The Neighborhood With The Best Food

"Sure, some people would do anything to have a view of Central Park or to live in a great school district, but I wanted the cheese bread called pandebono and the $6.50 meat-and-rice-and-soup lunch special at my local Colombian diner, Seba Seba. And I wanted Little India and its famous Jackson Diner five blocks away, not to mention the Patel Brothers supermarket, which snarls traffic on weekends as South Asian immigrants from across the metropolitan area shop for imported ingredients (while double-parked)."

"Should the takeout scene play such a huge role in determining where you buy a New York City apartment? If you're the chef Mario Batali, perhaps not. But I'm a single guy who works at home and generally refuses to cook without an audience. So whether or not the food scene should play a role, I didn't consider any apartment farther than five blocks from Seba Seba. Coincidence?

Food didn't only attract me to Jackson Heights, which I had grown to love while visiting friends and writing about the area. It also drove me out of my old neighborhood, around 181st Street and Fort Washington in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan, where I had rented for nine years."