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I first met Quincy Taylor over on the west side of Crown Heights, where he and his crew (aka his literal family) were firing a slew of jerk chicken on a rogue sidewalk grill set up near Franklin Avenue.

Nothing too unusual about that; you see these smoky, cylindrical beasts all over the place in this neck of Brooklyn. And though I had just eaten way too much food somewhere else, for some reason I stopped and chatted with the amiable Taylor. Which is what led me, a week later, to the opposite end of Crown Heights for a feast at the family's year-old restaurant, Authenticity.

Like those sidewalk grills, steam-table spots such as Authenticity are a common sight around these parts, though quality can vary widely. So if you find a good one—and Authenticity is definitely one of those—you want to remember it. These no-frills joints, spooning out massive plates of saucy meats and rice, offer some of the best dinner deals in town. 

Taylor was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and told Hell Gate he learned how to cook from his parents. "We try to keep it authentic here in this neighborhood, with Jamaican flavor," he said. "But the type of food we cook is for everybody." 

The "medium"-sized jerk chicken plate, for example, comes with at least a half-bird's worth of smoky poultry, the skin sticky with fire-charred sauce, piled beside a mountain of well-seasoned rice and peas. This is top-tier steam-table stuff, especially after you squirt a bunch of jerk sauce over everything. 

And our second platter was even better, starring a mess of funky goat curry that paired shockingly well with a slab of chewy macaroni and cheese. I'm betting that Taylor's dank-looking oxtail would make a fine companion to the latter as well. The beef patty was decent, but I kind of wish I had ordered the cow foot soup instead.  

Other points of recommendation here include the chill but friendly vibe, the large cup of tart sorrel, the World Cup playing on TV, and the $6 lunch specials during the week. "I like feeding the people," said Taylor. "I like when they come and enjoy the food and they're happy. I put a smile on their face, and they keep coming back." 

Authenticity is located at 228 Albany Avenue, just south of Park Place, and is currently open on Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and on Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

To read all of our $20 Dinners around NYC, head over here.

Chef Jun Park used to work in fancy kitchens. Jean Georges, ABC Kitchen, Catch, the Mark Hotel—for the first decade or so after coming to New York City, these were the sorts of restaurants where Park learned how to cook, the art, the craft, the technique, all of it. 

Ultimately, though—even after opening his own successful (and very good!) ramen joint, Jun Men—Park knew he had to listen to his heart and follow his childhood culinary dreams. As he put it to Hell Gate: "Ever since I was growing up in South Korea, I have been absolutely obsessed with chicken." 

"When I moved to the U.S., I discovered Nashville hot chicken for the first time," he continued. "It was a revelation. Unlike Korean fried chicken, which delivers a slow creeping heat, Nashville chicken hits instantly. You can feel the kick. I was fascinated. I wanted to harness that spicy experience, but refine it, make it a little lighter, a little more balanced." 

Park debuted his Nashville-Korean hybrid fried chicken at the stellar Chick Chick on the Upper West Side in 2021, and he just unveiled a second Chick Chick at a new Midtown food court called Shaver Hall, which is pretty cool news for area office drones. (Based on last week's media-preview feast, it's one of the two or three best things there.)

Even more exciting—for me at least, because I'm rarely hanging around Fifth Avenue and 39th Street, and food halls are wack—is that Park also recently launched Lala Chicken in Chelsea, a counter-service spot slinging a tight menu of his truly excellent birds. "We brine chicken for 24 hours in buttermilk, and I use eight kinds of spices for the rub," he said. "Then I coat it with a blend of 70 percent hot oil and 30 percent clarified butter, for more flavor."

Chicken comes in three formats here, all of them big and bold and satisfying. The sando features a fat, juicy chicken breast bursting from two slabs of buttery Texas toast, with pickles, slaw, and a punchy white sauce adding crunch, acid, and relief from the heat. The slider option has all the same ingredients, but with everything stuffed between a potato bun. A side of Lala's decent crinkle-cut fries is the obvious add-on here.

Lala's biggest winner, though, is the mac and cheese platter, for which Park hacks up his chicken and piles it atop a mound of ultra-creamy pasta, with a generous portion of the sauce squirted all over everything. This is elite-level stoner/drunk food. If my buddy Tod and I had access to this stuff back in the 1980s, we would have never stopped eating it.

As at any good hot chicken spot, you can choose your level of heat here, from "no spicy," which has zero chili peppers, to "super spicy," which is infused with Carolina Reapers. I had both the mid-range "spicy" (with habanero) and the next-up "very spicy" (with ghost pepper), and both delivered plenty of zing without being overly dramatic.

Beverages include cane sugar sodas, sweet peach tea and lemonade, and a few very solid milkshakes. Park flipped his ramen place for Lala, and though the layout is basically the same (it's still pretty cramped when it gets full!), the new signage and branding is clean and bright, if a little heavy on random bits of Americana, like Coca-Cola and "the history of sneakers."  

Lala Chicken is located at 249 Ninth Avenue, between 25th and 26th Streets, and is currently open on Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Today is primary day, and Hell Gate reporters are already all over the city, staking out polling places, talking to voters, and taking the temperature of the various races. Here is our first dispatch of the day. Keep refreshing the link above to see the rest!

Hello on this soggy, muggy primary day! After the polls close at 9 p.m. tonight, we'll find out whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani has the political juice to launch a pair of democratic socialists into Congress, or whether New York's Democratic power structure still has the muscle to keep their turf.

Will the Mamdani-anointed State Assemblymember Claire Valdez win and represent the "Commie Corridor" in Congress? Or will Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, son of Los Sures, prevail in the race that has gotten increasingly nasty? (Also: Julie Wonspoiler alert?)

Can Darializa Avila Chevalier move past her own social media history and the racist attacks coming from her opponents to dethrone Representative Adriano Espaillat uptown? Or will $7 million in super PAC cash and an "anti-gentrification" narrative fend off the newcomer?
And what about the raft of Mamdani-backed state candidates? (And the DSA-endorsed ones he declined to support?) Oh and we can't forget Lander vs. Goldman, or Jessica vs. Jessica, or any of the important-but-obscure district leader races happening in Brooklyn that could determine the soul of the Democratic Party in Kings County. Want to read all our previous election coverage this cycle? Go here.

Hell Gate's live blog will be humming all day, as our reporters fan out across the city to talk to voters and keep an eye on the polling sites. Also, be sure to tune in tonight to Hell Gate's primary election livestream, starting at 8 p.m.!

UPDATE 8:30 A.M. | Jackson Heights

Down the block from PS 69 on 37th Avenue, canvassers supporting State Senator Jessica Ramos and a canvasser from 1199 SEIU, which is supporting her opponent, Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas, were arguing as they handed out leaflets to potential voters. 

"Steve Cohen is funding her campaign! She took money from him," said a supporter of Ramos, referring to the $850,000 that flooded into a super PACsupporting González-Rojas during the race's final days. (Cohen, the billionaire Mets owner who is in the process of building a casino next to Citi Field, has not responded to questions about whether he is the source of the dark money.)

"No she didn't," responded the SEIU member. "She didn't take the money. It's an independent expenditure, he can do what he wants with the money. He chose a side. Ask him why he spent the money, I only know why we endorsed her." 

One tangible impact of the late spending on the race? A deluge into people's mailboxes. A Jackson Heights resident told Hell Gate that they received nine mailers supporting González-Rojas just yesterday, and that wasn't including the ones from the Working Families Party, which also supports her. 

Despite the furor surrounding the casino, one 50-year resident of Jackson Heights was ready to turn on Ramos. 

"She embraced Cuomo, which determined my vote," said Fanny, referring to Ramos's endorsement of Andrew Cuomo during last year's mayoral race. "I don't know Jessica González-Rojas, but a lot of people I like are backing her."

Indeed, González-Rojas is supported by almost every other elected official in the area, including Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

For first-time voter Zinat, she was just happy to be able to cast a vote at all. She became a citizen last year. 
"I was so excited and everyone in there was so helpful," Zinat said as she held up her "I Voted" sticker outside of the polling site. "I already knew who I was going to vote for, so it was easy."

Who did Zinat vote for? She wasn't telling. 

In 2012, lightning struck a four-story apartment building in Crown Heights; the roof caught fire and the first three floors burned out. The second floor, where the playwright, composer, lyricist, and performer Heather Christian resided, was filled, floor to ceiling, with water. 

Christian was carried out of the building by a firefighter. One of her water-ravaged possessions was a piano purchased with six months' worth of crowdfunding money—she had sold an earlier piano in order to record her first album with her band, the Arbornauts—that had been delivered to her home just four days earlier. 

Making matters even worse for Christian was the unshakable feeling that she was somehow responsible for the blaze. "It was such a crazy time," she told Hell Gate. "I was like, oh—I brought this." But as it turns out, that violent and cataclysmic event forced Christian to reset her life and focus on her writing. In that sense, it was responsible for launching the career of one of the city's most captivating artistic voices. 

Five years after her building burned down, in 2017, Christian debuted "Animal Wisdom," her first evening-length show, at the Bushwick Starr. The show was recently resurrected at Signature Theatre, with Kenita R. Miller playing H., a role based on Christian herself. "Animal Wisdom" is Christian's theatrical memoir, a tour of the formative experiences and people that have shaped her and, in many cases, haunt her to this day. Among other key figures, we meet her grandmother and grandfather—whose souls inhabit a cardinal bird and her car, respectively—her opinionated piano teacher Doris, and her dashing godfather Myles.

The show is also a concert, séance, a therapy session, a gathering. Much of its score is the music of her upbringing in Mississippi: dirty blues chased with the holy water of gospel music, culminating in Christian's take on a Catholic requiem mass, with a community choir descending on the space and lending it the atmosphere of a house party. Attending one of Christian's shows is to suspect she would make a terrific cult leader. These are deep works—deep of feeling, deep of thought—overflowing with music and meaning, propelled by community and ritual and infused with the transcendent power of the human voice. 

The more I saw of "Animal Wisdom," the more I was put in mind of the Red Queen from "Alice Through the Looking Glass," who believes six impossible things before breakfast. The audience learns that Christian comes from a long line of musicians and mediums—she has mingled and conversed with ghosts all her life. Her dreams are loaded with portent and meaning. At one point, H. explains the connection between meteorological phenomena and spiritual possession. There are dozens of ghosts in the room right now, she says.

And yet, there's something about the space Christian creates in "Animal Wisdom" that compels the skeptics and nonbelievers in the audience to suspend their disbelief and get swept up. Ritual and collective catharsis feature heavily—in one moment, the audience drinks ceremoniously from cups of Coke. H. is so vulnerable, we can't help but lower our own defenses.

There's also the sheer irresistibility, for believers and non-believers alike, of getting a window into Christian's mind. "I'm motivated by curiosity," she explained. "I'm constantly researching and reading, trying to become a theoretical physicist for six months or trying to become a botanist for six months or, in the case of the show that I'm writing now, trying to become an ancient Greek scholar for six months. Each thing that you learn about has octopus tendrils to everything else that you've known or your life and how you're experiencing it." 

She added, "Inevitably, it's always reflective, right? I'm just a very reflective person trying to look for another lens to look at this world."

Christian grew up in a Victorian mansion in Natchez, Mississippi. As well as the ghosts, there was music, a lot of it: her father's blues records, a terrific sound system in the car, a pair of headphones gifted to her when she was three. "I started to live in those headphones. I remember viscerally discovering the music that made me feel like everything was magic or everything was safe," she said. She studied classical piano and sang in a children's choir until she got the boot for being too loud. She fared much better as a member of a gospel choir in a predominantly African American church as well as a cantor in the Catholic church. 

Christian's way of perceiving and making sense of the world was shaped by similarly disparate and eclectic forces. When she was in seventh grade she broke from her family's Catholicism—"Very early on there, I felt like I was harboring a nasty secret. And that nasty secret was, This is not working for me"—and became enamored of theoretical physics, connecting with the blend of science and Eastern traditions in "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" by Gary Zukav. She tried on aspects of different faiths, with science and logic in the mix. Sometimes the ideas were contradictory. "I think that that's led to where I am now, which is like: we all live in complexity. Carl Sagan was right. We are not meant to know the secrets of the universe and how and what she and her designs for us here." Her worldview is "kind of elaborate and labor-filled," she said. "But I'm looking intently for different possible answers to try and run through my body."

Christian came to New York in 2000 to study music theater at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. "The plan was to become a Broadway star," she said, laughing. It wasn't long before she transferred to the experimental theater wing, where she found the classes were a revelation. But when she graduated, she found there was no work for her as a performer. "So," Christian said, "I started to make my own." She wrote music for and starred in "Mission Drift," a musical about Las Vegas and the promise of American capitalism, among other projects.

But in the year leading up to the apartment fire and flood, Christian became wracked by crippling performance anxiety, suffering panic attacks on stage in which she thought she was dying. On the considered advice of a friend—a priest and medium—Christian made a shrine for what she calls the entity that was causing the panic attacks. It was an effort to make peace with it. "And a week later, lightning struck my apartment building and it burned to the ground," she said. In her already rattled psychological state, she really was tormented by the thought that her well-meaning offering had caused the blaze.

Christian's first phone call was to the company that had sold her the piano, who sent over a sort of piano emergency response team. The instrument underwent the equivalent of on-the-sport open heart surgery before being shipped to a warehouse to dry out.

And then? "Um, I lost my mind for a little bit." 

Christian moved back to Mississippi to do some healing. She went into therapy. Eventually, she married her best friend and they moved up to Beacon.

Then she turned her attention to her writing. "I was like, if I can't perform all the time, then I'm just going to really put my nose to the grindstone and figure out how to be the best writer I can possibly be," she said. 

What poured out of her was "Animal Wisdom." Christian conceived it as a work that would force her, as a performer, to push through her performance anxiety, while also allowing the writer-composer-lyricist part of her to do some serious excavation of her psyche. "It's part of why the lyrics are way more metaphorically saturated than they are in some of my newer shows. I was trying to fish something out of myself that maybe didn't want to be named explicitly," she explained. Christian initially wrote around 100 songs before whittling it down to songs she said "are magic—the ones that fell from the ceiling."

Christian doubted whether "Animal Wisdom" would find an audience, but upon its premiere it earned rave reviews—the New York Times called it a "truly one-of-a-kind opus." Her subsequent immersive and choral-driven works—"Oratorio for Living Things," a meditation of the cosmos, and "Terce: A Practical Breviary," a worship experience celebrating the divine feminine—were similarly lauded

The acclaim has been nice, Christian said, but she is still plagued by insecurities. For one thing, she believes she hadn't yet found her voice when she created "Animal Wisdom," even with all the evidence that audiences respond to the raw, unwieldy nature of the work. Being content with the fruit of her own art-making, Christian admitted, is a "lifelong exercise."

"I will just tell you that every single time that I put a show up, there's a moment after our last day of tech where I come back home and my husband picks me up from the train station and I just weep in the car," she said."I'm like, well, this is where I lost it. This one's a disaster."

It all seems to be working out OK. Among the projects Christian is working on is her first narrative opera, a feminist retelling of the story of Dido and Aeneas. Last year she was awarded a MacArthur Genius fellowship, through which she will receive $800,000 over a five-year period.

With hindsight, Christian now describes her apartment building burning down as one of the best things to have happened to her, saying that she "honestly can't imagine my life any other way." She meant her relationship and life upstate, but also the discovery of her ability to connect in such a profound way with audiences. "To hold the pen," she said, "is such a holy endeavor."

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We have but one question for New Yorkers who spent all weekend cheering themselves hoarse, hugging strangers, and roaming streets that echoed with Ja Rule's baritone and the explosions of bootleg fireworks.

Are you ready to do it again? 

On Saturday night, mere minutes after the New York Knicks clinched their first championship in 53 years and bedlam broke out in the five boroughs, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that there would be a ticker-tape parade to honor the Knicks on Thursday morning. 

The parade—which will be the first-ever for a Knicks championship—will begin at 10 a.m. near Battery Park and end at City Hall, where all the Knicks will be presented with keys to the city. 

"The team, frankly, reflects the city—the relentlessness, the drive, the hustle, the never-give-up," Mayor Mamdani told ABC7 on Sunday. "You look at the stories of each of these individual players, so many of them overlooked at different points in their careers. And Mike Brown built a team where every single player had a role. And even over the course of the finals, we saw different players show up for this team, show up for the city. And as a city, we can't wait to show up for all of them."

Mamdani himself was at a kind of dry-run for Thursday's salute: The mayor appeared with Knicks guard and Brooklyn native Jose Alvarado, and his San Antonio-raised teammate Jordan Clarkson, at Sunday's Knickerbocker Avenue Puerto Rican Day Parade in Bushwick. 

Why didn't Mayor John Lindsay honor the 1970 or the 1973 Knicks with a parade? Basically, he didn't feel like it. Kenneth Cobb, the deputy commissioner at the City's Department of Records and Information services, told the City Reporter that Lindsay "discontinued the ticker-tape parade celebration in favor of more informal receptions." Lindsay did give the 1973 Knicks "diamond jubilee medallions marking the 75th anniversary of the City's consolidation in 1898," which, in our judgement, does not replace the exultant feeling of being carried through the Financial District's Canyon of Heroes while millions of tiny pieces of paper flutter down from the sky. 

If this weekend's well-populated festivities are any indication, demand for space along the one-mile-long route will be high—higher, we hope, than the April 20, 1951 parade to honor General Douglas MacArthur. "The City's police commissioner estimated that 7.5 million people lined city streets," a City archivist wrote in a 2023 blog post. "If the crowd estimates were true, the New York Times calculated that 'would leave only 335,099 New Yorkers at home or at work.'"

Juneteenth, now an official City holiday, falls on Friday—what better way to kick off a long weekend than by watching Knicks center Mitchell Robinson drive his pickup truck with his teammates standing in the bed? 

One group of New Yorkers who may get left out: students who are scheduled to take the science Regents exams, which are being held on Thursday. Chalkbeat reports that some of them have started a petition to ask the mayor to move the parade, because, as one of the students argues, it's the parade that is the real exam, actually. 

"The parade is an educational experience in itself, rich with lessons about sportsmanship, history, and the power of dreams coming true," student Sebastian Crosa wrote. Give Sebastian an A++ in irresistible teenage sophistry.

Since the Knicks made it to the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years, a wave of '90s nostalgia has been permeating New York. It's 1999 again, and when the Knicks win, we're blasting Mobb Deep, Jadakiss, and Fat Joe. Wu-Tang Clan even played the halftime show during Game 4. It's as though the last three decades in New York City's culture are culminating in this moment—like every meme, dance, or fashion has been waiting to erupt out of our collective cultural memory. On Thursday afternoon, after the Knicks' miraculous Game 4 win, comedian Dan Yang called it "reverse 9/11." 

One newer track you've probably heard a lot is "Ever Since You Left Me," the song ESPN has been playing when they cut to commercials during home games: a family-friendly, Knicks-focused remix of a French Montana and Max B throwback featuring Remy Ma—all rappers who became local stars in the early and mid-2000s. 

"Ever Since You Left Me (Knicks Remix)," with its familiar sample and endearingly corny refrain of "more wins, more plays, more dunks," sounds like a turn-of-the-millennium summer. And if you, like me, love it when otherwise-unfiltered rappers are forced by a brand to do an uncannily family-friendly song, you might enjoy this squeaky-clean, almost Will Smithian remix, which is branded as an "exclusive collaboration" between French, Remy, Max, and ESPN. Instead of saying "I went deaf on a bitch," as French does in the original, he sanitizes the line to bleat, "I went deaf with the Knicks." Amazing. 

The original song, released in January, is built around a sample of KC & the Sunshine Band's disco classic "That's The Way (I Like It)," and was a reintroduction vehicle for French Montana's formerly-incarcerated bestie, the Harlem wave god Max B. For the Knicks version (as well as another remix, released on the hip-hop platform 4 Shooters Only), the trio posted up outside of the newly painted 34th Street subway entrance in a set of outrageously tricked-out, blue and orange Pelle Pelle jackets—another throwback. 

Nadeem "Daniel" Waheed, owner of Lower East Side luxury outerwear shop Daniel's Leather, told Hell Gate he's gotten 200 to 300 Instagram direct messages per hour since the video came out. The original jackets are a collaboration between Pelle Pelle and former Knick Allan Houston's clothing brand Fisll, but Waheed said that Remy Ma called him up to ask whether he could customize an oversized version into the cropped jacket and skirt combo that she's wearing in the video. 

"I said, 'Of course. This is Daniel's Leather; we can make anything happen,'" Waheed told us. "We took a men's jacket and cut it into pieces." Daniel's became a licensed dealer for Pelle Pelle around 15 years ago, when Waheed noticed the brand had all but "disappeared" despite its status as an ostentatious icon of '90s and '00s hip-hop fashion, and predicted it would come back into style. "I knew that our future customers would be the kids who used to be 14 or 15 at that time, when only the hustlers and the drug dealers could afford those jackets," he said. 

Now those kids are grown up, and reveling in the '90s and '00s nostalgia. And have they ever really gotten to have a moment like this? Have any of us? It's only fitting that Max B's long-awaited release happened just months ago. It's only right that Method Man is wearing picnic basket Timberland boots. Everything that's happened in New York in the last 27 years is happening again, all at once.

The menu at Maqluba, a comfortable, casual restaurant that opened about a year ago on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, is lengthy, varied, and ridiculously appealing. It's got Middle Eastern mainstays such as shawarmas, falafel, and all the familiar dips mingling with the likes of warak enab, or Lebanese grape leaves, and zahir be laban, a Palestinian stew of bone-in lamb and yogurt. You could eat here happily every night for a month, solo or with a crew, and not exhaust the possibilities.    

That said, if you can get a few friends to join you, you should make Maqluba's namesake dish a priority.

Chef Fatme, who hails from Lebanon, calls it Palestine's second most favorite dish (number one, she says, is mansaf, which she also serves here), and it's a beauty: a massive mound of rice, redolent with her special blend of seven spices—clove, curry, cinnamon, cumin, other secret things—as well as carrots, potato, cauliflower, eggplant and, if you want, large amounts of chicken, lamb, or shrimp. 

My rice the other afternoon lacked that lovely outer layer of burnt-crispness that I've seen in videos (Fatme was offsite doing a catering gig), but no matter what, the flavors in this dish are fantastic. Spoon on the accompanying labneh for a bit of gloppiness; the side of well-dressed salad provides a nice hit of acid. And the portion is enormous, with the "serves 1-2" size, pictured here, easily feeding four. Or, in our case, providing leftovers for days.    

It takes about 45 minutes to make the chicken maqluba properly, and longer if you want it with lamb, so it's really best to call and order ahead (929-699-3897) to avoid hangry impatience. If that all sounds like too much planning, or too much food, there's so much more that will also make you happy here.  

An excellent beef shawarma platter, for example, the meat tender and funky with a delightful hint of sweetness thanks to some pomegranate, added to our bounty of leftovers. And the fatta humus, essentially a bowl of tangy tahini and yogurt dip with pita chips already submerged therein, makes for a fun table share. 

Other options include several pressed sandwiches, a half dozen different "pizzas," a pile of skinny stuffed cabbages called malfouf, multiple kebabs and koftas, and an extravagant platter of ouzi lamb. There are plenty of vegan dishes from which to choose as well. 

Photos of most things are hung around the place if you need help deciding what to get, or you can just ask your friendly and patient counter person/server for clarification or suggestions.

Maqluba's co-owner Falah Badr, who moved here from Palestine seven years ago and is responsible for decorating the wall behind the counter that honors the people of Gaza, hinted at the deeper mission here. "We are happy to be a place that represents the culture and the food of the country I came from," he told Hell Gate, "and to share that with the people of Brooklyn." 

Maqluba is located at 7025 Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, near 71st Street, and is currently open on Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., and on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. 

In the jubilant haze of this steamy June morning, it is only natural to focus on the positive—the fact that the New York Knicks are one win away from ending a 53-year NBA title drought, or that OG Anunoby, our awkwardest and sweetest soldier, will never pay for a meal in this town again.

But to fully appreciate the scope and breadth of the Knicks' historic 29-point comeback against the Spurs on Wednesday night, New Yorkers must not forget the astoundingly putrid miasma that awaited the team before they even took the floor for Game 4, thanks to their jackass billionaire owner and his coterie of vulgar vampiric quarter-zips, who nearly doomed everything. 

Just hours before tipoff, Knicks owner James Dolan, who had the good enough sense to shut his giant-toothed mouth all season, broke edge and went on sports radio to pick a fight with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the NYPD over an aborted watch party that he himself canceled.

"I don't think they have faith in their own police force," Dolan told the two WFAN radio hosts, who sagely nodded their heads like they were interviewing George fucking Patton. "The mayor's office, and the commissioner too, do not have the experience to do this…They have never managed anything like this before. It's like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches coming out the sides."

Dolan added, "We're seeing a lot of fear from the mayor's office, a lot of anxiety. They're not Knicks fans."

When one of the hosts pointed out that the Mayor's Office had released MSG's watch party application, which showed that Dolan himself had only asked for a permit for up to 999 people, he dodged the question, offering up a kind of koan instead: "He gave us the right to screen 999 people and tell 20,000 people no." (Mamdani ultimately won the war of words and screens, calling Dolan out by name and airing the game at LinkNYC stations around the city.) Later, Dolan complained about the amount of security around MSG, which is a valid enough point except when it's coming from a man who reportedly oversees a literal face-stealing panopticon. 

As if picking a fight with the mayor of the city that allows you to operate tax-free in perpetuity hours before your team has a must-win game at home wasn't bad enough, Dolan went on to defend his decision to invite a sleeping Donald Trump to the Knicks' loss on Monday night.

"He was very much awake, very much engaged," Dolan insisted. "Whatever you think about him, he's a Knicks fan, and you know, people don't wanna hear this—I think he's a great guy. I've known him for over 30 years. Having him there was a great honor."

Not satisfied, Dolan went for the jinx: "I expect to win tonight. Speaking as if I make predictions here they come true, we're gonna win tonight and we're gonna win the Finals."

By halftime, the Knicks were down 27 points, as the cameras panned around the courtside seats to reveal a who's who of powerful, reactionary, soul-sucking human beings: Steve Cohen, Michael Bloomberg, David Zaslav, Jerry Seinfeld. Taylor Swift, who was rooting against the Knicks just a few weeks ago, donned her finest millennial cringe with the Haim sisters. The Wu-Tang Clan and 15 tons of burning sage wouldn't be enough to get us out of this jam.

And yet…it happened. THIS is what the Knicks overcame.

We'll let the conductor of our midnight J train have the last word. Sound up!

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The vibes were off at the beginning of Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Monday night, and there's simply no other explanation: just as we feared, the culprit was none other than Donald J. Trump.

Not satisfied with merely terrorizing our immigrant communities, imperiling and surveilling our transgender youth, and strangling government aid programs for low-income New Yorkers, the president had to barge into Madison Square Garden, shutting down multiple transit lines and a huge swath of Midtown in the process, just to fucking fall asleep in the middle of the first Knicks championship run since 1999.

On Monday morning, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch appeared alongside the head of New York's Secret Service field office, Matt McCool, to announce that there would be no watch party outside of MSG, due to heightened security measures necessitated by the president's visit. "The message is simple," Tisch said. "Celebrate the Knicks, but avoid the MSG area tonight if you do not have tickets to the game or some other valid reason to be there for the night."

The NYC Ferry system suspended its service as the president arrived at the game, just in time to inconvenience New Yorkers commuting home from work—or traveling into Midtown in order to, I don't know, enjoy the NBA Finals in the greatest city on Earth.

And from 4 p.m. onward, between Seventh and Eighth Avenue and 30th and 35th Street, the streets were closed off from pedestrian and vehicular traffic to everyone except Knicks ticketholders, commuters heading to Penn Station, and people "going to a business inside the area," funneling people through TSA-like security checkpoints. 

Although bars and restaurants within the secured zone were allowed to operate, Tisch said during the press conference that they would do so with "strict capacity limits," and warned that "if you plan to frequent one of these locations, you will need to be screened at the security checkpoint," adding that "if you leave, you will not be allowed onto Seventh or Eighth Avenue inside of the secure area"—potentially kneecapping businesses immediately around MSG for the night that had likely been counting on earning some of the $465 million local establishments expect to make from the Finals boom. 

In the hours leading up to the game, Madison Square Garden was surrounded by police and metal barricades in a security zone that extended from West 30th to West 35th Street, and three avenues to the east. People who paid tens of thousands of dollars per ticket were supposed to be able to enter from the east side at Sixth Avenue and 32nd Street. Some were let through, but once the crowds of deep-pocketed fans grew too large, the cops shut access down.

Mike Lopez, who bought a ticket hours before tipoff and flew up with his family from Tampa for the experience, couldn't believe it.

"All this for Trump?" he muttered. "This is such bullshit."

Lopez, who runs a stock company, said that the security measures "ruined the whole experience" for him.

"I was coming out here to experience Seventh Avenue with all the fans. I'm a lifelong Knick fan. And now, because of Trump, they're blocking it all off. It's selfish." 

Larry Prelli and Terri Winters, a retired couple from New Hampshire, tried to get into MSG at one of the access points at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue but were turned away by police. They said they paid around $10,000 for both of their tickets. "We're way up in the rafters," Prelli said.

We asked what they thought of the president being in attendance. Terri made a raspberry noise.

"I hate the president," Larry replied. "I loathe him. He ruins everything. He's a loathsome and evil man."

They were happier to talk about their favorite Knicks: Karl-Anthony Towns for Prelli, Mitchell Robinson for Terri ("First of all, he's super awesome," she explained. "And he has to overcome all his injuries and bad free-throw shooting. I just really like him.")

At 33rd and Sixth Avenue, roughly two hours from tipoff, a massive crowd of angry ticketholders began chanting "let us in!" 

Chris Ayala was close to the front of the barricades. He said his business partner had already gotten in. "Yeah, bro, I paid ten grand for a ticket to fucking wait around like a jabroni?" he said.

He added, "I didn't think it was going to be this bad. I was like, cool, I'm gonna go have some dinner, then I'll come meet you. I didn't think every block was gonna be at a standstill."

Ayala, who works in entertainment, said he and his business partner "had a really good month," so were able to afford tickets. "It was either resell them and get like, a down payment on a condo, or just go be a part of history. We're like, Yo, we gotta do it." But he thought that James Dolan should have insisted that Trump sit this one out.

"He should have told him like, 'No, sorry, you can't because you're gonna fuck up the entire city.' People can't even get home from work right now. I just watched like 10 fucking people come out of work and like have to walk 700 blocks."

We mused that the security might have been more intense than it was during the pope's visit to the city in 2015.

"It's definitely worse than the pope! No one's trying to kill the pope."

Inside the stadium, the game itself—excruciatingly close down to the final few seconds, we honestly don't want to discuss it, unless you're talking about Jose Alvarado leaping into former mayor Michael Bloomberg's lap—began with a nasty dose of DJT, who fans greeted with a raucous chorus of boos when he flashed on the Jumbotron, doing a stupid-ass salute in the middle of the National Anthem. 

Then, as the Knicks valiantly tried to hold off the Spurs, who benefited from referees' selective blindness to their blatantly absurd run of obvious fouls, the president proceeded to cozy up with Dolan (we told you so), doze off in the middle of the action, and then was finally carted off in his motorcade around 11:30 p.m., leaving hordes of pissed-off Knicks fans in his wake.

One friend of the blog, who managed to snag an invitation to Game 3 from a friend who's had season tickets since the 1980s, texted Hell Gate a video of the post-game chaos—showing a sea of angry people, corralled behind metal barricades, stuck at a standstill while NYPD officers paced back and forth and attempted to control the crowd from the cleared-off street.

"We were caged in this narrow passageway surrounded by NYPD," she said. "People kept getting mad because the cops were letting celebrities and off duty cops through. I got out at 11:51."

She added that inside the stadium, after the game ended, "people were losing their minds, talking about how the game was rigged because they can't let it go to a sweep... I can't believe all this BS so Trump could sleep at the game."

The end result of the first Finals loss for the Knicks wasn't pretty, and reports indicate that the heightened security measures probably made things worse. Twenty-one people were arrested at impromptu watch parties in the area, thanks to an NYPD response to Knicks fans that Bronx City Councilmember Justin Sanchez criticized in a statement to Gothamist: "There are ways to manage crowds that limit risks and remove bad actors and also allow fans to have fun," he said. 

A spokesperson for the Mayor's Office did not respond to a request for comment from Hell Gate about what Mayor Mamdani—also in attendance last night—had to say to New Yorkers upset at City resources being used to protect the president who cursed our beautiful boys in blue and orange.

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There’s no other way to describe it—the vibes have been immaculate in New York City. The New York Knicks, improbably and yet now very tangibly, are on the precipice of an NBA championship, only needing to win two more games against the suddenly cursed San Antonio Spurs.

Nothing could possibly throw off the extremely positive, somewhat frenzied energy that will pervade Madison Square Garden tonight, as the Knicks play their first NBA Finals game there in 27 years, right? 

Ah well, nevertheless.

Yes, the president himself is attending tonight's Game 3, apparently at the invitation of Knicks owner and Trump megadonor James Dolan.

His presence curdles the vibes in so many ways, though it serves as a timely reminder to Knicks fans (but not us, we've known all along) of what an absolute malignant piece of shit Dolan is, and especially, how much he generally loathes his paying customers. How much? This much:

Should we pity the poor finance bros who are paying upwards of $5,000 for the cheapest tickets on the resale market for tonight’s game? Certainly not—but even then, you have to sympathize with those who thought they were going to a basketball game, instead of an event with the general vibes of a JFK terminal.

Thanks to the president's attendance, the NYPD has put the kibosh on the recently revived watch parties outside of MSG. At first, Dolan said the cancellation had nothing to do with Trump, but the NYPD then corrected him by saying it absolutely did. (Mayor Zohran Mamdani has added a watch party at nearby Bryant Park. The mayor, who bought a ticket for Game 3, said Thursday that he "will be in a very different section of the stadium" from Trump.)

So while the Knicks do battle with the Spurs tonight, Knicks fans and New Yorkers at large will be engaged in spiritual war over keeping the good vibes going—because dammit, we deserve them. 

Will Trump be booed by the 18,000 fans forced by his presence to show up early, get their faces scanned, subject themselves to enhanced security, and deal with the presence of snipers and guard dogs, when they show him on the Jumbotron? Absolutely and lustily, no matter how much MSG pumps the organ to try to drown them out. No T-shirt toss will distract from the stink.

Who will prevail? We have a hunch: As the good poet said, Knicks in four.

Every week at Hell Gate, we highlight some of the best $20 or less dinners throughout the five boroughs. This week, it's Flushing's Xiaozhan Rice Noodle. For the full piece and all the delectable photos, head over to this link.

I admit it doesn't take much to get me excited about a new noodle restaurant—I've ruined more shirts than I can count over the years with splash stains. But when my buddy Mike recently put me on to a place in Flushing that specializes in a rice-noodle soup made with—WTF—passion fruit broth, I knew I was getting on the 7 train sooner rather than later. 

The restaurant is called Xiaozhan Rice Noodle, it's a narrow storefront that makes up for its small footprint by being as visually busy as possible, and almost every table was taken at around 3 p.m. last Friday afternoon. There have been reports of hour-plus waits during peak times, so plan accordingly.

And it's easy to see why it's popular! Xiaozhan serves up a killer lineup of pot rice noodles, so called because the soup is served in small-mouthed but deceptively deep clay pots. Each of the dozen-or-so varieties comes with an impressive tangle of slippery, springy rice noodles; slivers of bright pink, near-shockingly potent Chinese sausages; strands of tofu skin; crisp beans sprouts, scallion shoots, and other green things.

You choose your protein from thinly sliced ribeye, fatty beef, chunky bits of basa fish, or shrimp paste. There's also a sauce and fixings bar with add-ins like pickled root vegetables, black vinegar, cilantro, and chili oils of varying degrees of intensity. 

But Xiaozhan isn't really a build-a-bowl type operation, because each of the dishes—or, at least, each of the three dishes I tried—are totally different in character. The passion fruit sour soup, which I ordered with the fish, is a revelation, the bright and bracing broth an excellent counterpoint to all the salt and umami. 

There are four chili-based options: fermented, pickled, spicy oil, and charred. I chose the latter, which made my server nervous (it's the only one with a three chili pepper spiciness rating), but I have no regrets. Yes, it's fiery as hell, but it's also pretty fantastic. And it paired especially well with the fatty beef and the pickled veggies from the fixings bar.     

Our third bowl was the Sichuan peppercorn one, a punchy, delightfully numbing broth loaded with rib eye. Honestly I couldn't even tell you which of the three was my favorite, they were all so good. And it's easy to share everything too, because they give you small individual bowls into which you can ladle tastes of each from the pots. Truly a noodle party.

Other soup options include tom yum, fresh tomato, stinky tofu, and "three kinds of mushroom." For the broth-averse there's a dry-tossed rice noodle dish with black pepper sauce, as well as a bunch of Yunnan stir fries (mango beef, salted egg yolk with creamy  shrimp, honey spicy chicken) and snacks like crispy roasted quail eggs, creamy-center tofu chunks, and pork skewers. Bring a crew if you can. 

Xiaozhan Rice Noodle is located at 135-38 39th Avenue, between Main and Prince Streets, and is currently open from 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.