Read The Man Who Ate Everything for Free Online

day, or $1.50 a meal. My disbelief at hearing these numbers cannot be entirely blamed on my own gluttonous nature. The French and the Japanese are happy to spend twice as much for their exquisite food. We, the richest country in the world, have simply chosen to scrimp. Among the wealthy countries, only the British spend much less than we do. This says volumes to me.
    It seems obvious that the only way to spend as little as $4.50 a day on food is to eat nearly every meal at home. To test this proposition, I took out my 1993 edition of the Zagat New York City Restaurant Survey, checked off the ten cheapest restaurants, and began to eat my way through them. If you’ve never dined at the Wall Street branch of McDonald’s at 160 Broadway, just two blocks north of Trinity Church, you have a treat in store. It is a soaring two-story space with marble tables, an electronic stock ticker, a pianist at an ebony baby grand, a doorman, and a hostess in a curvy lavender suit. The back half of the ground floor is a traditional McDonald’s counter and kitchen, and the menu and prices are just what you would hope. Nonetheless, my discreetly spiced Mighty Wings, my order of excellent fries, and my Diet Coke totaled $5.34 with tax, effortlessly busting the $4.50 average daily food budget of the average American. I could, I suppose, have ordered much less food and sat there all day like several other patrons who, I surmised from their multiple layers of clothing, were homeless. Our bilingual (English-Spanish) hostess guided them to a warm seat upstairs where the staff would bother them less, and together, underneath the Golden Arches, we enjoyed the pianist’s witty rendition of “There Will Never Be Another You.”
    Three of New York City’s cheapest restaurants are called the Original California Taqueria; all are in Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope, and two appear to be owned by the same person. A convenient F train whisked us nearly door-to-door to 341 Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, where a fresh and pungent interpretation of East Los Angeles cuisine, an attractive and friendly ambience, and a boldly painted mural that incongruously included the Golden Gate Bridge awaited us. We exceeded $4.50 apiece by only 12 cents, ignoring the $3.00 for round-trip transportation. If my wife’s tostada was not quite enough for a day’s ration, my ample plattio, which included a beef taco, guacamole, beans, and rice, more than made up for it. Of all the restaurants I visited, only at the Original California Taqueria could I buy something approaching a balanced diet with my limited funds. To celebrate this achievement and our unaccustomed sojourn in Brooklyn, we returned to the F train and rode it to the very last stop, in Coney Island, where close by the desolate ruins of Luna Park and its famous Parachute Jump, and two blocks from the original Nathan’s, still stands Totonno Pizzeria Napolitano, historically one of the most important restaurants in America. (Totonno, with its coal oven and thickly painted pressed-tin walls and ceiling, opened in 1924, making it the second-oldest surviving pizzeria in this country.) Though Totonno is unjustly listed by Zagat as only the thirty-sixth-best bang for the buck in New York City, a small pizza with a remarkable crust covered by nothing but handmade mozzarella and a sauce of imported canned tomatoes—all unchanged from the founder’s original recipe—cost us only slightly more than the following day’s entire $9 food budget for two.
    At Gray’s Papaya and Papaya King the customer can easily stop short of $4.50 by ordering two first-rate beef frankfurters (70 cents apiece at Gray’s, more at Papaya King) or one chicken fajita (only at Papaya King) and one large fresh pineapple juice ($1.75). For a more varied diet I journeyed to Amir’s Falafel near the Columbia University campus and to the Cupcake Cafe on Ninth Avenue. Perhaps because I relished the food at both addresses, I failed to keep the tab under