Street Meat image by Daniel Krieger (dot com) via Midtown Lunch (dot com)

At this point, I think we can all agree that eating well on 50 bucks a week really isn’t that hard. Sure, there are challenges and we sometimes cheat, but if we are careful at the grocery store or farmers’ market and cook all of our meals at home, Adam, Cari and I have proved that one can stay fairly well fed while spending damn close to 50 dollars a week. They key to this success, of course, is the cooking-all-of-our-meals-at-home part.

So, what is one to do when traveling? Well, readers, I’m about to find out.

Tomorrow I take off for twelve days in the Northeast. While a few of those days will be spent at friends’ summer house (where my only “culinary” contribution will most likely be in the fermented form) I will spend another eight-point-something days visiting New York City. Eight days in a city that has, arguably, the best food in the world. Eight days in a city where I used to spend $15 on lunch alone. Eight days in a city where most of my friends—who I haven’t seen in months—live. Eight days in a city where, even when I had a kitchen there, I spent far more than 50 bucks a week to eat marginally well.

It’s not like I’m going to eat like a tourist and blow all of my money at the Times’ Square TGI Friday’s or consume over-priced, over-processed airport food. I will be couch surfing and can stash a few things in my friends’ fridges. And unlike most visitors, I know how to eat cheaply, and well, in New York. I lived there for nine years and so I am able to have a few cost-cutting measures in mind already.

For example: a cheap street meat Midtown lunch with my friend Zach is a given and I’ve talked another friend into taking me out for a fancy belated birthday dinner (for his birthday, even). I plan to stop by Red Hook for my first-ever meal cooked by Adam, and I assume—to keep things fair here—we’ll just divvy up the bill for whatever he cooks and each apply it to our own budgets. But even then, this leaves at least 20 meals for me to cover with a budget of about $70. I will probably swing by Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s for free samples, as well.

But these things I already know to be true: I will consume street meat more than once. I will have at least one Bergen Bagel (everything, toasted with cream cheese and tomato) and I will, undoubtedly, go out to many dinners with many friends, including one night (and one $10 vegetarian platter) at Calcutta on East 6th Street. I will have $12 chicken mole enchiladas from Tacos Nuevo Mexico in Park Slope and $8 Pad Thai from Ott in Greenpoint. I will have an expensive-but-well-worth-it brunch at Char No. 4 (thank goodness the four chipotle bourbon bloody Marys with house made pickles I will consume at that brunch won’t count). Luckily, one of my most-treasured friendships can survive solely on margaritas and free chips and salsa, so I’ll save a few bucks there.

Still, I feel a huge failure coming on. Because even knowing where to eat cheaply, sharing dishes and skipping a few meals doesn’t mean I can survive, as a visitor in New York, on 50 bucks a week. My friend Cathy Erway made a lifestyle of not eating out in New York because, as far as she was concerned, it was just too expensive. And she was right. Sure, if I eat every meal off of the McDonald’s Dollar Menu and supplement those with a few picks from the fruit and vegetable stand, I might be able to do it, but that’s not what I’m about and it’s certainly not what this project is about.

So I will do my best, full-well knowing it’s going to be damn-near impossible to eat well on $50 a week as a visitor in New York. But wish me luck, anyway, would you?

Oh, and tips, tricks and dinner invitations are greatly appreciated.