The Best Fried Chicken in the Financial District is at Kyedong in the Hanover Square Cafe.

This is post one in my ambitious project to find the No. 1 anything in every single neighborhood in New York. I feel like not many people know about it, except for the amazing folks at Midtown Lunch who wrote about it here. Midtown Lunch is definitely going to be my cheat sheet for trying to find the BEST everything in Midtown and downtown Manhattan. I put Kyedong on the fried chicken list rather than "wings" list because they give you a few regular drumsticks and wings with your order. They're crispy, hot, sweet, juicy. They're everything you want. And they give you a TON, with fries. Just go buy them. Until they lose the belt, they're the champions of fried chicken in the Financial District.

Best Fried Chicken in the Financial District

Cafe Hanover (Kyedong Chicken Counter)

5 Hanover Square at Pearl Street

212-809-6808

Where Do I Find The Perfect ___ In The ____ Neighborhood In NYC?

I don't know about you, but I always find myself Googletating some form of that question. I work in Midtown, and I want to know where to find the PERFECT Chinese spare ribs within walking distance from my office.

That's probably because I have unhealthy obsessions for weird things like unauthentic, Chinese-American Chinese spare ribs, usually called "BBQ Spare Ribs" on the appetizer portion of a Chinese menu, and often making a second appearance under "Special Combination Platters," with some sort of letter combination like G-12 or something. (By the way, the picture on the left looks like it's of really good ribs in Midtown, but really it's of really crappy ones at a place in the Financial District. I'm just a superb photographer.)

Obviously, "perfect" is a relative word, but I find it frustrating that whenever I do the Google on a question like that, or even maybe something simpler like "Where can I find the best pizza in Murray Hill" or "the best Buffalo wings on the Upper West Side" or "the best burger in Bay Ridge," I just find a combination of the same question being asked by an AOL user in 2005, before the Internet was even invented, or just a congregation of 254 Yelp results sorted in whatever the hell way Yelp sorts stuff out.

In fact, and obviously I'm really frustrated by this or I wouldn't still be bitching about it, but I feel like even trying to Google "where are the best Buffalo wings in the entirety of New York City," you still don't get perfect results. God, I keep saying perfect.

Anyway, I feel like I can help with this problem. Why not try to answer these questions? I mean, it's always going to be a never-ending project, but why not at least put some effort into figuring out where to get the perfect everything everywhere in the city that always claims to have everything (except clean and succinct Google search results). So I'm going to try.

I already have a few of the answers: I genuinely feel like I know where to get the best soup dumplings and fried rice in Chinatown (Joe's Shanghai) or the best pizza in South Slope (Giuseppina's) and the best Halal food in Midtown (Famous 53rd Street or whatever the hell they call themselves, ON THE SOUTHWEST corner of 53rd and 6th), or the best Taylor ham, egg & cheese sandwich in the Theatre District (Starlight Deli, probably because you can't find that sandwich anywhere else in NYC sans two or three places), but I want a list that's somewhat exhaustive.

I feel like the most organized way to do this is to create food guides on one of my favorite sites, foodspotting.com, like I've done with the still-in-progress "Great Bay Ridge Pizza Experiment." I'll make guides like "Most Perfect Chinese spare ribs in NYC by neighborhood" and then when I find something I think is at least a contender, I'll add that photo. Then of course I'll blog about it here, and hopefully start coming up really high in the Google hits. The idea is to have ONE ANSWER and ONE ANSWER ONLY for every question. That's the goal.

By the time I'm 745 years old, maybe I'll Take The Check will be the definitive guide to where to get the perfect slice of average, soggy pizza in Washington Heights.

You're welcome!