Heralded for offering similar grill and salad bar choices as Fogo de Chão (an international Brazilian steakhouse chain), but at a more accessible price point, Rio serves a traditional Brazilian buffet and churrasco, along with popular street foods, drinks, and desserts. Diners looking for a feast can go for the buffet-grill combo. For a lighter lunch or snack, choose from the extensive menu of Brazilian classics, such as beef- or cheese-filled pastel, one of the salgados (savory bites) like kibe, or some fried yuca. Pastries and sweets here come in all sorts of varieties, too, from arroz doce (sweet rice pudding) to the soft cream-filled doughnut known as sonho. Grab a maracujá (passion fruit drink) or a caipirinha to wash it all down.
Contrary to the days when a new food court was a big deal, they now appear with such regularity that these collections of pricey fast-food stalls — where a meal, including beverage, tax, and tip (and now, a credit-card surcharge), often runs $25 or more — can be a nonevent, unless they have some special feature. Olly Olly was significant for its artsy location and cocktail program, while Urban Hawker was the hit of the year because of its single-minded emphasis on the street food of Singapore.
Food courts have become so ubiquitous they have started cannibalizing each other, so that — I swear — when the Hugh opened in the Citibank building two blocks north of Urbanspace 576 Lex, it partly drained the older food court of its patrons. As a result, it comes as no surprise to visit an older food court like Dekalb Market Hall and find several of the stalls untenanted.
The murals enliven what might be a pretty grim space.There are a total of 13 counters at Urbanspace Union Square.
Yet food courts keep opening. The new ones often have many of the same tenants as other food courts, disqualifying them as unique destinations. And the time when food courts served as incubators for small food businesses is becoming a thing of the past. Entering a new food court these days has a certain ho-hum quality, as one notes the number of chain stalls and brick-and-mortar establishments that have newly invaded food courts.
So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Urbanspace opened its sixth Manhattan food court at Union Square. The new facility at the corner of Irving Place and East 14th is in a new building called Zero Irving, which describes itself as “a trophy-class office building.” The entrances are not well marked, suggesting that signage has either not arrived or is not permitted. Apart from a few nice pastel paintings, the floor and walls are solid concrete, making it feel like you’re in a bomb-proof bunker.
The 13 stalls form an island in the middle and are arranged around the periphery, forming a great big “O.” The best seats look out onto 14th street from a shallow counter by the windows. Trencher tables are scattered here and there, plus some raised tables with stools. Best of all is an outdoor patio: Among food courts, this one is perhaps more spacious than average.
As at most food courts, the menus favor bowls, salads, and sandwiches. Ingredients are redundant: I lost count of how many times kale, avocado, and chocolate chip cookies appeared. Meat with bones is absent. But like all food courts, there are some great things to eat. I recently spent three days roaming Urbanspace Union Square; here’s a list of the food stalls, and five things to eat I highly recommend.
Five Best Dishes
Tuna tostada at GoFish Sushi Box
Normally, I avoid buying sushi pulled from reach-in refrigerated cases. You never know how long ago it was made. At the very least the nori may be soggy, and the fish itself may be headed down the road, too. So it pays to pick things that must be freshly assembled, and this tuna tostada ($9.75) fits the profile. It is wonderful with its tortilla-chip crunch, glowing crema, and spices that are sprinkled overall.
The tuna tostada at Urbanspace Union Square is scrumptious.
Eggs bacon parm at Casa Toscana
This nominally Italian stall isn’t really Tuscan at all (consider the jalapeno chicken energy plate, for example), but it produces some generous sandwiches on focaccia. I particularly admire the eggs bacon parm ($10), which features scrambled eggs, shaved cheese of a pungent sort, and, best of all, slices of pancetta, which add funkiness to what is basically a BEC.
Eggs bacon parm sandwich with soft scrambled eggs.
Yucatan Mayan world bowl at Plant Junkie
The province of this vegan counter is salads, sandwiches, and “world” bowls, many of which deploy fake meat, which I dislike — because it doesn’t taste like meat and the textures tend to be identical whether it’s a sausage or a cutlet. So I naturally beelined for items without it, and came up with this really lovely bowl ($15). It features firm tofu slathered with mole, poblano aioli, and tomatoey salsa fresca for a wallop of flavor. I even ate the coconut kale. Maybe bowls aren’t so bad after all.
The Yucatan Mayan at Plant Junkie.
Chicken yeero pita at Pita Yeero
This Greek chain — which seems intent on getting you to pronounce “gyro” correctly — produces a mean chicken gyro ($12.25). Get both yogurt and hot sauce, plus all the vegetables, especially the raw onions which give the conical sandwich zip. Most important, ask that french fries be deposited inside, for which there’s no extra charge. Huzzah!
Yes, the chicken gyro is very good.
Sausage and shishito pepper pizza at Kid Brother
This pizza was the best thing I ate at Urbanspace Union Square. The peppers have just the right heat and lubricity, the sausage reeks of fennel, and the crust is as good as it gets at small boutiquey pizzerias. Sit at the counter and enjoy this pizza of the day ($20), which reappears on a rotating basis. This is food court-style experimentation at its best.
Sausage and shishito pepper pizza.Look for the goat atop the stall.
Food Stalls
Bao by Kaya (Taiwanese dumplings and bao)
Casa Toscana (focaccia sandwiches from, ironically, Arezzo)
GoFish Sushi Box (grab and go sushi)
Pita Yeero (Greek gyro sandwiches)
Plant Junkie (vegan fake meat, mainly in bowls)
Twenty-One Grains (grain bowls and salads)
Playa Bowls (fruit smoothies and vegan bowls)
Goat Cafe (coffee bar offering filled croissants)
Summer Salt (fish and shrimp tacos and burritos)
Wafles & Dinges (Belgium waffles and ice cream)
Bobwhite Counter (chicken sandwiches and tenders)
Two Hops (boutique beer counter with snacks)
Kid Brother (pizza and pastas)
His first restaurant, Kuma Inn, became destination dining despite its location on what was then a quiet stretch of the Lower East Side.
King Phojanakong, who in the 2000s led the charge in bringing Filipino cuisine to the American culinary mainstream with his first restaurant, Kuma Inn — an impossibly tiny spot on the Lower East Side that quickly developed a passionate following — died on Jan. 2 in Manhattan. He was 54.
His wife, Annabel Nau-Phojanakong, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of granulomatous amoebic encephalitis, a rare disease that attacks the spinal cord and brain.
The son of a Filipino mother and a Thai father, Mr. Phojanakong was both classically trained and steeped in the home-cooking traditions of his parents’ native countries. His mother taught him to prepare Filipino comfort food like pancit canton, made with richly spiced noodles, and adobo chicken, the vinegary unofficial national dish of the Philippines. He made them his own by spiking them with some of the sweet notes found in Thai cuisine.
After studying at the Culinary Institute of America and working at top Manhattan restaurants like Daniel, Jean-Georges and Danube, Mr. Phojanakong opened Kuma Inn on Ludlow Street in 2003. (The name is a play on the Tagalog word “kumain,” which means “eat.”) It was only the second sit-down Filipino restaurant in Manhattan, after Cendrillon in SoHo, which opened in 1995.
The restaurant was difficult to find and, at the time, considered far off the city’s beaten gastronomic path. Tucked between two nondescript shops, a simple red door opened onto a vertiginous staircase that led up to the studio-size dining room.
“It felt like someone’s apartment; the room was dark and cramped,” the chef Neil Syham, a former owner of Lumpia Shack Snackbar in Greenwich Village, said in a phone interview. “But what I remember most is the smells that came out of his restaurant: the smells of fish sauce, Chinese sauces, soy sauce — those just smacked you in your face, and it just brought me back to Southeast Asia.”
The Kuma Inn kitchen in 2004. Mr. King used traditional Filipino ingredients like calamasi, a type of citrus, and coconut vinegar, but often added a touch of sweetness to his dishes, an homage to his father’s Thai heritage.Lars Klove for The New York Times
Mr. Phojanakong’s menu, built around small plates, was stocked with Filipino favorites like seared sausages and lumpia (which is similar to a spring roll). His cooking was detailed but unfussy. He used traditional Filipino ingredients like calamansi, a type of citrus, and coconut vinegar — though he was no purist, and he occasionally substituted Western ingredients like apple cider vinegar if he felt it would help the dish.
Occasionally he would push further, cooking foods that even many Filipinos find challenging, like dinuguan, or pork-blood stew, and balut, a partly fertilized duck egg.
“He had a really great palate and a really great sense of flavor,” Anne McBride, the vice president for programs at the James Beard Foundation and a longtime admirer of Mr. Phojanakong, said by phone. “He brought a subtle and balanced approach to flavor that created very people-pleasing food that you wanted to eat over and over again.”
Mr. Phojanakong was not just a pioneer in bringing Filipino food to the city. He was also one of the first chefs to trade the safety of a haute-cuisine career for the chance to explore their passion without a net.
Kuma Inn was a shoestring operation. Mr. Phojanakong and a friend did the décor. The music came from a CD player loaded with his own playlists. When the heat from the kitchen made the dining room a bit too toasty, Mr. Phojanakong cracked the fire-escape window.
The early 2000s were a time before social media, before Instagram influencers, before the rush of food-centered public relations firms, before buzz was something you could buy, back when word of mouth was literally just that.
Yet somehow word did spread about this garrulous, talented chef dishing the fiery, florid flavors of his mother’s homeland somewhere on the Lower East Side — though no one could ever quite explain where; you just had to look for it.
“To me that choice speaks volumes about King,” Nicole Ponseca, the former owner of the Filipino restaurant Jeepney and a co-author of the cookbook “I Am a Filipino” (2019), said in a phone interview. “It says, ‘My food is good. I think you’ll enjoy it. And I’m going to pick this obscure location on top of another obscure location knowing that you’ll find it.’”
Celebrities became regulars. So did many of the city’s young Filipinos. And aspiring chefs came to see Mr. Phojanakong do what had once been considered impossible: make the once-derided, even feared, cuisine of the Philippines friendly, approachable and hip.
“What was good about it was, he wasn’t pretentious about it,” said Amy Besa, who co-founded Cendrillon and is now an owner of the Brooklyn restaurant Purple Yam. “It was just good home cooking.”
Mr. Phojanakong outside Kuma Inn in 2017. Aspiring chefs came to see him do what had once been considered impossible: make the once-derided, even feared, cuisine of the Philippines friendly, approachable and hip.via Phojanakong family
King Phojanakong, a lifelong resident of Manhattan, was born there on Aug. 18, 1968, and grew up in Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, the sprawling East Side residential development. His father, also named King, owned a series of small retail businesses, and his mother, Zosima (Arceo) Phojanakong, known as Emma, was a nurse.
Along with his wife, he is survived by his parents; his children, Phebe and Eduard; and his brother, Paul.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1986, he studied at the State University of New York at Purchase and the City College of New York, but he did not graduate from either. He received an associate degree in culinary arts from the Culinary Institute of America in 1998.
In 2009, six years after opening Kuma Inn, Mr. Phojanakong opened Umi Nom, on the border of Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Like Kuma Inn, it was intentionally nondescript, located in a former laundromat whose awning still hung over the door. This time he focused on skewers, egg noodles and other Filipino drinking food — “uminom” means “drink” in Tagalog.
Mr. Phojanakong closed Umi Nom in 2015, and the pandemic forced him to close Kuma Inn in 2021. He pursued other projects: a pop-up menu in the basement of Jimmy’s No. 43, in the East Village, and more recently Cook Like King, through which he offered custom-designed cooking classes.
He was especially proud of Bronx Hot Sauce, a venture that bought serrano peppers from community gardens around the Bronx to make into a garlicky, fiery condiment.
“He wanted to invite people into the food,” Ms. Ponseca said. “He was using his skills, his memory, to invite them into whatever kitchen he was cooking.”
Vegetable yakisoba, kale and squash salad and more recipes.
Christopher Simpson for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
Good morning. The college football National Championship is tomorrow night in Inglewood, California, pitting the University of Georgia against Texas Christian University. I work and live in a Dawgs-rich environment, so there’ll be a lot of woof-woof-woofing going on. But at the start of the first full workweek of the year I’m not inclined to make a big production out of a dinner to accompany the game.
Instead, I’ll scratch that itch today and sic my crew on a big platter of Pati Jinich’s bricklayer-style nachos (above) for dinner and on Millie Peartree’s red velvet cupcakes for dessert.
Then, for the rest of the week …
Monday
Kay Chun’s recipe for vegetable yakisoba is simplicity itself. If you’d like to eat the stir-fry on the couch while you’re watching football, you can do it the traditional street-food way: piled into butter-toasted hot dog buns with a little mayonnaise and pickled ginger.
There are days, and Wednesdays are often one of them, when all dinner wants to be is a platter of Mark Bittman’s Buffalo chicken wings, classic ranch dressing and a beer so cold it has little flecks of ice in it. (I roast the chicken on a wire rack until they’re extremely crisp.)
Thursday
Ali Slagle uses almond butter to make a rich and creamy vinaigrette to anoint her kale and squash salad, and it’s a deeply satisfying vegan main dish. I’m not vegan, so I might sprinkle some crumbles of aged Cheddar over the top.
Friday
And then you can run out the week with Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for mapo tofu. (Yes, we also have a vegan version of the dish, from David Tanis.) Or if you’d like to end where we started, you could make Andrea’s recipe for mapo tofu nachos, which puts all that great flavor atop tortilla chips with cheese. Outrageous!
There are many thousands more recipes to consider this week on New York Times Cooking — and you can find even more inspiration on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Sally forth and see what you find.
You do need a subscription to read the recipes, though. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven’t already, I hope you will consider subscribing today. Thank you.
Reach out if you have trouble doing that, or if you run into a problem with our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. You can also write to me, though I can’t help you with technical matters and I can’t respond to everyone: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter I receive.
Now, it has nothing to do with strawberries, pork loin or the price of saffron, but if you haven’t watched it already (and perhaps even if you have!) you should make some time this week for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s absurd and gripping 2022 dramedy, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
This is extremely niche programming, but there is something absorbing about the terribly named reality television show “Battlefish” on Netflix, about a difficult season commercial fishing for albacore off the Oregon coast.
Finally, here’s Anne Sexton’s poem “Letter Written During a January Northeaster,” published in The Hudson Review in 1962 and just as suitable today. Enjoy that and then go cook something. I’ll return next week.
Vegetable yakisoba, kale and squash salad and more recipes.
Christopher Simpson for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
Good morning. The college football National Championship is tomorrow night in Inglewood, California, pitting the University of Georgia against Texas Christian University. I work and live in a Dawgs-rich environment, so there’ll be a lot of woof-woof-woofing going on. But at the start of the first full workweek of the year I’m not inclined to make a big production out of a dinner to accompany the game.
Instead, I’ll scratch that itch today and sic my crew on a big platter of Pati Jinich’s bricklayer-style nachos (above) for dinner and on Millie Peartree’s red velvet cupcakes for dessert.
Then, for the rest of the week …
Monday
Kay Chun’s recipe for vegetable yakisoba is simplicity itself. If you’d like to eat the stir-fry on the couch while you’re watching football, you can do it the traditional street-food way: piled into butter-toasted hot dog buns with a little mayonnaise and pickled ginger.
There are days, and Wednesdays are often one of them, when all dinner wants to be is a platter of Mark Bittman’s Buffalo chicken wings, classic ranch dressing and a beer so cold it has little flecks of ice in it. (I roast the chicken on a wire rack until they’re extremely crisp.)
Thursday
Ali Slagle uses almond butter to make a rich and creamy vinaigrette to anoint her kale and squash salad, and it’s a deeply satisfying vegan main dish. I’m not vegan, so I might sprinkle some crumbles of aged Cheddar over the top.
Friday
And then you can run out the week with Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for mapo tofu. (Yes, we also have a vegan version of the dish, from David Tanis.) Or if you’d like to end where we started, you could make Andrea’s recipe for mapo tofu nachos, which puts all that great flavor atop tortilla chips with cheese. Outrageous!
There are many thousands more recipes to consider this week on New York Times Cooking — and you can find even more inspiration on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Sally forth and see what you find.
You do need a subscription to read the recipes, though. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven’t already, I hope you will consider subscribing today. Thank you.
Reach out if you have trouble doing that, or if you run into a problem with our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. You can also write to me, though I can’t help you with technical matters and I can’t respond to everyone: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter I receive.
Now, it has nothing to do with strawberries, pork loin or the price of saffron, but if you haven’t watched it already (and perhaps even if you have!) you should make some time this week for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s absurd and gripping 2022 dramedy, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
This is extremely niche programming, but there is something absorbing about the terribly named reality television show “Battlefish” on Netflix, about a difficult season commercial fishing for albacore off the Oregon coast.
Finally, here’s Anne Sexton’s poem “Letter Written During a January Northeaster,” published in The Hudson Review in 1962 and just as suitable today. Enjoy that and then go cook something. I’ll return next week.
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