Carmine's

The servers at Carmine’s in Times Square have a little routine they like to do. They’ll let you start listing your order, then playfully interject with, “You haven’t seen our portion sizes, have you?” Look around, and you’ll notice barely-contained piles of calamari, and spaghetti platters the size of flying saucers. Everything at this 500-seat institution (with an original location on the Upper West Side) is big. It’s grand-scale Italian dinner theater, under candelabra chandeliers and watchful portraits of Jimmy Durante. Order the massive chicken parm, anything with vodka sauce, and as many $20 quartinos of wine as it takes to wash down all that salt. There’s better Italian food in the city, but every New Yorker should come at least once, preferably with a big group (unless you want to eat leftover manicotti for days).