This year for my birthday dinner with friends, I decided for the third year in a row to drag everyone out to Elmhurst again, and this time, it would be for Indonesian food. There really isn’t any Indonesian food in Manhattan, and even if there were, it would be much more expensive than in Elmhurst. With our party of nine including tax, tip, and a lot of Thai iced teas, we managed to spend just $22/person on dinner tonight. For the amount of food we had, I doubt we could have had a cheaper meal anywhere else. That’s the thing when you organize a group dinner: you want a place that is affordable and isn’t going to make anyone feel poor after.

No one gets excited about Elmhurst, but I still do because of the variety of the cuisines and food, the low price points relatively speaking, and… well, this was my original ‘hood when I moved to New York City. So it feels comfortable to me, like another home neighborhood in my heart. Even though I’m not close to my cousin who is here in New York, he’s actually the reason I even considered this neighborhood in the first place because he lived here, and I feel like I got a more “local” experience because of that. Locals know and would consider living in Elmhurst; people who move to New York for the first time would never even be aware that it existed. And.. it’s kind of their loss because of how rich the culture is there. I’m proud to have lived there for my first four years in New York and have zero regrets.