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Three Cheap Eats in Chicago That Don't Serve Fried Onion Blossoms
A trip to Chicago can be a heady experience for a foodie, with more than 6,000 restaurants all within the range of efficient public transportation and affordable taxis. It would take a lifetime to sample even a fraction of the city's offerings and without being a native it's often difficult to tell a great ethnic restaurant from a good one or from a mediocre one.
Jaunted recently did a whirlwind tour through the Windy City, and herein is our selection of top Greek, Italian, and Armenian restaurants. One for each category, since we're in a recession and Chicago isn't exactly a cheap town. Each of these places clock in at upwards of $50/person after food and drinks. Don't even hope to get away with less.
Tags: Cheap Eats / Budget Travel / Restaurants / → All Tags
'Grazing' On The Cheap In London
So where to go for a good old meaty London lunch? Well, the brave could try St John, where they specialize in offal. Pheasant and trotter pie not for you? There’s always Smiths of Smithfield, which has four floors of eateries – getting more expensive as you go up the stairs – just opposite London’s meat market (Smithfields, if you hadn’t guessed.)
Or, if you’re really on a budget, and it’s before 4pm, you could go to Grazing, on Great Tower Street – handily on the tourist map because it’s directly halfway between the Tower of London and The Monument, which reopened this week.
Tags: Cheap Eats / Budget Travel / Restaurants / Pharaohs / → All Tags
Eat With The Pharoahs On A Budget in London
So you’ve only been in London a couple of days, but you’ve already blown your cash. Breaking into the overdraft isn’t a good idea at times like these. So before you break out the credit card at Nobu, here’s a tip: we suggest you hop on a 38 bus from the centre of town and head out to once edgy, now trendy (though not totally removed of edginess) Hackney, where you’ll find one of London’s weirdest, and better priced restaurants, LMNT.
It’s not so much the food that’s weird – that’s your standard confit of duck, pheasant en croute and roast pumpkin risotto – it’s the restaurant itself. Or rather, the decor – it’s like walking into the British Museum and clambering into the exhibits themselves for a spot of dinner. You might eat in a huge Greek-style urn or – our favourite – an Egyptian coffin, suspended from the wall. And you’ll definitely see one of the oddest bathrooms around – enjoy the pornographic murals as you pee, because the next time you see something like that, you’ll be picking it off the top shelf and paying for it.
Best of all are the prices. People would pay buckets for this if it was in central London, but because it’s in Hackney, starters are set at £4.45, mains at £9.95 and desserts at £3.95. Trust us, that’s good for London (unless you’re after a chain pizza).
Related Stories:
· LMNT [Official Site]
· London Travel [Jaunted]
[Photo: JessicaJBeck]
Tags: Recession Restaurants / Food Travel / Restaurant Week / Cheap Eats / → All Tags
L'Absinthe Introduces Permanent NYC Restaurant Week Menu
The disastrous economy has made New York's latest Restaurant Week even more popular than usual—and the powers-that-be are even considering extending it through February at all 250 participating restaurants. But for many of the struggling high-end restos, even that's not enough.
Fortunately for cheapskate foodies, many owners are taking it into their own hands, and L'Absinthe is the latest eatery to debut a full-time RW-style menu.
L'Absinthe, a high-end French brasserie on the Upper East Side, is serving up a three-course prix fixe dinner menu (available Monday-Friday) for $30.09. And it's not one of those extremely limited RW menus, either. There are four-to-five choices in each course, and with offerings like salmon tartare, pike quenelles in lobster broth, and fresh profiterolles with vanilla ice cream, you really are getting a meal that would normally run $50 or more.
So, not exactly one for the penny-pinching crowd, but if you're in town and looking for the full Paris-via-New York dining experience, this is one place where you can taste the high life and still afford a ticket home.
· L'Absinthe [Official Site]
· NYC Restaurant Week Now in Full Effect [Jaunted]
· Restaurant Week extended to February [Crain's]
[Photo: Great Restaurants Mag]
Tags: Street Food / Cheap Eats / Hot Dogs / → All Tags
Street Food in Peril: LA Cracking Down on Bacon Hot Dogs
OK, it's not quite the '92 riots, but the Los Angeles streets are indeed boiling over with the latest friction between cops and everyday folks. The burning topic this time: Bacon hot dogs.
A marquee staple of LA street food, bacon wrapped hot dogs have been declared unsafe by the LA Health Department, which deems bacon too risky health-wise to be fully cooked on the street. The cops have subsequently cracked down on the pork-on-pork action, ticketing offending vendors. Earlier this year, Drew Carey took to the streets for reason.tv to investigate. (He's sympathetic to the hot dog vendors, if you couldn't guess.)
Now LAist reports that just last week, there was a major bust right on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with police literally picking up hot dog carts and throwing them in the garbage. What gives, law enforcement? Those dogs were the only decent eats on Hollywood Boulevard!
Related Stories:
· Battle of the Bacon Hot Dogs [reason.tv]
· Killin' the Bacon [LAist]
· Street Food coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: jslander]
Tags: Street Food / Williamsburg / Cheap Eats / → All Tags
Peerless Mexican Street Food in Williamsburg
We remember what it was like to backpack across Europe on a shoestring budget. A couple hundred bucks had to last through multiple countries, which meant that eating in restaurants was out of the question. Hence, the old backpacker cliché of bread and cheese on a park bench was elevated to a mantra, and delicious street food was a rare indulgence.
Penny-pinching visitors to New York who are "tuned in" enough to spend some time in Williamsburg, Brooklyn should make a beeline to the corner of Bedford Avenue and North 12th Street (across from the Turkey's Nest) for some of the finest - and cheapest - Mexican street food in the city. From Thursday through Sunday, a nameless food cart (we asked) turns out fantastic chicken, steak, and chorizo tacos for $2.50 a pop, along with $4 quesadillas and decadent elote (Mexican corn on the cob on a stick) with mayo, lime juice, parmesan cheese, salt, and red pepper. The food is straight-up yummers.
Take your Mexican feast across the street to McCarren Park, find a bench or a patch of grass, and chow down while assorted softball games are played on the diamonds. Plenty of people accompany their meals with draft beers poured into Styrofoam cups from the aforementioned Turkey's Nest, but drinking in public remains illegal in New York, and just because your beverage is in a unmarked container, don't think you can't get busted. I've seen it happen. Better to scrape together your remaining money and belly up to the bar for a digestif.
Related Stories:
· Turkey's Nest Tavern [New York Magazine]
· Street Food Coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: Victor Ozols]
Tags: Eat-'N-Sleep / Cheap Eats / Mount Hood / → All Tags
Eat 'n Sleep in Portland :: Laughing Planet and Bluebird Guest House
Our Eat 'n Sleep feature profiles a restaurant in a random city and a hotel nearby. It's kinda like that old show "Dinner and a Movie" but you know, with restaurant and hotels. And better jokes.
This past weekend hundreds of rabid runners gathered in Portland to race from the top of Mt. Hood down to the Pacific Coast in the largest relay race in the world. Only those crazy enough willing to run a leg of the 197-mile overnight race were assigned numbers. So where did those looking for serious nourishment before running the Hood to Coast relay go to fill their bellies? And where did racers weary from the open road finally rest their legs? Only Jaunted's got the answer.
Tags: Hot Dogs / Restaurants / Cheap Eats / → All Tags
More Haute Hot Dogs in Miami
We think of Miami as having more or less two types of restaurants. You've got your divey Cuban spots-slash-seedy diners for hangover nursing and you've got your over-the-top small-plates-sharing hot spot of the week.
But Dogma Grill deserves a category all its own--and with a new location opening up next month in North Miami--it's making a bid to be the city's foremost gourmet hot-doggery.
At the current Design District and Miami Beach locations, you'll find dogs beyond the basic, if that's your thing: Chicago (onions, tomatoes, peppers and pickles), El Macho (brown mustard, cheddar, tomatoes, onions and jalapenos) even the Tropicale (secret sauce, mozzarella, bacon and pineapple). Speaking of foods that could nurse a post-clubbing hangover: How do two gourmet dogs for under $10 sound?
Related Stories:
· Dogma Grill [Official Site]
· Miami Beach hotels [HotelChatter]
Tags: Food / Cheap Eats / New York City / → All Tags
Dining Cheap in New York City
EuroCheapo, that guide to budget beds in European cities that, in the interest of complete disclosure, also employs one Jaunted contributing editor, recently launched a New York City Cheap Eats feature to accompany the site's also newish NYC budget bed listings.
Written and compiled by T.J. DiChristopher, the Cheap Eats feature divides staff faves into three categories: the very cheap, the splurgeworthy, and desserts.
The obvious budget options like Grey's Papaya are here, but so too are kick ass and somewhat neglected NYC restaurant gems like Soul Food spot Miss Mamie's Spoonbread Too on 110th between Columbus and Manhattan and Ghenet, Soho's best Ethiopian spot, on Mulberry between Prince and Houston.
If you run into a throng of Germans at Miss Mamie's or Ghenet this summer, methodically writing check marks next to names of restaurants on a dog-eared piece of paper, there's a good chance that EuroCheapo will have sent them there.
[Image via jxv23/Flickr]
