The Joy of Sports Bars. And The Knicks.

Review: Cariñito's porky tacos from Mexico City, slices from Roberta's, and a short Cheat Sheet on where to eat around Penn Station

May 13, 2025

Today’s column on sport bars is free for the next day or so. If you’d like to access our Cheat Sheets, like The Budget Steak List or The Sandwich List, kindly subscribe!

Rhapsody in Blue...And Orange

Eric Adams is still our mayor. Andrew Cuomo is still running for office.

Good pizza goes for five bucks a slice. Good pastries sell out before you wake up.

Your Citibike ride to the East Village could cost you, like, $9. And your rent-regulated apartment could get a serious price hike later this year.

But hey. At least Jalen is sinking threes to give us a 2-1 lead in the NBA playoffs.

When it seems like New York is out to get you, the therapeutic power of sports is a godsend. When the sh!t is literally falling from the sky, the Knicks always seem to rally in the fourth.

More than a few folks will be at the Garden tonight for game four. Bless them. My budget’s a bit tight, so $713 for the nosebleeds is even less practical than a front row seat at Sushi Sho.

I’ve always preferred watching sports from a bar anyway. The admission is free. The staff doesn’t cut off the keg lines when the fourth quarter starts. And if the people next to you at The Garden are losers — during the “Linsanity” era, I sat behind teenagers screaming out crude penis insults — remember that there’s no assigned searing at your local watering hole.

Sports are good. Bars are good.

And more often than not, sports bars are quite good too.

So what makes an ideal sports bar?

Excellent question. It should be close to you. And it does not need to self-identify as a sports bar. But ideally, it will meet most of the following criteria:

The local game should be playing by the time you get there. You should not have to negotiate with bartenders to change the channel from a UFC fight.
The kitchen does not need a Michelin star, but you shouldn’t be angry about what you ate. Especially if your team loses. Let’s keep sacrifices to a minimum.
The bar should attract informed patrons and staffers. If someone walks in late and asks what happened, it is your civic duty to fill them in on relevant injuries and bad officiating. Without educated voters, there shall be no democracy.
There should be sufficiently large and plentiful TVs to prevent crowding at one end of the bar. But flatscreens shouldn’t be so numerous as to overwhelm or distract from lively conversation.
It should remain open until the game is over.

My go-to sports bar for over a decade was Tracks, a subterranean hangout in the old Penn Station. The kitchen put out a decent lobster roll. The Irish bartenders poured heavy drinks. And wherever you were sitting, TVs were close enough. But your joy was fleeting. Because your train to Long Beach was leaving in 13 minutes.

The lesson of Tracks was that your time on earth is short, so enjoy that double gin & tonic and pay attention to Mariano’s slider before he retires.

Ever drop by P.J. Clarke’s for a burger and a beer?

Great bar. But not a sports bar. At least not most nights. Not enough televisions. Not enough people paying attention. Yet for game seven of the Cubs-Cleveland World Series in 2016 — the greatest baseball championship ever — the Lincoln Center P.J.’s was packed like a Times Square sidewalk. Management killed the jukebox and blasted the game through the sound system. P.J.’s was more than a sports bar that night; it was like being at Progressive Field. And somehow, bartenders kept up with the beer.

You needed alcohol after Aroldis Chapman blew the save.

My favorite sports bar isn’t in New York, as it happens. It’s in Los Angeles. It’s called Pijja Palace. It serves Indian pizza, tomato masala rigatoni, and achaari wings. Maybe not what you’d expect, and that’s the point. The crowds there suggest that sports bars — havens of generic wings, overcooked burgers, burnt chicken tenders, and nachos — are underestimating what people actually want to eat.

That’s not to say Pijja Palace is perfect; there are too many TVs. A dystopian number of flatscreens. Eating there is a little like dining inside a Vegas Casino doing its best impression of a Best Buy — while still managing to be pretty and breezy in a SoCal way. So be it. I’d trade half the Knicks bench to get a Pijja Palace in New York.

I’m a super loyal sports fan.

These days, I like to catch at least some of the game at the new Roberta’s above Penn Station, the shiny Midtown outpost of the quirky Brooklyn pizzeria.

Is it objectively the best place to watch the Knicks? It is not.

Roberta’s shutters at 9:00 p.m. and the open-air rooftop sometimes shuts down for private events. But somehow, this is where I want to be — right next door to Madison Square Garden.

Two televisions behind the bar show sports, and chance are, at least one of them will be playing the Knicks. Bar coasters come in Knicks orange and blue. As they should. This is our city’s flag in the spring (in October, it switches to pinstripes).

From the rooftop, you can see fans in jerseys streaming into the garden. You can see giant digital billboards for…gambling (“bet the Knicks all season long”), and for Disney Abu Dhabi.

Lol, let’s move on.

The cacio e pepe is a good decision at Roberta’s, as are the full pies, but the best move is to pick up some pizza downstairs from R Slice and bring it up to the roof.

Yes, these are five dollar slices, but you’ll know where that money went once you try’em. Tomato slices, as light as crackers, smack of good olive oil. And best of all the is the Fire & Ice, a warm white slice dripping with cool stracciatella and ‘nduja. It is everything a classic pepperoni pizza wished it were. Order a hazy IPA to go with and you have yourself a light meal for $30 after tax and tip.

And if you peer down below, you’ll see a few hundred folks watching the game on two large outdoor screens, at the Penn District pedestrian plaza. A sea of blue and orange at dusk. Sunset on the street.

Or you could just swing by the new Tracks, on the opposite side of The Garden. A place where I can ask any stranger to fill me in on what I missed. Remember, a sports bar isn’t a quiet chef’s counter or luxe bistro where people mind their own business.

A sports bar is a pot luck of opinions, a haven for whiskey-fueled arguments about coaching and benching. It’s a place to feel less alone when you’re away from home, to connect with like-minded fans (or break bread with the enemy) when you don’t have cable (who has cable anymore?). It’s a place to get a dopamine high of collective cheers (or condolences), a place to keep falling in love or getting your heart broken…over something which you have absolutely no control.

Sometimes, I wish restaurants felt a little more like sports bars.

Sometimes, I wish sports bars had better food. Especially for vegetarians.

But for now, let’s be grateful. Let’s remember that Jalen, like The New Pope, went to Villanova, as Father Spike reminded us. And good Catholics know that watching a New York sports team beat up on Boston heals all.

So order a slice and eat some wings and enjoy the wins while they come.

Let me know what your favorite sports bars are in the comments!!!

Perhaps I’ll do a “where to eat in and around” Penn Station guide one day. For now, here’s the quick version:

Go to Roberta’s for slice pizza. You can skip Rose’s.
Alidoro at Moynihan serves really good Italian sandwiches on the fly.
Do you really want ramen? Go to E.A.K.
The Los Tacos No. 1 next to Roberta’s is as excellent as any location and you’ll get in and out fast. Go for the al pastor or get some steak tacos.
For something fancier, take a stroll toward Manhattan West for Zou Zou’s or to Hudson Yards for sliced steak and Nikkei fare at Papa San.

Cariñito Arrives in the Village — For Six Months

It’s a good time to be eating tacos in New York.

One big reason is size.

A new crop of taquerias inspired by Mexico City are using modestly sized tortillas. They dole out fillings with prudence, instead of abundance. And while there’s no one single way or rule or make any dish, I’ve long believed the following:

Smaller tacos are better tacos.

A compact tortilla facilitates quicker eating; it lets you enjoy the warm corn at its prime. And lightly applied fillings produce a better ratio of meat to masa. At a sushi spot, you wouldn’t want eight slices of bluefin over a single mound of rice, would you? Let’s treat our tacos with the same respect.

New spots like Carnitas Ramirez showcase these sensibilities without any headlines or pomp. Their smartly portioned tacos are simply part of their DNA. This is also the case at the brand-new Cariñito in Greenwich Village, a Mexico City import that serves at least one extremely delicious taco.

What follows are a few thoughts from a single visit.

Cariñito — with permanent locations in Río Lerma and Roma Norte — has been on a global streak of sorts, having hosted pop-ups in London, Paris, Singapore, and elsewhere, Time Out reports. The New York location is the first U.S. location, and it’ll remain open for six months or so, per the Times. The airy room, in the old El Cantinero space, is decked out in handsome green tiles and exposed bricks. On a recent evening, a handful of Spanish speakers who are cooler than me sat outside with tacos, drinking red wine and smoking cigs. How Parisian.

The menu, like in CDMX, toys around with Southeast Asian flavors.

Take the “Issan” taco, an ode to the incendiary meat salads of Northeastern Thailand. The kitchen takes a little shredded pork belly and seasons it with chicharrón, rice powder, and herbs. Does it taste like a classic laab? Yeah, it actually does. The tender pork screams with the sharp, grassy flavor of mint. Chiles sting the tongue with a heat level that’s a solid “six” on a scale of 10. And yet the tortilla’s clean corn aroma still comes through clearly. The flavors are loud, and it could use a little lime, but the taco is brilliantly balanced. You could eat the whole thing in three bites, maybe four, max.

Cariñito also gives us its own take on some classic New York dishes.

Consider the pastrami taco, named after a famous line in a Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron rom-com; I won’t repeat it because the phrase been endlessly commercialized and bastardized in the decades since.

Proper pastrami can taste of sweet hickory or oak. But at Cariñito, it’s as if the chefs seasoned the meat with one of those cheap smoke guns that dumb cocktail bars use for overpriced negronis. The scent recalls the noxious aroma of artificial wood chips. It overpowers the herbs and Chinese mustard that come with. No good.

There’s also a “cantones” taco. Call it a nod to Peking duck. Cariñito overstuffs a big flour tortilla with “eight-spiced” pork belly, pickles, and a flood of hoisin. A typical Chinese duck wrap achieves a woozy balance of fatty waterfowl, crisp skin, and sweet sauce, but this taco tastes overwhelmingly of sugar.

Stick with the Issan for now. I’ll try to get back here and test drive the “cochinita Thai” and the “eggplant Laos,” but really, a single great taco from a pop up is a feat. Flaws notwithstanding, I’m impressed. 86 University Place, Greenwich Village

Here’s Robert Sietsema, with a different take on Cariñito’s pastrami taco!

I should be back around this time next week, most likely with a multi-visit review I’ve been working on. Unless I decide to do something else! I often pivot from my editorial calendar (yes, I always have a plan!!!) due to a variety of factors, including the state of the world and what fellow critics write about.

Go Knicks!!!