I’m a New Yorker: Bronx-Jewish on one side, Queens-Italian on the other. It’s safe to say my life revolves around food, and I know the ins and outs of the outer boroughs (kind of).
As such, I have a lot in common with New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seemingly aspires to be a food influencer in between House votes. After all, we’re both of Ellis Island stock – one man’s rice and beans is just another man’s pasta fazool.
Alas, we’re now also both city types, having outgrown our outer-borough roots. But while one of us has learned to appreciate the finer things, the other still eats like a torta.
There’s no need to yuppify a classic, if the roll is good
I know this because AOC is a millennial, which means she shares what she’s eating at any given moment. Between TikTok reels and endless interviews, it was rather easy to track down her favorite dishes, snacks and restaurants across New York City. It was a little tougher to actually eat all of them. But I sure as hell tried.
For breakfast, I started with a bowl of cream of wheat with sugar. It’s fine, I guess, although I’m not sure it needs the sugar. I agree it’s a childhood comfort food, as AOC told Bon Appétit in 2019, but it also tastes like poverty. Good thing I work out a lot and needed a second breakfast anyway.
I will say this though: AOC is so right about the BEC, a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, which is God’s gift to man. There’s no better place to get it than New York. In 2020, AOC infamously griped that it’s “impossible” to find a decent BEC in DC because bodegas don’t quite exist. Having woken up hungover in DC quite a few times, I can certainly empathize. There’s no need to yuppify a classic, if the roll is good. But I did class it up with cheddar over American – as my queen commands.
Next, I moved on to AOC’s well-documented favorite snacks: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, KIND bars, chocolate-drizzled popcorn, and a Goya coquito kit for later (heartburn in a packet for a white boy like me). From unhealthy to fake-healthy, these snacks range from something a Bushwick Dominican might eat while gambling on the street to what a sad millennial scoffs down while putting together Excel reports in a Murray Hill highrise. AOC seems to waver somewhere in the middle.
Finding a lunch spot was harder. A number of AOC’s go-to restaurants did not survive Covid: an Italian spot in Belmont, a divey taco bar, a diner off Union Square. Maybe wage hikes and lockdowns weren’t the best idea after all?
The good news is there’s still no shortage of ethnic-fusion slop in New York City, and I scanned the Eater website to find the next best version of her signature taco order: pastrami, hold the guac. Honestly, kind of gross. Too creamy, fatty and heavy; the rich flavors all blended into nothingness. I went home to sleep it off.
Dinner – game time – and it was time to hike to the outer boroughs. I opted for Astoria, the historically middle-class Greek neighborhood in Queens, which now seems to have lost all of its unique character. At least it saved me from having to schlep to the Bronx.
My cousin, a DSA lib who lives in the neighborhood, happily met me for the AOC dinner tour. The route would take in a collection of various ethnic haunts in Queens that AOC has posted about on Threads, Instagram’s version of X. We got some Bangladeshi tea, Vietnamese sandwiches then Mexican ice cream and then looped back to Astoria for some conspicuously American (read: pricey and over-conceptualized) craft cocktails. Stumbling out, we happened to walk past AOC’s choice halal cart.
Despite the great diversity in the city, all the food pretty much melded together
All told, everything was pretty good. Wildly unhealthy – but good. The real problem is, that despite the great diversity in cuisines, it all pretty much melded together. This is the ironic reality of New York City today: extreme diversity creates total homogeneity. Every block has the same collection of take-outs, food carts and hole-in-the-wall spots. And despite AOC’s picks, you just can’t convince me that one divey pizza, taco or curry place in Queens is any better than another one down the block or across the bridge.
A cynic might say AOC is trying to feign authenticity – that she’s a boring, middle-class Westchester girl larping at coming from “the hood.” More likely she just has bad taste, then justifies it with feelings of Bourdain-style social superiority.
Call me a snob, but there’s nothing authentic about eating outer-borough swill. All authentic New Yorkers understand that, despite the best efforts of politicians like AOC, we still live in the greatest city in the world. So we better learn to eat like it.
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