I washed up at Joe’s Pizza for the first time four years ago, after I’d been suckered into going to Misshapes. (As we pushed into the party and I saw a barely-twenty-year-old girl with Weimar-era makeup and a sculptural Isabella Blow-ish hat/mask covering half her face I understood why the doorman had looked at our outfits and pronounced us tragic). The thing about feeling ridiculously old and unfashionable at 25 is that you still have the stamina to drink and dance all night, or at least until you feel start feeling pretty damn good. Still, certain worries edge this pleasant little mood you’ve blundered into–it’s so late, I’m so hungry, everything is closed, I’m so hungry, where the hell am I going to eat?

Joe’s Pizza at 4 am glows like a molten cheese bubble in the strange afterhours dark of the closed-down city. A glittering, laughing, sweating, exhausted cross-section of nightlife clings to this oasis, and spills onto the waiting sidewalk, held upright by booze and the smell of baking pizza. Unlike pizzeria of the moment, Artichoke, whose counter people serve with a slowness that seems lackadaisical or sadistic, depending on how hungry you are, the service at Joe’s is brisk. Orders are asked with a glance as a fresh pie is spun into slices that are scooped, drooping onto paper plates exchanged for cash–fast, fast, fast. If you’re lucky enough to snag a fresh mozzarella slice right from the oven ($2.75), go for it. The regular slice ($2.50) is good too, with sweet tomato sauce, the right balance of cheese and a thin, chewy crust that’s got a teeny bit of burnt crispness. The crust, however does not hold up for long, so the slices are best eaten HOT and immediately–and if you happen in at a slower time, it’s worth the wait for a fresh pie. There’s little to no seating to be had, but there’s benches in Father Demo Park across the street.

Since that evening Joe’s has been my go-to spot when I’m in the area at some unseemly hour, looking for a little comfort at the tail-end of a long night.

Joe’s Pizza 7 Carmine Street Open every day 9 am - 5 am

I never tasted a bialy before I lived in New York City. Even in New York these cousins to the more-mainstream bagel are hard to come by. Try to find a good one and most likely, you’ll end up standing at a certain spot on Grand Street, where trendy Lower East Side melds with Chinatown and overlooks a grim shoreline of projects. Here stands Kossar’s Bialys, the remaining stronghold of downtown’s vanished bialy-baking industry.

Inside it seems like little has changed since they opened seventy years ago. Behind a simple counter stand a few wire racks piled with warm bialys, bagels and bulkas. Across a powdery floor, trays of dough placed in tall racks await their turn in the brick oven, whose depths are plumbed by a lone baker with a pole. Seating consists of a bench outside, with an old guy already sitting on it.

But atmosphere isn’t the point–this place is all about bialys. While bagels are boiled rior to baking, rendering their crusts hard and shiny and their innards dense, bialys are simply baked, leaving them lighter and airier, but still chewy and delicious. Instead of a center hole they have a dimple filled with sweet chopped onion. Kossar’s doesn’t toast, so if you do some at home you’ll find even more flavor unleashed, especially with a thin layer of cream cheese or butter spread over top. If you haven’t been for a while, steel yourself for sticker shock–the price of a bilay has skyrocketed from sixty to ninety cents since the halcyon days of 2006. Don’t tell them but I’d probably pay more.

Snack spots, even good ones, come and go quickly in this hood, and I don’t tend to get too attached (witness, if you will, the Chase Bank that was once the venerable Second Avenue Deli). Although the reflex sentiment toward gentrification is dismay, I don’t think shrugging off the past is necessarily a bad thing (now scheduled for demolition/cries of protest–the funeral pyre-ish tower of bedraggled toys on Sixth Street and Avenue B–good fucking riddance). But, ye Manhattan gods! Leave us Kossar’s Bialys! Someone make this a designated landmark of snack before it’s too late!

(shot of the Tower of Toys on East Sixth Street)

Kossar’s Bialys 367 Grand Street at Essex Street. Open 24 Hours Sun-Fri. Closes Fri at sundown. Closed Saturday. REPEAT: Closed Saturday!! If you forget and head down on a Saturday, don’t worry. Donut Plant is a couple doors down, and is worth a visit.

The pizza at Alligator Lounge might just be a miracle of modern budget boozery, because no one can quite figure out how it’s free. Well, it’s not exactly free—you must purchase one drink, at about $5 a pop, to get a free pizza ticket. Once you’ve completed this task, you simply march up to the brick oven, and present your ticket. If you want toppings, it’ll be $2 for the first and $1 for each additional. But assuming you don’t, in about ten minutes you’ll have a piping-hot 12-inch pie to accompany your beer at a cost of ZERO DOLLARS (but if you’re classy you’ll leave $1 for your pizza guy).

How? How is it possible? Because the pizza actually isn’t half bad. True, it tastes better when it has some liquor to soak up in your belly. And you might want to blot the grease with several napkins and go heavy on the crushed red pepper and oregano to give it some extra taste. Better yet, you might want to carry along your own personal pizza spice-rack, with plenty of fresh basil, for just these kinds of situations. But if you spice it up just right and be sure to eat it fast before the cheese congeals—this is the miracle of which I speak.

The ambience is, I think, cheesy-tropical: potted palms and bamboo shades, flamingos and rainbow lights, with a decent digital jukebox and a pool table. In other words, it’s a perfect late-night hunger fix (until 3:30 am), or a place to get the party started before moving on to some serious drinking at Spuyten Duyvil.

If you don’t feel like hopping the L, there’s even an East Village outpost. And while I don’t advise this, if you can handle two pizzas, you get another free one with your second drink. Of course, this place does draw a crowd. I’m even a little reluctant to spread the word. Beware the crapshoot that is comedy Tuesdays.

Free Pizza!

Brooklyn: Alligator Lounge, 600 Metropolitan Ave. at Lorimer St. Open Daily 3pm-4am

East Village: Crocodile Lounge 325 E 14th St. at First Avenue Open Daily 12pm-4am

If there’s one thing California transplants assure me of, it’s that you can find tastier, more authentic tacos all over the place out West. Having lived on the East Coast my entire life, it was only a few months ago that I began to feel that a neighborhood taco stand might be as necessary as a coffee shop and a pizza place. I probably couldn’t have dreamed up a better fix than Snack Dragon.

Perhaps starting out in an actual shack slapped to the front of a deli on Avenue B helped the Dragon narrow its focus to perfecting its food. Now installed in a cozy storefront with a takeout window on 3rd St., Snack Dragon still offers tacos with fresh ingredients made on premises, in five varieties: carne asada, pollo verde, carnitas, quinoa (veggie), and fish. The carne asada taco ($4) is usually my pick—marinated steak and black beans topped with salsa, sour cream, and monterey jack, seasoned with cilantro and lime, and folded in a blue corn tortilla. For the price it’s not a huge amount of food, but is definitely a more delicious option for soaking up booze than a gooey slice of processed cheese.

Another important point, Snack Dragon is open until 4 am on weekends, although they do seem to close earlier from time to time. And while I don’t know how Snack Dragon stacks up to a Californian’s jaded palate, there’s something that seems a little transplanted and quite a bit comforting about it, when found aglow in the wee hours, serving up fresh tacos to an indie rock soundtrack.

Vidocity visits Snack Dagon back when it was a shack.

Snack Dragon Taco Shack 199 E 3rd St. at Ave B.
Usually open by 6 pm, until 1 am; 4am Fri and Sat