NYC NOW - August 29, 2023: Midday News

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Service on the 1, 2 and 3 subway lines has resumed with serious delays after a water main break in Times Square. New York City is preparing to issue "emergency” MetroCards and pay for students to take cabs and rideshares if negotiators don't avert a school bus drivers strike by the first day of school on September 7. And finally, a look at the growing food scene in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Tuesday, August 29th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Residents of Staten Island are condemning the Adams administration housing asylum seekers in a former private school. 64-year-old Carl Marmos as opposition to the city's decision to house migrant families at the old St. John Villa High School has tensions running high.

The crowd's been growing more and more, and they're very anxious to get this done, to see the migrants moved out of here and put in another facility somewhere that's not near school children. They should not be here near school children. City Hall says 25 migrants are living at the facility, which has room for about 300. Staten Island is home to less than 2% of the nearly 60,000 migrants in the city's care. New York City is preparing to issue emergency metro cards and pay for students to take cabs and ride shares if negotiators don't avert a school bus driver's strike by the first day of school on September 7th. Local 1181, the Amalgamated Transit Union is in the midst of contract

negotiations with the city. If those negotiations don't resolve the issues, roughly 80,000 students could have their bus routes canceled. Hell's Kitchen was once one of New York City's most notorious neighborhoods. These days, the tough name remains, but it might be better known for an eclectic and growing food scene. WNYC's David First talked with Robert Sietzima, senior critic at Eater, New York. We're talking about the Manhattan neighborhood that is framed by 8th Avenue and the Hudson River, and it runs from around the Lincoln Tunnel up near Columbus Circle. You have a piece in Eater this week looking at the range of food available in Hell's Kitchen, and you say there's no neighborhood quite like it in town for dining. What makes it unique? Well, it's kind of like

Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C. It's a neighborhood that has a vast range of different ethnicities represented and at a price point that makes it accessible to many people, but not rock bottom cheap. The mix of restaurants is constantly changing and it doesn't pay to ignore the neighborhood for more than a few months at a time. It doesn't pay to ignore it because it may look completely different over the course of those months? Well, yeah, and also for the New York native, it's a few steps too far away from Times Square to be completely tourist-plugged,

although it is a good place for tourists to go, and the streets are thronged in a very cosmopolitan sort of way. Yet the neighborhood looks like it's a few decades older than the present. So, Robert, back in May, we talked about some of the new Chinese restaurants that have been opening in Hell's Kitchen. Give us some suggestions for other places to try in the neighborhood. Off to the side from 9th Avenue, there is a new place called Hydrabati Zaykwa.

And in a way, it's kind of better to get off of 9th Avenue and look around because hydrobati Zaikwa, which refers to a city in southern India, is off on a side street. It's in a basement. Normally, you would have to go to Jersey City to Newark Avenue to get all of the biryani that Hydrobot is famous for, but this place has them all in this convenient location, and they are delicious. If you've never had Southern Indian type biryani, dumb biryanies are called D-U-M because they're cooked in a sealed pot. And they often have ingredients added at the end that make the biryani especially lively. If you think of biryani as kind of a bland rice and meat dish,

man, you are going to be surprised because they put it, mango pickles and stuff like that. Okay, that sounds awesome. What else should we check out? Kind of going back in time a little, we have Ariana Afghan kebab. In this case, kebab is spelled K-E-B-O-B. This is one of the old timers along the 9th Avenue strip. It's very inexpensive. It serves kebabs, the best of which is the ground meat lamb kofka. It serves Pulao rice dish dish, which are pilafs, the way that they make them in Afghanistan. It has vegetable stews and it has giant fist-sized dumplings filled with pumpkin, served with yogurt.

And it kind of, it partakes of the 50-year-old atmosphere of 9th Avenue. The beauty of hell's kitchen is that you can find a restaurant not only from any country, but from any era. They don't seem to renovate the restaurants very readily. in Hell's Kitchen. So you can really settle down into a place that looks like your grandfather ate there. So you can sort of time travel as you move through the neighborhood? Exactly. Okay, bring us up to present day. We went 50 years back in time. What's a newer place we should check out?

A place that opened exactly a year ago is called Lum Lum, L-U-M with no space between the words. It is a Thai restaurant, you know, holding up the Thai traditions of Hell's Kitchen, and it is a fascinating one. They have dishes from all over the country, but in particular, an area north of Bangkok, where there are rivers and resorts. And they serve this group of dishes called Kug Klayam. And what it is basically is drinking snacks. You know, every place seems to have a tapas tradition now. And this is the one that's associated with Thailand. And this is one of the rare Thai restaurants in that area that actually has cocktails, if you like those.

And the cocktails are sometimes mind-boggling. There's one that is purple made with coconut milk that has blue pea blossoms in it. And who knew that you could use that as a food color? And what should you have with that purple drink? You should check out the river prawns. That's Robert Sitsima, senior critic at Eater, New York, talking with WNYYNY. Sees David First. Thanks for listening.

This is NYC now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back this evening.