Exploring New York’s Best Cheap Eats with Wiki

This summer, on an intensely sweaty night at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, the rapper Wiki started a chant. He began slowly, his twisted syllables gaining in speed and intensity, soon passing them back and forth onstage with his co-headliner Your Old Droog, who screamed them like a religious mantra until they were chanting in unison:

“Mayo lettuce onion pickle pepper cheddar honey mustard mozzarella jalapeno sausalito turkey on a roll!”

Soon, stagehands passed out foot-long sandwiches to the raucous crowd. Fans took a chomp and passed them down the line before jumping back in the mosh pit; after they left, shreds of lettuce and cheese scattered the floor, ground up by Jordans and Timbs.

There are few young rappers who embrace New York—its aesthetic, history, and mythology — as fervently as Wiki. Through 16 dense songs on his critically acclaimed debut album for XL, No Mountains in Manhattan, he skillfully mimics and transcends the city’s 1990s halcyon boom-bap era. He paints vivid tales of riding the subway, setting off firecrackers in Columbus Park, and smoking weed at the Apollo, slipping in shout-outs to Elaine Benes and Clyde Frazier. And most centrally, he rhapsodizes about the city’s food. If Jay-Z had the Lexus and Nas had the Tec on the dresser, Wiki has the deli sandwich. The complexity and interplay of its layers and textures signify everything Wiki loves about the city: its hustle, humility, and diversity. And with every food reference, Wiki plants a flag for his New York, screaming back against the homogenized, corporate version rapidly taking its place.

“Let me get that bacon egg and cheese right quick, look/I flip it today’s paper/Cadence making deli life entertainment” (“Made for This”)

I’m sitting with Wiki at the Mott Corner deli in Chinatown, a few days after the release of No Mountains in Manhattan. I’ve told Wiki he can pick any restaurant he wants, and on our walk over we pass a string of sleek, trendy, and surely delicious spots with names like The Butcher’s Daughter and LuAnne's Wild Ginger All-Asian Vegan. But delis are Wiki’s home. They are the first place he goes in the morning—usually for a bacon, egg, and cheese—and the last stop after a night out. They’re the site of his drunken brawls and quiet dates; one even became his daily bathroom outpost when his own apartment’s facilities broke last year.

Plenty of rappers have plunged headfirst into the food game, imbuing gourmet culture with their rowdy enthusiasm—most notably, Action Bronson and Snoop Dogg. But while these rappers delight in shaking up hallowed culinary spaces, Wiki takes a different approach by staying resolutely at the street level. “I’m not really an expert on food. I just like regular shit,” he says as we dig into the deli’s spicy special sandwich, one of his go-to meals in the area: shredded chicken cutlet, jalapenos, tomato, cheese, and lettuce on a roll. It stings pleasantly, the heat tempered by our 24-ounce bottles of Corona. It’s here that Wiki shot the music video for “Pretty Bull,” the album’s gleeful, teetering first single. In the video, Wiki dons an apron and works the fryer, serving sandwiches to his friends; later, he packs the tiny corner store full with revelers, sheds his shirt and jumps up onto the countertop to dance. “We were like, ‘Yo, you can take any beer you want.’ Everyone was immediately loose off it,” he recalls. Today, the deli staff gives knowing nods to Wiki and appears pretty blasé about the beer spraying, toilet paper throwing, and blunt smoking that ensued in the tiny confines. “We gave them some bread. They were down,” Wiki says with a shrug.

“I like the 1 train, bagel and lox/Crushing the mic like the sunset on the Hudson” (“Islander”)

Wiki, born Patrick Morales, grew up on the Upper West Side savoring his Puerto Rican dad’s rice, beans, and tostones, not to mention the neighborhood’s bounty of bagels. “The bagel and lox is more nostalgic,” he says. “Christmas morning, me and my mom, we always had the everything bagel and lox. That’s the tradition.”

After school, he rose the 1 train up and down Broadway, writing bars, searching for some weed or a bodega that would sell alcohol to minors. He now lives in Brooklyn, and his music is tailor-made for the subway experience: dense, claustrophobic, clattering, with menacing elements popping off at unexpected moments. We start a debate about the ethics of eating on the train, centered on a scuffle he recently witnessed between a sloppy halal eater and an outraged newcomer who attacked him. “Most New Yorkers are just like, ‘All right, this dude is a douchebag but we’re gonna go on with our day,’” he says, laughing. “I’m not gonna call out a guy for dropping some food. I’ve done worse.”

“Dinner way past due, we out to Noodletown/Suckers move on down/All my hustlers move a pound, do it now” (“Chinatown Swing”)

We walk down the Bowery and step into Great NY Noodletown, its garish, stained yellow sign concealing the careful craftsmanship within. A waiter gruffly bumps off a few single patrons to make room for our crew of five, which includes Matt Lubansky, Wiki’s manager and frequent video director, and the rapper Slicky Boy. The waiter smacks down a kettle of tea and proceeds to pour some right onto the glass counter to clean it with a rag. Wiki looks delighted.

“If you’re in Chinatown, that’s how you want it to be. You don't want no one catering for you,” he says. “They want you to be in and out, like, ‘Let’s get this motherfucker out of here.’” He spent most of the year living down the block, writing his album, partying at pop-up raves in dim sum parlors, observing and then adopting the breathless pace of its inhabitants: old ladies selling crab claws next to chiropractors next to bilingual law firms. “That’s the whole vibe of Chinatown: No matter what it is, someone’s hustling.”

The food arrives family-style: soft-shell crab, with claws that crunch satisfyingly and then melt away, plus filling heaps of roast pork over rice and beef chow fun along with bottles of Tsingtaos. It’s bustling at 9 p.m. and will be until 4 in the morning, when the owners close shop. “This is a good spot when it gets kinda late,” Wiki says. “After a show I’ll be like, ‘Fuck it, let’s all come and get that round table and feel like Wu-Tang.’”

“Went home to my baby girl in her lavish loft/The best is when she cheffing pork chops and applesauce” (“Leppy Coqui”)

In 2015, during the recording of his first mixtape, Lil Me, Wiki was plagued by an ulcer that left his appetite weak and his energy low. “I wasn’t eating as much and I used to drink too much,” he confesses. But Wiki’s got a steady girl now who’s been teaching him to cook and eat healthier. The pork chops and applesauce combo is one of the first meals that she made for him. (“That shit was bomb,” he recalls proudly.) Now they make balanced meals together of eggs, salads, and refried beans, building their relationship meal by meal. “Food’s definitely hella important in that,” he says. “With your girl, whether you’re going out to eat or cooking at home together. It’s a whole bonding experience.”

“I been traveling but I’m back to my Ahki and I ask for a chopped cheese/And he fast like hibachi with the batch” (“Chinatown Swing”)

Once in awhile, Wiki will put on a collared shirt and take his girl out. His favorite fancy spot is Lucien, a French bistro in the East Village. (“The steak frites is on crack.”) But he fidgets when talking about the rib eye’s price tag; he’s far more comfortable waxing poetic about the standard deli chopped cheese, a current cultural lightning rod, which he loves for both the robust, reliable flavor and the dramatic flair in its creation — the cooks slicing up beef rapidfire, like their more showy counterparts at Benihana’s. “There ain't no performance at a deli, but the one time there is, is when they’re making the chopped cheese. It’s a vibe, like now I’m at the expensive hibachi spot,” he says. “They finessing it just as hard.”

“City just a fricken’ farm/With some chicken parmesan and some cold cuts” (“Wiki New Written”)

As Wiki reels off his favorite spots around the city, a common theme emerges: Most of them have closed. “They shut down everything that’s good,” he says. There was H&H, the hallowed bagel spot on the Upper West Side; Cup and Saucer, a Lower East Side diner; and Cornerstone, a chicken joint in Tribeca. All have folded in the last six years. Wiki’s favorite meal in the city was Cornerstone’s chicken, rice, and gravy — a combination not even on the menu, but beloved by those who knew to ask for it. His craving for the meal remains so extreme that recently, he tried to custom-order it at the chain Chirping Chicken. They declined.

With each homegrown store replaced by a big box chain or a shiny apartment complex, the connective thread of the city weakens. And so every time Wiki name-checks the bagel or the chopped cheese, he’s not just rapping with his tastebuds; he’s launching a scrappy defense of New York street culture. And he’ll choose the bodega over the conveyor-belt experience of Chipotle or Potbelly every time.

We step out onto the Chinatown streets as a man mounts his bike for a delivery run, and another trawls for bottles in the trash. Wiki heads off to ride the rails again, leaving me with a final description of his afterschool meals at Cornerstone. “They had the older waiter dude who was the doofiest motherfucker ever. You could ask him anything on the menu, he never knew,” he says. “But that’s the type of shit you like. Yeah, he took forever. Yeah, he was annoying and kind of rude. But at least you’re dealing with this fucking character.”