My senior project started with the essential question: How does culture affect and create the food landscape in the Tri-State Area? I believe my project definitely was focused around this question and was able to at least start to dig into it. The reason I say “start to dig into it” is because from doing this project I have realized that there is no possible way I can truly understand what makes one of the most diverse food scenes in the world what it is in the time span of this project. I feel that I was able to realize quicker than I expected that the number of different groups of people and types of food in New York was immense and that there was zero chance I was going to be able to try everything let alone even some of the largest represented groups of people in the city. I was also soon able to realize that I needed to rephrase my question from Tri-State Area to just New York for this reason. Although I was only able to dig into the answer to this essential question I feel that I was definitely able to get a sense of what the answer would be.
Through my senior project, I have found that the food scene in New York is almost solely made up of immigrants or descendants of immigrants. In New York, I have found that it is almost impossible to NOT be able to find a type of food and someone serving it. No matter where you turn in the city there is always a neighborhood or place that serves a different type of food. Something I also found interesting when looking for the answer to my essential question is that immigrants usually stick together and you can see this when trying different restaurants. Most of the places I went to were restaurants that in their area were also surrounded by other places serving the same type of food.
One thing I wanted my project to focus on was culture and I feel that I successfully was able to do that. The way I successfully did this was by actively going to the places I went to. Something I found when going to each neighborhood was that it almost gives you a little picture of what life in whatever country or place most people in the neighborhood you are visiting are from. For example, Chinatown in flushing doesn’t feel at all like you are in New York same with Little India in Jackson heights. The people living in these areas have brought aspects of where they or their families are originally from to New York.
I think I really had two main challenges when doing my senior project. The first challenge was sometimes finding a certain restaurant in a certain area. The way I decided to organize my project was by doing a different borough every week. While I definitely feel this was the right choice to organize my project so I wasn’t just going to different places randomly sometimes the constraints of the boroughs and places made it a bit hard to find the best place possible. Although this was a challenge it just took a little more research to find a place. I think going to a different borough every week also added a contrast which was very very helpful. I was able to see the differences between each borough and really travel all over New York City which I had never really done before this project.
The second challenge I had was staying on task with writing my reviews which was definitely a work in progress throughout this whole project. This senior project was the first extended period of time that I was almost completely on my own schedule. This meant that it was on me to stay on task and meet the expectations of my project. I can definitely say that a stayed on task with meeting the schedule that I created with visiting the different places I had planned on visiting. The one palace that took some time for me to get correct was writing the reviews. For me, I planned on doing all the reviews when I got home from the place I went to. While this happened sometimes I do wish I ended up doing that more.
The main thing I want my audience to learn when reading my website is what goes into the food scene in New York. I think from reading my website you can see relatively easily how many different people build up the food scene in which we eat in New York every day. Overall I think through my project I have been able to understand what food New York has to offer and in general what each borough has to offer.