones from Din Tai Fung - I thought the dumplings at Joe’s had great flavor, but the dumpling skin was little too thick compared to DTF’s. Nevertheless, they were quite good, and very affordable at less than $10 a basket. Great place for a quick lunch to satisfy a dumpling craving.

Everyone loves XLBs

Snowdays

One thing we are severely lacking in upstate New York is a good Asian dessert place. Which is why I was exceptionally excited to go to Snowdays and have some Taiwanese style snow ice. At Snowdays you can pick between building your own cup by choosing a snow flavor, toppings, and drizzle, or picking the pre-built combos. I ordered the “Made in Taiwan” combo, featuring green tea flavored snow, mochi and grass jelly toppings, and condensed milk drizzle. My favorite part was the snow itself. It had just the right amount of fluffiness and the green tea flavor was sweet but not too sweet. I definitely thought it was worth the $6 for the regular cup.

"Made in Taiwan" snow ice at Snowdays

Takashi

This trendy yakiniku place is the one pricier restaurant I have listed here. We split roughly 10 plates of meat between five people and ended up paying around $50 each, so not quite gourmet Michelin prices, but still more than I usually spend on food. Though I guess these sort of prices are to be expected for good yakiniku, and the stuff here was quite good. I’m not an expert on meat, but the marbling on the beef was beautiful, which I’ve heard is indicative of high quality meat. Our waitress was supremely helpful, giving us excellent suggestions for cuts to try, and great recommendations for marinades. Everything we had that night, from the beef tongue to the short-rib, was delicious. If it wasn’t for the price, I’d go back in a heartbeat, but if you do want to splurge you can’t go wrong here.

Yakiniku at Takashi

Cooking all the meat

Adrienne’s Pizza Bar

A large variety of pizza, pasta, and salads are available at Adrienne’s Pizza Bar, but apparently what you’re supposed to do here is order the “Old Fashioned Pizza”, a rectangular pie you can customize with individual toppings. The first thing I noticed when our pie came out was that it was huge. We definitely got our bang for our buck with our large cookie sheet sized pizza we only paid around $40 for total. The pizza itself also tasted great. The crust was pleasantly crispy, and the ingredients all combined harmoniously into perfection with every bite. Alas, even with the three of us we couldn’t finish the enormous pie. (But I’m sure the homeless person we gave our leftovers to enjoyed the rest.) Delicious food, and excellent value considering this was right in the heart of the financial district.

Giant pizza at Adrienne's

Looking forward to eating more on future trips to the city!

- MC 9/20

PAX Prime 2015

Last weekend I flew across the country to Seattle with some friends and guildmates, where a massive gathering of gamers was taking place at the Penny Arcade eXpo. It took roughly 9 hours of travel time one way, but it was worth every minute. I could go on and on about all the cool demos I saw and interesting game I tried, but I’ll just pick a few highlights of my PAX experience:

Crowds on the show floor

Project Morpheus

VR was the big thing at PAX this year. Spread across various areas of the convention were stations where you could try out a new game showing off the latest VR technology. But like almost everything else there, massive lines formed, and unless you got in line before 7 in the morning you were unlikely to get a spot. By some stroke of luck, we were able to get a couple of the walk-in spots at Sony’s Project Morpheus booth.

Project Morpheus

They had several different games available for demo. The game I got put you in the point of view of a tank getting besieged by other tanks from all sides. You had to physically turn your neck back and forth to see where the enemies were coming from, and then use the Playstation controller to move, jump, and shoot. The helmet was a bit heavy, and I definitely got motion sickness after a few minutes, but overall I was impressed by how smooth the game ran. There’s a lot of potential for gaming applications (and non-gaming applications for that matter), and I’m excited to see how the technology develops. I’ll just make sure to have a healthy serving of ginger before trying it again.

Gigantic

About a block away from the convention center was a large restaurant-arcade hybrid called Gameworks. After eating lunch there, we wandered around the arcade, and stumbled upon a demo station for the game Gigantic in the back of the building, completely by accident. Apparently not a lot of other people knew of its existence, so there was no line whatsoever - a miracle! So of course we decided to try it out.

I actually forgot to take a picture of the Gigantic booth

so here's a gigantic Pikachu

Gigantic is a head to head game in which you and your team of five fight the other team and try to take out their guardian, a huge (gigantic) creature that you can only damage after getting enough kills and capturing enough points from the other team. You can pick between many heroes, each of which have their own play styles and special abilities. The game itself was a lot of fun. It was simple enough to pick up and start playing right away, yet complex enough to provide longevity. The only thing I was disappointed with was the fact that it’s only available for Windows 10. Not quite sure if I want to upgrade to Win 10 just yet, but when I do, I’ll have to revisit this game.

Super Mario Maker

If you’ve ever played a Mario stage and thought, “I could design a stage so much better!”, soon you’ll have the opportunity to do so. One of the many game Nintendo had in their massive booth was Super Mario Maker for the WiiU. The game allows you to play stages made by other people, but as the name implies, the point is really to let those creative juices flow and design your own stages. My interest in this game was actually only lukewarm prior to trying it out, but once I got my hands on the controller and started playing around, I found myself really getting into it. How do I make this jump sequence challenging and exciting, yet still doable? How many cannons can I stack before things start getting too ridiculous? The game allows you to quickly go back and forth between editing and play testing, allow for rapid iteration in every sense of the phrase. Alas, this is another game I lack the platform for. Maybe it’s about time to start thinking about getting a WiiU… (Clearly Nintendo’s marketing has worked.)

Super Mario Maker

Console/PC Free Play Rooms

At PAX there were several free play rooms for both console and PC gaming. I actually ended up spending quite a bit of time here because I just wanted to play something and didn’t want to spend all my time waiting in lines. In the console room you could check out current gen and previous gen consoles and pick from their extensive library of games. I’d been wanting to try out Hyrule Warriors for awhile, so I got that. It was basically Dynasty Warriors with Zelda characters. Not sure what I was expecting. 

PC room

The PC gaming room was literally just a room full of PCs. You could hop on a PC and play for 45 minutes, more if no one was in line after your session expired, and pick between the many games they had pre-installed. There were some familiar ones, like Civilization V - although how they expect any Civ game to finish within 45 minutes is beyond me. There were also lots of games I’d never played before, many of which had been sitting on my to-try list for a long time. I tried Bastion, Transistor, and Kerbal Space Program. It was kind of nice being able to just sit down after a tiring day walking around the convention and try out some new games.

***

This was my first time going to such a large gaming convention, and it was an amazing experience. It isn’t everyday that you can walk around and see and play the latest and greatest surrounded by enthusiastic like-minded gamers. I only wish I could have spent more than two days there. Guess that’s something to consider for next year. See you at PAX 2016!

- MC 9/2