Eating Like a Local (Photographer) in New York City
As an editorial food photographer in New York City, one of the best parts of my job is, well, eating. Best case scenario: I get to adventure to restaurants around the city to photograph new and interesting flavors.
Fortunately, I was asked to do just that for Bloomsbury Publishing‘s Eat Like a Local guide for New York City (which just came out this week on Amazon!).
Shooting food and restaurant photography for the book’s 100+ locations took me all over the 5 boroughs of New York, to subway-tiled butcher shops, tiny pizza hideaways, and historic dim sum destinations…
I got a chance to eat (and drink) my way through New York. It was great to make it to Nom Wah Tea Parlor—NYC’s oldest Dim Sum restaurant. It opened in Chinatown in 1920, and is still a real no-frills place, complete with shiny red booths, towering snake plants, and cheap bottled beer.
Also on the list is Te Company, an impressive tea destination in the Village, and Sammy’s Romanian Steakhouse, an amazing old school Eastern European restaurant hiding in SoHo, where waiters served bottles of vodka frozen into ice blocks!
Shooting on location can be a challenge, especially in New York City. Restaurants in New York have to move at breakneck speed, and they don’t always have time for a photographer in their space snapping photos of steaming hot pizza and trays of cocktails. But learning how to stalk restaurants is a part of the job!
As a “local” New Yorker myself, I had been to a handful of the locations: Hanoi House, Bar Primi (their bolognese is A+), Van Leeuwen, Peter Pan Donut, and Clinton Street Bakery. Can you tell I have a sweet tooth??
But many places were new to me! Looks like I still have some eating in NYC to do.
