Sam Ashworth

With finals approaching, the time is nigh for a regular eating schedule no longer to appear on your list of daily necessities. Rather than resort to whatever happens to be leftover in your fridge from two weeks ago, hit up some of the best delivery and takeout around.

Morningside Heights is not noted for its culinary delights. By and large, we at Columbia are left with a choice of dreadful mediocrities, ranging from the lame to the truly regrettable. Morningside restaurants enjoy a captive audience—students are understandably disinclined to venture too far from campus, so we settle for less and restaurants need not produce anything beyond the mundane.

The cruel paradox of living in the restaurant capital of the United States is that the vast majority of those restaurants are far too expensive for most New Yorkers to enjoy.

I thought the shrimp was dead. It had arrived at our table (a great round one in a restaurant in Dalian, a seaside town in northern China) gray, whole, and unmoving. Grandma, across the table, became excited, clapping her hands and insisting that I be the first to try one.

Barricaded as we are in the fortress Morningside Heights, we tend to develop a kind of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to our local dining options, with restaurants like Le Monde playing “good kidnapper” to Ollie’s deranged sociopath.

Inevitably, anyone who has traveled to China finds upon his return to America that Chinese food has mysteriously gone from flavorful to criminally tasteless.

New Yorkers are not known for their patience. While we are a more affable, easygoing species than generally advertised, the one thing none of us can tolerate is having to wait: inconvenient service changes on the subway (say, the 1 line on weekends), dawdling, sun-dazed pedestrians obstructing us on the sidewalk, or indecisive people ahead of us in line at Starbucks are certain to provoke most of us to towering heights of rage.

Few here at Columbia will deny that the single most significant criterion for any restaurant is its price.