Inside the box is a can of blueberries. Yes, a CAN! Of REAL blueberries! And all you have to do is throw in an egg or something, bake, and out come delicious and relatively healthy muffins. This, we have decided, is symbolic of the rise of… something. Or maybe the demise. Well, anyway, it’s big.

Our cost: $2.50 (with coupon)
Available at a supermarket near you

Our destination was a family-style Italian eatery called Dominick’s.  After a significant wait we (and six friends) were seated; we learned there were no menus, just a waiter telling us from memory some things we might like to eat. We started with a salad, a plate of mussels and a stuffed artichoke.  All were huge and reportedly delicious, however some of us avoided the mussels as we do not enjoy the taste of dirty ocean in our mouths and do not understand why somebody ever would. Our entres were a penne pomodoro, chicken catchatorie, a shrimp pasta and eggplant parmesan–all good, and huge.

There are generally two risks at family-style restaurants.  The first is that your party wont pick things you like.  Barring the mussels and the shrimp pasta, we survived that one in tact. The second risk, however, is that someone might actually come with their family.  This was in fact a problem at Dominick’s, as the early Saturday evening crowd included more children under ten years old than a Park Slope street fair.

When it came time to pay, we received no bill, but rather our waiter simply told us how much we owed. We shot fearful glances at one another but were surprised when the the total came to only $20 per person. 

As we left we wandered into a small bakery and enjoyed cheap treats, then walked down the street under a lighted sign that proclaimed “Happy Passover!”

Our cost: $40

2335 Arthur Ave
Bronx, NY 10458

Take the B/D to 182nd-183rd St

Being from the Midwest, we could go on and on about how comfortable we felt in a sprawling, kitschily-decorated restaurant that brought us free refills of our Diet Cokes, but instead we’ll get right to the food. There were essentially three options: chicken, ribs and brisket (okay, and some pork). All we had to decide was what we wanted and how. Plain? Pulled? On a sandwich? Ultimately we decided we wanted it all—plain, on a sampler platter. Maybe because we are both half-Jewish, we picked the cheapest (meant for one person), but we were pleasantly surprised to have enough food left over for dinner the next night. As for the meat itself, we have no complaints. I suppose you don’t know us well enough to understand how impressive this is, so trust us.

But what we really want to discuss are the sides. Our meal came with cornbread, about which we also have no complaints. Not being foodies, though, the best descriptions we can come up with are “crumbly” and “sweet” and “yellow.” But we promise it was good. That’s not all: we also got to pick two more. After a fair amount of whining about the lack of green beans we decided on salt potatoes (which were indeed potatoes and did indeed have salt) and mac and cheese. Now, let us preface this by explaining that we like mac and cheese. We like it so much, in fact, that when we heard a new restaurant was opening in our neighborhood serving exclusively mac and cheese, we showed up before it even opened. This mac and cheese, however, was the best we’ve had. “Oh my God,” Andy practically exclaimed, “this has, like, you know, SPICES and stuff!”

However, we do have one complaint. After dinner, it took a half hour for a 1 train to arrive, and when it did arrive we were squeezed into a car with a horde of Columbia girls dolled up for a night in the West Village, and that there’s not much that annoys us more than college girls (except perhaps high school girls).  This put a damper on an otherwise pleasant evening.

Our cost: $30

646 W. 131st St.
New York, NY
212-694-1777

Take the 1 to 125th Street