Visiting Madison, Wisconsin is easy. There are 20-30 really good restaurants and if you know someone there, you’re guaranteed a good meal. In New York, that doesn’t work. You need at least some parameters. There are, approximately, 300 million restaurants in the city and 75% of them are good.

If you want to make it easy on your host/friend/butler, give him something to go on. Here are some suggestions:

• Location: “I’m going to the Mets game on Saturday. What should I eat before the game?”
• Atmosphere: “My brother is hard of hearing, any quiet restaurants near Penn Station?”
• Cuisine: “I’m trying to eat a burger in every state. What’s your favorite spot?”
• Anti-cuisine: “I’d love to go out, so long as it’s anything but Indian; I had that last night.”
• Trendiness: “I cannot stand waiting in line or fighting for reservations. I just want a simple Italian restaurant.”
• Cost: “I just got my tax return. Take me to the best sushi in the city.”
• Time: “Let’s meet for brunch, but it’s got to be quick. I’ve got a shift at the Park Slope Co-op at noon.”
• Situation: “This is my first trip to NYC and I want to try your favorite spots.”

The more of these you have, the better. That being said, a good friend sent me an email asking for recommendations for tasty restaurants that don’t need reservations and aren’t too trendy. This was for a couple that never been to NYC. Because I love being a gastronomic ambassador, I occasionally ignored the instructions and provided the following list.

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A couple months ago, Andre and Amber of Simpleform brought us the delightful image and video sharing site that is MLKSHK. Seriously, it is one of my favorite things on the internet these days. For those of us who are dormant or infrequent or suspect photographers, it’s an easy way to share and explore visual content. If you need more convincing, I suggest you read Chris’ post.

One of my favorite light-browsing activities is clicking on photos from their @bestofmlkshk Twitter account. It’s consistently entertaining. Unfortunately, there is a lot of clicking and I often miss stuff. Instead of complaining, I made something.

This is BSTSHK, a prettier view of the @bestofmlkshk feed. I made it last week and I’ve been looking at it 3-4 times a day. I think of it as Stellar (I’ll tell you about that in another post) for MLKSHK. If you want to get a flavor for what people are posting and liking, you’ll like this.

For the nerds in the audience, I made this by hitting the Twitter JSON API, regexing a bit, and spitting it out to a webpage. Magic! Also magic, is that I made it responsive-ish. See below.