A cheap eats smackdown: New York vs. Washington

It’s hard to dislike Ed Levine.

When Levine showed up in Washington for the first half of our eating odyssey, I quickly learned two things about him. First off, he’s no food snob. He embraced the short-order Mid-Atlantic, gentrified soul-food vibe of Market Lunch as we dug into our disposable plates of breakfast food along the communal counter at Eastern Market. “It’s one of those places that you want to be good,” he confides. “It plain feels right.”

Personal Post

(Michael S. Williamson/WASHINGTON POST) - Ed Levine makes a careful study of the Pattison Avenue sandwich from Taylor Gourmet. It features roast pork, broccoli rabe and sharp provolone cheese on a classic Italian sesame seed sub roll.

More on this Story

• A Cheap Eats Showdown: New York v. Washington
• Cheap eats showdown: Results
• Sneak peek at Buzz Bakery in Ballston
• 2 Amys: Review

View all Items in this Story

• Fojol Bros. debut Ethio­pian food truck
• Some of The Post’s favorite food trucks

Cheap Eats Smackdown

Full Results

The other thing I learned is that Levine doesn’t drink coffee or alcohol. He never developed much taste for them, which I imagine has frustrated more than one chef and/or sommelier during Levine’s nearly two decades of tasting food for a living. It certainly frustrated my attempt to take him to one of Washington’s best coffee shops. I ordered a hand-pour at Peregrine Espresso on Capitol Hill. Levine ordered a hot chocolate, which the clerk behind the register had the guts to call “world renowned.” Levine found it so sweet he chucked it in the trash outside the shop’s door.

More often than not, Levine proved generous toward the dishes/restaurants that The Post’s Food section picked as our city’s representatives in this seven-category challenge. Only once did he find himself on unfamiliar turf, during the late morning, when we stopped for street food at the Fojol Bros. of Benethiopia, that rolling carnival of Ethiopian finger foods. Levine made the mistake of grabbing a pair of sporks for our meals, a rookie move for which I taunted him as if he were a Red Sox fan in Yankee Stadium. He knew as soon as he picked up the utensils that he was busted.

He admitted that he probably hadn’t sampled Ethiopian food, a staple around Washington, in about 20 years. “It’s messy,” Levine noted about Benethiopia’s stews, “but really good street food.”

Levine was more than a passive participant in our D.C. adventure. When the timing for our planned stopover at Palena Cafe proved too tight for Levine’s comfort — he really wanted to catch the 6 p.m. train back to New York — he hatched a plan that chef Frank Ruta’s team embraced without batting an eye. Levine suggested I call them, anonymously, and see if they could prepare two cheeseburgers to go around 5 p.m., a good 30 minutes before the cafe opened. Levine’s reaction to Ruta’s patty was as satisfying as the truffled cheeseburger itself.

“That’s seriously delicious,” he said after I told him his first two reactions were unprintable in a curse-free zone like The Post. “That’s certainly the best hamburger I’ve had in this town.”

Several days later, my similarly hectic spin through New York’s best cheap eats had a completely different flavor, in large part because some of the dishes weren’t so cheap. We dropped more than $100 on breakfast at Danny Meyer’s Maialino; granted, it was for four people, because both Jones and Zimmer (the latter a Georgetown graduate and a friend of mine) dined with us. Later in the day, three of us spent $29 on gelato alone at Otto, Mario Batali’s enoteca and pizzeria. “Cheap” is a relative term in New York.

I gave Levine a small cushion in the burger category, which we agreed should be capped at $12 (a Machiavellian ploy on my part since I knew the exact price of Palena’s offering). I suggested that Levine could select a burger that was up to $2 more expensive, since one source pegged New York’s cost of living at about 14 percent higher than Washington’s, but Levine exploited my offer by picking a $16 burger on the lunch menu at Prime Meats in Brooklyn. The same half-pound certified Black Angus burger was even pricier ($18) at dinner, when we sampled it. Levine justified the cost because it came with hand-cut fries, which are available only as a side at Palena Cafe for $7.

That haggling over price struck me as one of the primal differences between Washingtonians and New Yorkers: Washingtonians will look for any angle that might give them an advantage in a side-by-side comparison with Gotham. New Yorkers just don’t sweat the details that much. They know they’re good at every price point. Which is why when Levine submitted his grades (on a scale of 0 to 100) on the food we’d sampled in both cities, I was shocked (and tickled) to see him cast aside his New York bias — in one category.

See the full results of the cheap eats smackdown.