It's different in NY due to the ubiquity, downward pressure on price, and all-hour coverage. You can be nearly anywhere, at any time, and be fed in minutes. You often eat while standing and remaining social. The experience anchors itself in your mind as an instant, omnipresent solution to hunger. There's also probably something to the infinitely nuanced territorial aspect of which slice is better (the answer is Prince Street).
Less mentioned about NYC is the 24-hour egg and sausage breakfast sandwich, fresh off a griddle. This, more than pizza, was my staple when I went to college in New York.
Egg and bacon / egg and sausage were like $2 when I was there in the 90s. And they were about twice the diameter of the ones you get at McDonalds. I don't know what it costs now, maybe this is something like avocado toast that's become anomalously expensive, but calorie for calorie it was as cheap or cheaper than pizza back then. They could be bought from most bodegas that had a stove, as the peer points out. (The LA equivalent of this type of bodega was the "roach coach" - distinguished from modern food trucks by (a) an apparent lack of formal licensing, (b) presence of construction workers eating there, and (c) charging about 30% the price for the same items. The breakfast burrito, however, had not yet migrated to the East Coast).
At most non-fancy corner stores they're still under $4. Usually under $3 if you just want egg & cheese. And they're always made to order - ketchup, mayo, salt/pepper, hot sauce, on a roll or bagel, 50 cents extra for a tomato. I know New Yorkers can be a little insufferable about their bodegas, but I've lived in a few other major cities and none of them have provided me with this much access to a cheap breakfast.
It's true though, good breakfast burritos are still hard to come by here.
Thanks for the delicious reminder of how good those are! Nice to hear they're still competitive with pizza prices! I only eat once a day, since before college, so breakfast foods were like a sort of yearned-for delicacy in my world, especially at 3am in Brooklyn. That or cheap dumplings if I was anywhere near Chinatown. Hot corn muffin from the street vendor out my door if I was absolutely hung over and needed something in the morning...
Back on the west coast, the price of a breakfast burrito at my local cart has almost doubled since covid, and the burrito got smaller. My conclusion is that burritos are a scam. The contents of the classic round breakfast sandwich are much harder to fake.
I really miss the McDonald's egg and sausage muffins, mediocre as they are. They stopped doing the special breakfast menu during the pandemic here in Spain and it never came back. They only have it at the airport locations now.
The McCafe locations have a Spanish omelette roll again but it's not the same thing :'(
Kaiser rolls are really the shit. It should be noted to the class warrior above... you used to be able to sit down in a lot of sit-down restaurants on the Lower East Side, and get a basket of free kaiser rolls and butter before you even ordered food. A foreign concept, I know! You could eat em and scram if you were of the mind to. That was when people had more class than to get a little nudge of self congratulations from judging each other's pocketbook based on which cheap fast food they ate, hoping for a popular online mob to agree with their stupidly ill informed opinion. But this will all fall on deaf ears, so, hallelujah there's still cheap breakfast sandwiches, and let the culture warriors who never experienced human civilization stick it up their ass.
Wtf are you talking about my guy. Subs are larger and carry more meat, so the sandwiches cost more. There’s no quality judgement in that statement (also weird to think of a sub roll as like some kind of luxury). It’s like saying a small coffee at Starbucks costs less than a large.
Starting to think maybe you’ve never been in a deli!
The Ninja Turtles got this picky-eater-as-a-child fella to give it a fair shake. Was my undisputed favorite type of food for like 15 years straight (when I started trying more things and discovered Middle Eastern and Indian food).
And that's out in a part of the country with mostly-bad pizza options. Nothing half as good as a so-so NY slice, certainly.
Absolutely not. I've lived in a lot of places in the US, and almost none of them outside of a couple of major cities in New England had the equivalent of a NY slice. This has only changed somewhat recently (maybe past decade or so). Even still, it's not nearly as ubiquitous.
It's kind of similar with bodegas, a lot of people will say "we have corner stores too" but that's not a bodega. It sounds snobbish sometimes but there are a lot of actual differences.
> I've lived in a lot of places in the US, and almost none of them outside of a couple of major cities in New England had the equivalent of a NY slice.
I’ve spent time in New Haven and NYC and… not even close. Sure there’s good slices in New Haven, but there are also pizza deserts, and a lot of them. New Haven does compete with NYC on restaurant-style pizza though.
Yeah this is how this conversation typically goes "but we've got good pizza from X, Y, Z restaurant" — is not the same as just walking to the corner and paying $2 for a big cheese slice — the NY slice is essentially a street food, like street tacos are in some states along the mexican border
