"I moved here for the food"

My new fourth-floor co-op in Queens measures about 800 square feet, pretty good for one person...

There’s a light-flooded room perfect for a work-from-home journalist like myself. And then there is the great storage space in the basement, friendly neighbors, low monthly maintenance, and a five-minute walk to the E and F express trains that reach Midtown Manhattan in 15 minutes.

Whatever. I moved here for the food.

Sure, some people would do anything to have a view of Central Park or to live in a great school district, but I wanted the cheese bread called pandebono and the $6.50 meat-and-rice-and-soup lunch special at my local Colombian diner, Seba Seba. And I wanted Little India and its famous Jackson Diner five blocks away, not to mention the Patel Brothers supermarket, which snarls traffic on weekends as South Asian immigrants from across the metropolitan area shop for imported ingredients (while double-parked).

And Tacos Guicho, a street cart a five-minute walk away on Roosevelt Avenue that in its wildest dreams would never consider posting a menu in English. And the Uruguayan bakery on 37th Street, and the competing empanada shops on Northern Boulevard and the Peruvian ceviche. When your local lingerie store sells homemade passion fruit popsicles for $1, you know you’ve hit a culinary artery...

Moving For The Food - Seth Kugel, New York Times Real Estate section, December 31, 2006