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Whenever my parents visit, our time together is spent largely at restaurants. Well, that’s not quite true, but the interim is spent figuring out how we’ll fill time until our reservations for the next restaurant. I was not born to grazers, we just don’t know what to do with each other. They’re in their seventies, they’re Christian, they’re racist, they hate museums, I hate shopping, and Broadway costs $100 a pop (besides, they’ve already seen all the shows on tour).

We do all eat. We have that at least. So beyond tickets to the The Color Purple, and an equally hellish trip to the counterfeits-and-handbags strip of Chinatown, our itinerary revolves around restaurants. My mother consequently associates New York City with gluttony. She says things like, “I would eat all day long if I lived here. There’s so much food!” And indeed, Hell’s Kitchen is just a long row of restaurants, interrupted occasionally by nail salons, boutiques, delis, hot dog stands, pizzerias and bodegas. From the outside looking in, we crap entire bakeries.

But from the resident’s perspective, it looks like a straight mile of gut-bludgeoning cheesecake and tasteless paninis. No matter how they repackage it, it’s all more of the same. The same Thai restaurant appears three different times on my block. Three different restaurants, same name, same owner, same menu, same mediocre noodle and curry dishes. Different decor.

So begins the daily scavenge for food. You know, it’s like, yeah, but what am I going to eat? I’m so sick of everything.

Walking around the Port Authority Saturday, on the morning scavenge in which I hoped to discover a new option on take-out, I came upon a West African grocery. I knew it was a West African grocery because the store’s name was “West African Grocery.” An old boyfriend and I used to cook Ethiopian food together (other side of the continent?—whatever); it required us to grind little seed pods and combine various herbs into approximations of seasonings unheard of in our neck of the woods. And here those spices all were, by the ounce or by the pound, labeled. Sumac (of which I’m very fond), berbere, za’atar, ufaze (??? don’t know this one), increasingly unfamiliar names. But oh, god, the flies. Dried fish: wide ones, narrow ones, flies all over them, crawling on the eye sockets. No wonder these people are starving. On the floor, knee-high vats of grains and nuts, sealed with dirty lids. Throughout the store, shelf after shelf of bleach (gallon jugs). Exotic spices, nuts, herbs, delicacies in vats on the floor, on countertops, in barrels, and along the walls and beneath the counters enough bleach to disinfect the Holland Tunnel.

A few doors down another international grocery, called “International Grocery,” this one as tidy and civil as a dental office. The same spices, but in clear buckets, clean buckets, with little tags and pencils for labelling. Self-serve trays of what looked to be cornish hens, say forty of them huddled together, their drumsticks tight at their sides, shoulders back like little soldiers. He’d topped them with a loose piece of saran wrap, no refrigeration. Five were missing. I can’t fathom risking my stomach on one of these, however pretty they were.

At some point I will go back and pick up some spices and cook a good stew, but for that moment I was looking at take-out. I spotted a shop, a new shop, a new sign ... and yes, it was panini. Same flavors as at the forty other panini stands in Hell’s Kitchen: Cuban, Russian, Italiano, Delightful, Siciliano, Monte Cristo, Chicken Club. They looked like they’d been there a week.

Behind the port authority stood the usual line-up of homeless riff-raff. Around the corner, a man with a day-glo orange shopping cart (filled with pants) grabbed me and shouted, “It’s heartbreak city, that’s what it is!” Walking home with a Subway sub, I thought, God he’s so right.