Universal New York Lunch-on-a-Budget Truisms:

If the menu is written on a cute little chalkboard out front, you can't afford it there.

I've been known to not eat for two days so that I can stretch my food budget far enough to sup at Belle Havana and Aquavit.

I've always wanted to go there, but I don't exactly have the threads for it.

the menu is notoriously hard to navigate if you're a vegetarian (which I am.) but despite that it was good...I just wanted to go because I was curious and a foodie, even though I knew from looking at the menu online that the vegetarian thing was going to be an issue. There is a lot of fish on the menu; thankfully they are very willing to accommodate special requests though at $60-$200/person, I guess they should be.

I'm a huge fan of the owner/executive-chef Marcus Samuelsson, one of my favorite go-to cookbooks is this neat book he put out a few years ago of African cuisine (two versions: Taste of a Continent was a limited edition put out in combination with Starbucks and supplemented with additional content and narrative about his tour of Africa, Soul of a New Cuisine contained more recipes and less travelogue. They are fundamentally the same book however.) that he learned while touring Africa to learn about where he came from. (He was adopted by a Swedish couple at age 3 after his birth parents were killed by a TB outbreak in Ethiopia in the 1970s.)