Where to Eat in Hell’s Kitchen, New York: Top Picks

Hell's Kitchen is a major food destination packed with chef-driven restaurants and plenty of nightlife, just west of Times Square and north of the new Hudson Yards neighborhood.

If you're after great food or a place to have a good time, this small Midtown West neighborhood deserves a visit.

Things to do in Hell's Kitchen

A couple of decades ago this was a rough neighborhood, but in the nineties young chefs started moving in looking for cheaper rents (now sky-high!). Little by little it turned bohemian and cosmopolitan.

Food and nightlife in Hell's Kitchen

A good spot to sample some of the food that made Hell's Kitchen famous is Gotham West Market (600 11th Avenue), a food hall that brings together a range of vendors.

Hell‘s Kitchen is full of nightspots. They're concentrated along Ninth Avenue, the gateway to Chelsea.

Hell's Kitchen and its Hollywood connection

Low property prices in Hell‘s Kitchen, plus its proximity to the Broadway theaters and to the famous Actors Studio run by Lee Strasberg (432 West 44th Street), the teacher of Marilyn Monroe among other stars, turned the neighborhood into a home for aspiring actors.

Plenty of famous names lived here before their careers took off, including Burt Reynolds, Charlton Heston, James Dean, Madonna, Jerry Seinfeld and Sylvester Stallone.

The Manhattan Plaza residential complex, on 42nd Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, built in the seventies mainly to house actors, is a reminder of those days.

The history of Hell's Kitchen

Hell's Kitchen was first settled by working-class Italian and Irish immigrants. Back then its streets were lined with warehouses, storage buildings and long rows of tenements.

Plenty of movies and Broadway musicals have brought that history to light, among them The Godfather (Corleone settles here when he arrives in New York) and West Side Story.

In the sixties the neighborhood became a hub for prostitution and drug dealing. As you can see, its origins are pretty grim, though today the reality is completely different, as I mentioned.

Why is it called Hell's Kitchen?

There are several theories about the name. One says Hell's Kitchen stuck in 1881, after a New York Times reporter compared the area to a London slum of the same name.

Address

It sits between 34th and 59th Streets, from the Hudson River to Eighth Avenue.

Getting there

A, C, E lines. Stations from Penn Station to Columbus Circle

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