Wow does New York taste like? After soul food and BBQ, after Yiddish lox bagels, after mango with chili salt on the street, after much too hot pizza pieces, which of course you fold in the middle in proper style and gobble down without cutlery, after hot dogs and tacos from the little cart at the next intersection, after Coffee out of blue paper cups, after three-star gourmet fascination, after way too much schnapps and after the chewing gum that you chew to at least whitewash the smell in the subway car.
At least that was the case until a year ago. Until Covid-19 came and the city that never sleeps fell into pandemic paralysis. Instead of long nights that begin in restaurants and end late in the evening: silence broken by the howling of the ambulance sirens. And about the whirring, an ever louder whirring. A new sound – but an ever increasing one. Behind it are hundreds, thousands of electric bicycles that whiz up and down Manhattan’s long avenues in an endless hurry. Mostly men of all ages sit on them, especially Latinos or blacks. And a heat-insulated box is balanced on the luggage rack at least as often.
The residents of New York speak of the “exodus”: neighbors, work colleagues, friends, whoever could left the city. Why pay $ 2,000 for a room in a shared apartment when you are only sitting in the home office or taking digital lessons? “I’m missing $ 50,000 in rental income,” says a private landlord. “The people have all moved out. Why should they stay here? ”Accordingly, rents have also fallen, and in some places where the market has been particularly heated have even halved. Of those who are left over, some minimize their time outside their own walls – and the others who shop for them.
Even purchases and cocktails can be delivered
Because the capital of take-out and food-on-the-go is now having its feasts delivered to your home. And not just pizza and sushi, but also purchases, cocktails and old classics. An endless number of platforms compete for the favor of the hungry: there are, for example, the delivery platforms Doordash, Caviar and, above all, UberEats. UberEats has certainly had more popularity for its food deliveries than for the parent company’s taxi service in recent months. Restaurants can hardly do without the services of Uber. Even a long-established traditional eatery like the pizzeria Patsy in East Harlem, which still relies on cash in the old-fashioned way in the city where everything is paid for by credit card, adapts to the rules of the delivery platform. In addition to the classic “Margherita Pie” on UberEats, it also offers other variants in order to keep up with the diverse competition and the efficient “Dark Kitchen”. There are also niche offers such as Goldbelly, which offers the specialties of “cult” pubs and snacks such as Yonah Schimmel’s Kosher Knishes (after all, the oldest “Knishery” in the United States, at least according to their own statements), Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs or Jing Fong, a legendary dim sum temple from Chinatown to your doorstep nationwide.
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