I landed in New York last Tuesday knowing that I was two days away from the end of my trip. October 8 was the day my All You Can Jet pass would expire, sending me back to Vermont to grapple with being incredibly under-employed, but full of great stories, photos, food memories, and ideas. After late nights in New Orleans, duck hot dogs in Chicago, the OMG! burger in Portland, and vegan smoothies in Phoenix, I was both ready for the trip to come to a graceful, calm end, and excited that I was finishing up in New York City, the center of it all.

My adventure was largely one of visiting cities: New Orleans, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Phoenix, and New York. I ate food you’d expect to hear about—Mexican in San Fran, etouffee in NOLA, hot dogs in Chicago—visited famous landmarks, museums, and centers of culture—Preservation Hall, the Art Institute of Chicago, traffic lights in Phoenix—and tried to absorb a bit of what makes each city unique.

I also had trusty guides. Aaron in NOLA; Adam and Emily in Chicago; Isaac and Elissa, Noah and Elizabeth in Portland; Mike and Hilery in San Fran; Steve and Aly in Phoenix. And now I was going to spend time with two close college friends in New York: first, Charity, who lives in the ‘Burg, and then Kudesh, who was born and raised in New Jersey. Kudesh was taking Wednesday off to guide me through eating tour of, as he put it, “The places no one goes, not even people who live in this city.”

You see, Kudesh is one of the three people who have been reading this travelogue, and he “got” the fact that I was looking for, finding, and enjoying, the food “of” each place I was visiting. And if that was street food, great. If that was fancy tapas and $10 cocktails, that was great too. (Oh, and it was, Toro Bravo. Don’t think I don’t love you, yo.) Kudesh had a vision: Flushing, Queens. His pitch: “This is immigrant food. These are neighborhoods where people haven’t even started to think about learning English, because they don’t have to. And they eat the food they know best, and people are cooking that food. That’s where we’re going to eat.”

He wanted to bring me to the Chinese part of Flushing, where the food courts offered cuisine with ingredients like lamb and cumin, influenced by China’s borders with Central Asian countries, instead the things we associate with the more famous Cantonese and Sichuanese cooking popular in the States. He told me that a Chinese friend from high school had brought him to Flushing after a Mets game when they were in high school, and he had loved the place ever since.

Kudesh met me in Williamsburg, where he laughed at the hipsters at Olso, where I was drinking coffee and waiting for him. (Great coffee, great people-watching, by the way.) We hopped on the 7 and took it out to Queens. When we surfaced from the subway, I understood what Kudesh had meant by people who didn’t have to learn English. We walked up from the subway stop straight into a river of Chinese. Nothing but Chinese. There was not one white person, black person, brown person—all Chinese. None of the street signs were in English—everything was some Chinese dialect. Instantly, I felt like I was in a different country. I’ve never been to China, but hey, I’ve never been to Flushing, either. Maybe they’re more similar than I realize.

Kudesh took a moment to orient himself, then quickly found a building that he recognized. We entered, and were instantly in the middle of a food court. Not a clean, sanitized mall-style food court, but something more real to the way people in developing countries eat and live—a little more worn, a little more greasy, a little more real.

Now, I have to mention something. Kudesh is short, portly, and Jewish. I’m tall, skinny, have a dark tan, a shaved head, and a beard. We started getting looks the minute we walked in. It probably didn’t help that we were talking excitedly and had no idea where we were. (I’m serious: We were the only Westerners in sight.)

As we walked back into the guts of the place, we saw a sign covered in Chinese characters and two words, hand-written, in English with parentheses: (Lamb soup).

“This is the place where the make the noodles right in front of you,” Kudesh said out of the side of his mouth. He was practically quivering.

We walked in to a small dining area with the kitchen at one end, behind a counter. Heads turned towards us. Quick, little conversations started all around us. We decided we’d try to split a bowl, as not to fill us up too much. We were here to sample as much as we could from as many stalls as possible.

There were several stock pots bubbling, a woman making noodle dough, and a man chopping vegetables. We stood at the counter; they ignored us completely. Kudesh turned back to me, with a smile, “Isn’t it great? It’s like they’re saying, ‘What are you doing here? Go away.’”

After a few minutes, during which three people stood next to us and ordered in Chinese, one of the women behind the counter looked up and said, “Yes?” in warbling English. Kudesh held up his index finger and said, “One.”

As we waited, I watched a younger woman prepping the noodles to be cooked. She took a small, flat slab about the size of a salad plate, and sliced it into several pieces. Then she held on to the ends and stretched them several times at arm’s length, across her body, before tossing them into the broth, where they cooked for only a couple of minutes before she poured the noodles and broth into a bowl.

I sat down and waited. Everyone looked up from their soup. I turned around; people in the hall were looking at us. It was great.

Kudesh brought the soup over with an extra bowl. More looks. Then we started to “split” the soup. This caused even more eyes to turn our way. Remember those noodles? They truly are a few feet long. We had chopsticks and small plastic spoons to split our soup between two bowls, and we quickly realized this soup is not designed to be split up. As we laughed our asses off, we started to split the soft, pliant noodles with our fingers, spilling soup all over the place. We must have been the most fun these people had all week.

Once we hacked our way through the noodles and had made a mess of our table, we started spooning broth into our mouths.

God. When you hear about people simmering stock for hours, the way so few people in the U.S. actually do, this is what they’re talking about. The flavor was deep, spicy, rich, and yet fresh in a way I’d hardly experienced before. I’m all for homemade chicken soup, and I’ve made my own stock, but this was something else. This was the kind of broth that makes you salivate constantly as you eat it.

Kudesh and I were face-down, slurping soup and noodles, like everyone else. We put a little hot oil in. Even better. The texture of the noodles, soft and only slightly chewy before giving way, was completely new to me. It was the best soup I’d ever had. Broth, noodles, cellophane noodles under the larger ones, chiles, small pieces of lamb, and cilantro. That was it.

A nice woman next to us could speak a bit of English. “Delicious?” she asked. We both nodded and replied positively. We must have looked like lunatics. We just kept eating and laughing. Then, during one enthusiastic slurp, a drop of hot oil landed right in my right eye, which started spasming and watering uncontrollably.

Kudesh started laughing. So did I. It hurt like hell, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I tried to open my eye and look at him. “Dude, your eye is bright orange. HAAAAA!!!”

We kept eating. I was crying and laughing and slurping. It was heavenly.

Once my eye calmed down and we had just about killed the soup—and entertained the room—we decided it was time to try something else.

We walked to a food stall which Kudesh claimed would serve us beef shin. He actually caught the proprietor’s eye, and pointed to his shin. I thought, Great, now we really look like idiots. But within a few seconds, the cook pulled out a section of beef from his fridge and gestured to Kudesh, who nodded enthusiastically. We sat and waited.

When the plate arrived, it was a large portion of thinly sliced beef with a side of green onions and cilantro. The cook suggested a sesame seed bun, and said, “Chinese hamburger!” We nodded.

The beef was a bit dry, and when we tried to put condiments on it and place it in the “bun,” we were told to eat it without sauce. We tried. Still dry, not so flavorful. So when the guy went back behind his counter, we tried a little soy sauce. Better. But still, after eating more than half the dish, we decided it was more important to move on than fill up on something so uninspired.

As Kudesh said, “Strikes and gutters, dude. Now, we have to go downstairs, into the bowels of this place. That’s where the really good stuff is.”

We found our way downstairs, and indeed, there were more stalls, and more people. We were almost paralyzed by the choices. Dumplings all over the place, lots of soups and noodles, illegal DVDs—this place had it all.

As we stood wondering whether we should order dumplings from this one lady, we noticed she had pig’s feet. We ordered one, caught up in the moment. When she simply pulled it off a tray and plopped it in front of us on a plate, we knew we may have gone wrong again. But we ripped into it—as much as you can rip into a pig’s foot. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of a room-temperature roasted pig’s foot, imagine a sheath of rubber under which you find cartilage, solid fat, and a tiny amount of tasty flesh. It was an absurd mission—find the goodness. After about a minute, Kudesh muttered out of the side of his mouth, “This isn’t very good.” I almost didn’t want to admit it. But then a few seconds later, I said, “Yeah.” Once or twice we thought we had figured it out, finding a tidbit here or there, but we looked at each other and finally gave up. We were mercenaries, after all. The foot may be good as an ingredient in a soup, or perhaps split and stuffed and roasted, served with a sauce, but it’s not good—at all—as is

After two minor mishaps our capacity was diminishing, and Kudesh wanted to make sure we had a lamb burger. Now, not the kind of burger we’re all used to. In fact, as we turned the corner to the lamb counter, I was thinking, “Wow. Writing about this would be great. People need to know about this place.” And then the obviousness of it all hit me: There was a huge, blown-up photo of the lamb burger guy with Anthony Bourdain. Of course. It made perfect sense: This building had Bourdain written all over it.

We ordered. When the “burgers” arrived, I saw that they were sandwiches of roasted, chopped-up lamb thick with cumin, salt, and chili peppers. The meat was dark, spicy, and packed into what looked like a large steamed bun. It was outrageously good. We knew we had hit it the Chinese jackpot again. And who would have thought it? Two Chinese-food grand-slams featuring lamb.

But we also knew we were bordering on more mainstream fare, as not only did we have Bourdain’s face smiling down on us, but there was a young white woman eating here among us. Kudesh said, in between bites, “This guy will move into the city. He won’t stay here.” And there it was: Success motivates people to leave their communities and seek out success in the bright lights. Hey, good luck to the guy. I know every one of my friends who eats meat would flip for this guy’s food. And we only tried one dish.

Once the lamb sandwich was down, we knew it was time to move on.

We walked out of the building and back into the bright sunlight and constant flow of people. We bought a cold “white gourd” tea from a street vendor. It tasted like… gourds. And honey. We walked around the neighborhood, drinking in all the local sights and flavors. We went into a market to check out the wares, and found live turtles and frogs in buckets beside several types of shrimp, shimmeringly fresh salmon, and littleneck clams.

Kudesh described how Roosevelt Avenue changes from Chinese to Indian to Mexican as you walk along it. So we hopped on the 7 for a few stops to the Indian part of Roosevelt. We checked out the markets and sari shops and gold shops. Kudesh told me stories about growing up in Edison, New Jersey, where he hung out with kids who all knew these communities in Queens. It was like a little bit of New York’s immigrant history rolled into an eating and walking tour.

We strolled down Roosevelt, with the elevated train directly above the street and people going about their lives in the city. We talked about old college friends, girlfriends and wives, his daughter, and just about everything else as we slowly watched the signs and people transition from Indian to Mexican. The merchandise in shop windows changed from saris to luchadore masks. We bought fresh juice from a vendor and walked on. It was a perfect, late-summer day, and we had plenty of time to just wander.

After a while, we took the train into the city and walked from Grand Central through Murray Hill, then Grammercy Park, and decided it was time to sit down at a bar to drink a pint or two. And yet, we still wandered all the way to the Lower East Side and sat down at Izzy’s, a bit of a punk-ish hipster bar, and drank a Brooklyn Lager. There were more stories, more memories, a lot of talk about writing, and then, finally, we had to be somewhere.

We had decided to eat at Diner, the famous Williamsburg restaurant and hipster hangout, for my last meal. I wanted to eat in the neighborhood, and Charity said flat-out that she thought it was the best food in Williamsburg. We met up at Charity’s apartment on Bedford Ave., then walked the few blocks to the small, unassuming diner that has housed the restaurant since 1998. It was busy, of course, so we dipped into Marlowe and Sons, next door, and drank Porkslap Pale Ales by candlelight while Kudesh and Charity caught up. I love Brooklyn. You can get good microbrew in a can and drink it by candlelight while waiting to eat at a place called Diner that serves food that is anything but. (Did I mention the illustration of two pigs chest-bumping on the front of the Porkslap can?)

Diner was everything it should be. We walked into the low-lit dining room, which is, as you would expect, the inside of an old diner. We sat at a booth. We were surrounded by incredibly good-looking people dressed in incredibly good-looking clothes. Our server was tall, African-American, serenely confident, and immpeccably good at her job. When there wasn’t an old-fashioned on the drink menu, she made sure the bartender made something Charity would like. And she did. Kudesh and I drank scotch cocktails. Then our server came back and sat down next to Kudesh. She proceeded to tell us every detail about the ten or so dishes on the menu, from salads to entrees, with an intimacy and subtle pride that showed this was all about the food. She wrote down the main ingredient of each salad, appetizer, and entree on the white paper covering the tabletop, so we would remember. It was so relaxed that she could easily have taken a sip of a glass of wine and been our dining companion.

Charity ordered grouper over Swiss chard. We ordered Delmonicos with fries. Rare.

It was another one of those flawless meals. The atmophere was almost dreamlike—low light, old friends, impossibly attractive people all around—and the food was exactly what you’d want it to be. The meat was succulent, tender, and served in its own juices; the fries were crisp and hot. Our server recommended glasses of red to go with the meat. We ordered coffees and a flourless chocolate cake for dessert. My espresso was chocolatey, spicy, and slightly bitter. The cake was smooth and topped with lightly whipped cream. We were all beside ourselves at how good everything was.

It was a perfect day. I had been from Queens to Midtown to the Lower East Side to Brooklyn. I had eaten both peasant food and a fine steak; drank beer out of a can and quaffed a Scotch cocktail. I was with one friend who is a corporate lawyer and lives in Brooklyn, and another who cleans up toxic spills and lives with his family in New Jersey. Duality has certainly been an unintentional theme of my trip, and it was fitting that the final day and night were spent in the same way.

I’ve been very lucky during this month-long adventure, and I’d like to thank Kudesh and Charity for helping me close it out in grand fashion, only a short walk from Charity’s apartment. If that doesn’t hold to the surpremely loose Eat, Walk, Jet! ethos, I don’t know what does. But Porkslap beer, cheap Wayfarers, and red meat are all contenders.