The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

by Anthony Bourdain

America's cool, if you look hard enough, if you wander far enough from the strip malls and theme restaurants and Starbucks and Mickey D's. Things have changed. Things are different now. Every day. SWEET

breakfast at Barney Greengrass, The Sturgeon King, on Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street.

Katz's Deli on East Houston for a nearly-as-big-as-your-head pile of steaming hot pastrami, sliced paper thin and stacked between fresh seeded rye bread. The appropriate beverage is a Dr. Brown's cream soda or Cel-Ray.

you feel like humping out to Brooklyn, to Di Fara's, you can get the best of the best. But I like the white clam pizza at Lombardi's on Spring Street,

And Yasuda on East Forty-third Street is the place to go for old-school Edo-style sushi and sashimi,

If I find myself in the neighborhood late at night, just across the street, through an anonymous office building lobby, down a flight of fire stairs to a cellar and through a plain door, is Sakagura, a huge, nearly all-Asian late-night joint with a mammoth selection of sakes and accompanying snacks. Guaranteed to inspire exclamations of "How did you find this place?!" among your envious friends.

you want a quality hot dog, however, the best by consensus is at the legendary Papaya King on East Eighty-sixth Street.

Scott Bryan's Veritas on East Twentieth Street is always worth struggling into a shirt with buttons.

Eric Ripert's Le Bernardin on West Fifty-first Street is, in my opinion, the best restaurant in New York,

it's illustrative of the utter gutlessness and self-delusion of these yuppified, trustafarian true believers. Arguably complicit—as we all are—in their comfortable T-shirts and leather-free footwear (surely subsidized by the underpaid labor of some faraway dictatorship) they toodle over in their sensibly fuel-efficient cars to Sonoma (not too far from their expensive homes) and destroy the small businesses of victims completely uninvolved in their argument. They terrorize a mother and infant child.