All photos courtesy Limani

Chef M.J. Alam is a native of Bangladesh, but he's spent the last 18 years cooking Mediterranean food. "I used to work for the Milos group," he says. "I started in Montreal, where I was sous chef. I also owned a restaurant there. It was a French steakhouse." He moved to New York more than a decade ago to take over the burners at the Milos here, and that's where he remained until Limani, a seafood-centric Greek restaurant on Long Island, enlisted him to helm a new Manhattan outpost (45 Rockefeller Plaza).

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The beef hits the table, hot with trails of steam. The dark shards march down the center of pale tortillas lying flat, wreathed with chopped onion and cilantro, a spoonful of avocado sauce, a blaze of green. The filling is suadero, the namesake at Nuevo Tacos al Suadero (9406 Roosevelt Avenue, Queens; 718-429-0555) in Jackson Heights, and even in harsh fluorescent light, it beckons.

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Behold: Everything you need

In any great relationship, there is a give and take that needs to exist, an ebb and flow that must be followed. There are high points and low, and it's always a two-way street. But twenty- and thirtysomething New Yorkers don't really follow any of these guidelines: We text through dinner, look at Instagrammed dog photos at the bar, and don't call anyone besides Grandma and Mom.

For all the one-word texts I send and receive, there is one relationship that I do work on almost daily, and usually twice a day on the weekends: my partnership with Graham Garden, my local bodega.

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Photo by Justin Graham; all photos courtesy Penguin Random House

Death & Co. co-founder David Kaplan

In 2006, David Kaplan came to New York with a dream of opening his own bar. The consummate host, Kaplan started playing bartender when he was 18, with a tiki-themed bar in his friend's dirt-floor garage. Little did he know his little hobby would lead him to co-own one of the most highly acclaimed bars in the world.

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If you want to see the very opposite of the crisp, buzzy, intense restaurant opening that's become the norm in this town, you should head immediately to Le Marecage (137 First Avenue, 212-777-1677), a small eatery that opened three weeks ago in the East Village. Here, you'll find perhaps the nicest people in this entire city serving food from Haiti and the Ivory Coast from a kitchen that moves at its own casual pace.

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Syndicate 58/6

Scotland is synonymous with single malt, a drink made with fermented barley from a single distillery. But this particular style of whisky, highly revered throughout the world, is hardly the be-all and end-all of scotch. In fact, many folks regard Johnnie Walker Blue Label -- a blend -- as the most elegant expression of brown spirit...and Johnnie hardly holds the monopoly on that game. Take Syndicate 58/6, a blend faithfully reconstructed from a 19th-century recipe. It has garnered critical acclaim by employing the Solera method in the maturation process. The brand's latest premium release is now available in bars and bottle shops throughout the city.

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All photos by Ken Goodman

When Franklin Becker opened the Little Beet in midtown, he told the Voice that "I decided to create this fast-casual environment here that would still serve the best ingredients I could get but for a reasonable price point. I wanted to make sure that people coming to the Little Beet leave here feeling good, feeling energized, feeling healthy, and wanting to come back again and again."

Come back again and again they did, and they clamored for something more upscale where they could get similarly pure food in a non-fast-casual environment. And so last week, Becker gave them The Little Beet Table (333 Park Avenue South, 212-466-3330).

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Shade Market via Kickstarter

A few years from now, when they've returned to the States after months of research, Paige Harte and Jason Rivera plan to open a market -- called Shade Market -- where they'll serve provisions and possibly some prepared food, created from healthy, local sources, to their community. By doing so, they'd like to help people make real lifestyle changes that begin with their diets, making it easy for them to cook deliciously and healthfully at home.

Between now and then, the two Charlie Bird staffers -- Harte is the maître d'; Rivera is a sous chef; both will leave the restaurant to begin this project -- are embarking on a global voyage to begin effecting the change they'd like to see stem from their market. Their trip is part research, part education, and part attempt to use lessons from other cultures to guide people here toward better, healthier lifestyles.

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Photo courtesy Food Chains

After being locked in the back of a U-Haul truck, Mariano Lucas Domingo saw a literal light at the end of the tunnel -- he punched his way through a small opening in the roof and freed himself. An illegal immigrant from Guatemala, Domingo expected to make about $200 a week picking tomatoes in Immokalee, Florida, a town not far from wealthy snowbird communities like Naples and Fort Myers. Domingo found himself, however, bound by the chains of modern slavery. When the United States Department of Justice released its indictment, Domingo's captors, Cesar and Giovanni Naverete, were accused of threatening, slapping, kicking, and beating the men they held on the family property. The report claimed the Navaretes chained people to poles, locked them in U-Haul trailers, and forced them to work for free.

From 1997 to 2010, more than 1,200 farmworkers have been freed from similar slavery rings in the area. Food Chains, produced by Eva Longoria, Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation and Food Inc.), Smriti Keshari, Hamilton Fish, and director Sanjay Rawal, tells the story of those at the bottom of the chain.

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Dave Nakayama/Flickr

Sick of your usual call drink? Try something new. In this series, we're asking the city's bartenders to name their current drinks of choice. Check out our Good Call archives for another round.

Today's call comes by way of Ryan Chetiyawardana, bartender at the newly opened Half & Half at Hudson (356 West 58th Street; 212-554-6217).

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