Lily Chen keeps a spreadsheet with 1,400 entries. Each row is a restaurant, a food cart, a bakery, a noodle counter, a Filipino karinderya or a Salvadoran pupusería — somewhere in New York City’s five boroughs where she has eaten, paid, and filed notes. The spreadsheet is color-coded. The green ones are the places she’d take her mother. The red ones are the places she’ll never forget, for reasons that are not always flattering. The yellow ones are the ones she needs to go back to, because something felt like it wasn’t quite finished yet.

Chen was born in Flushing and raised in Bay Ridge — two of the most food-dense zip codes in any city in the world. Her father, a Cantonese immigrant who drove a cab for 30 years, introduced her to hand-pulled noodles and salt fish fried rice before she could read. Her mother’s family was from Shanghai via Hong Kong via Brooklyn, and the dishes that appeared at their table were a kind of edible autobiography. Chen grew up understanding that food is geography, that every kitchen is a story about where people came from and what they carried with them.

She studied Urban Studies at Hunter College, wrote her thesis on the relationship between immigrant food economies and neighborhood displacement, and began freelancing for hyperlocal publications before she graduated. Her “Eat the Boroughs” column, which she launched independently in 2018, became a cult favorite among food-obsessed New Yorkers who wanted real recommendations, not algorithmic suggestions. When NYC Restaurant Voice approached her to build out its neighborhood coverage, she brought the column — and the spreadsheet — with her.

“The best food in New York is never in the places that have publicists. It’s in the places where the owner’s grandmother still comes in on Sundays to make sure the sauce is right.”

Chen’s guides are built on legwork — actual walking, actual eating, actual conversations with the people who run the places she covers. She speaks Mandarin and Cantonese, reads Korean restaurant signs phonetically, and has cultivated sources across the borough food communities that most food media ignores entirely. When she writes about a Guyanese rotisserie spot in Richmond Hill or a new Bangladeshi sweets shop in the Bronx, it’s not discovery tourism. It’s reporting from a city she has never stopped studying.

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