The Grotto lies way downtown on New Street — who would expect to find a great cheap southern Italian restaurant there? Named after Capri’s Blue Grotto, the premises are reached by diving down a long narrow stairway into the basement, where an L-shaped glass counter lies before you like a pirate’s treasure, displaying rice balls and potato croquettes, fricassees of chicken and pork, strombolis both Italian and American, the cheese-drenched baked pastas beloved of southern Italians, and a stunning array of pizzas ready to be purchased by the slice. Take your food upstairs to the secret dining room.

Big heaping plates of rice are the forte of this wonderful Chinese lunch counter with the bright red awning on the Lower East Side. With prices hovering around $5, any of the over-60 rice choices won’t let you walk away hungry. My favorite is listed as chicken with hot pepper and scallion on rice, in which scallion is treated as a vegetable; but you may prefer fish cake with pickle, baby shrimp with scrambled egg, or pork with taro. Also available are bargain plates of fried rice, noodle soups with duck or beef balls, and a scattering of pan-National Chinese dishes like ma po tofu and hot-and-sour soup. Open until 10 p.m., closed Sunday.

Patacon Pisao ("Smashed Plantain") is the name of a sandwich, but also of this narrow café specializing in Venezuelan street food. The namesake dish is its specialty: two fantastically flattened frisbees of tostones stuffed like a sandwich with roasted pork, grilled steak, or simply black beans, cheese, and avocados. Novelty fillings include bacon, lettuce, and tomato to make a crunchy BLT, and a hamburger patty with all the trimmings.

At this cafe laid out like a tiny Greek village, the off-price wine list alone is worth a visit, and the bread dips are a great deal. Three hefty scoops for $15 (out of a choice of seven), come with a generous wad of grilled pita triangles. The tzatziki is hyper-garlicky, and also comes as an accompaniment to many of the kebabs, which are the main reason for this café’s existence. Get these kebabs in a pita sandwich, which comes stuffed with a brochette of your choice, tomato, purple onions, tzatziki, and french fries. The hamburger ($7) treated this way is particularly wonderful.

Manousheh — Specializing in well-dressed Lebanese flatbreads, this Greenwich Village café styles itself “a real taste of Beirut.” These flatbreads fly from a brick hearth that dominates the small room. The best-known is za’atar, and the same bread is folded over or rolled around other ingredient combinations, including a wonderful paste of tomatoes, onions, and dried yogurt called kishek.

This Jackson Heights Pakistani favorite recently established a Curry Hill outpost. At the longest steam table the neighborhood has yet seen, one selects curries, tandooris, kebabs, dals, and biryanis from among about two dozen tubbed selections, half of them vegetarian. Full-plate meals including raita, salad, chutney, rice or biryani, naan, and three meat or vegetable selections go for around $10. Open until 4 a.m., seven days.

Himalayan cuisine has finally made its debut in Curry Hill. This Nepalese newcomer, branch of a celebrated café in the back of a flatbread bakery in Jackson Heights, is far more ambitious. All the typical meat jerkies, curries, Chinese-South Asian hybrids, homemade noodle dishes, and stuffed momo dumplings are available. Highlights include a thali consisting of vegetables curries, pickles, chutneys, and bhutan (goat-organ jerky, not to be confused with the country of the same name). But the thali’s focus is dhendo, a big clot of brown buckwheat starch kneaded into the equivalent of a West African mash. It’s wonderful. For the more timid, chicken chow mein is a good choice.

Specializing, somewhat illogically, in franks, pokes, and shakes, Sons of Thunder is the sort of fast casual place that encourages you to linger in its cavernous and relatively comfy dining rooms. It describes itself as Californian, but you might be more inclined to think Chicago, if that city were in Hawaii. The poke is good of its sort, more fish than salad, and the proprietary hot dogs come in several permutations, of which the Chicago and banh mi dogs are our favorites. And the chocolate shake is just as thick as you’d hoped.

From the outside it looks like a juice bar, but there’s also a savory menu of lunch and dinner fare at this narrow stall with counter seating south of Bryant Park. As the name suggests, there are two grease-dripping shawarma cylinders — chicken and a beef-lamb combo, both halal. (The chicken tastes better.) Either can be made into rice-pilaf platters or bargain pita sandwiches. On the vegetarian side of the ledger are falafels fried to order and other Middle Eastern delights, including good hummus and baba. But you can also get Indian vegetarian samosas with yogurt raita, Syrian cracked-wheat kibbe stuffed with ground beef and pine nuts, and the Turkish flatbread called gozleme stuffed with mushrooms or potatoes.

Fifty years ago the dining landscape was littered with Latin lunch counters, many of them originating as Cuban institutions, but then passed down from Puerto Ricans to Dominicans. Still located somewhat miraculously on Times Square, Margon fabricates magnificent Cuban sandwiches right in the front window of its walk down space, as customers twirl on the stools, ordering from a menu that varies by day of the week. The pernil (garlic-rubbed pork roast) is superb, and so are the roast chicken, tripe and pig-feet soup, and oxtail stew, served with white or yellow rice, black or red beans.

the dining room is tiny at this Upper East Side sushi parlor, with only a counter and one table. But the décor and staff are charming, the fish unfailingly fresh, and the prices low for sushi. The premium rolls are the attractions here, all of them invented out of whole cloth, including the mommy rose (tuna and salmon intercut to resemble a blossom), yellowtail basil (maki with a Thai twist), and healthy cucumber (an able contribution to the vegetarian sushi canon).

Sichuan peppercorns are rolling across the city like tiny marbles, as New York diners have become obsessed with the tingly and numbing flavor. Specializing in them, Lava Kitchen arose on the UWS, glowing late into the night. The menu is mainly northern Chinese, and classic dumplings, bao, cold salads, and grilled meat skewers share the menu with spicy noodles in three levels of spiciness.

A dim sum craze is sweeping the cityscape. This Chinese comfort food includes dumplings, turnip cakes, congees, and other snacks that make perfect light lunches and dinners at discount prices. Now, new neighborhood spots are appearing not in Chinatowns, and La Salle is an example. Though sounding like an effete French tea room, it’s named after the street in Morningside Heights where the restaurant is located. Made in-house and available in three permutations, the Shanghai soup dumplings are excellent. Steamed or fried, five kinds of pot-stickers are available, along with sesame noodles, ramen, and “beef scallion pancake wrap” (shown), which is really a meat-stuffed jian bing.

This Ecuadorian restaurant occupies a double-wide premises, with a formal dining room on one side and a juice bar, café, and carryout on the other. The ceviches here are super-sized, and great for warmer weather. Get the ceviche mixto con concha negra, which features black clams, the signature bivalves of Ecuador’s mangrove shoreline. Meal-size soups are another specialty, including weekend-only caldo de bola, which features one massive stuffed dumpling the size of a softball. You should take for granted that the roast pork and llapingachos (cheesy potato pancakes) will be fab.

The interior is boxy and a little darker than you might like, and the food is delicious and spectacularly inexpensive. A friend and I carried out several things and avidly munched them in the car. We had a serving of the lechon itself, with skin that was delicate and crisp, the meat well-salted and well-garlicked; a few shards of pork belly, crackling skin attached; and an alcapurria, one of several cuchifritos on the menu. Atypically, this giant, lard-fried orb had a coating of mashed potatoes instead of the usual mashed yuca. When bitten into, though, ground pork tumbled out in the usual fashion.

Though Arthur Avenue is known as the Bronx’s Italian food hot spot, many other types of restaurants, some of them excellent, hang in the background. Gurra Café is an Albanian café with a clubhouse feel, and the décor may remind you of a ski chalet. There’s a guy grilling cevapi and pleskavici (outsize, mixed-meat burgers) behind a partition, and every once in a while he comes out front to see how your meal is going. Other highlights of the short menu include a white-bean-and-jerky stew called fasule and a paprika-laced goulash served with a hearty scoop of mashed potatoes.

Once known as Cedars Meat House, this Astoria Lebanese mainstay combines a butcher shop, grocery store, and kebabery with counter seating. Choose from among a shawarma or two; chicken, beef kufta, or ground-lamb Aleppo kebabs; and lamb chops or ribeye steaks, all flame grilled. The usual dips and fried veggies are also provided, in addition to stews and soups. Don’t miss the pungent garlic sauce called toum.

A delightful Brazilian snack shop just off of Broadway in Astoria. In addition to bouncy little baked cheese balls, oblong fritters called coxinhas are also available on a rotating basis. But the real raison d’etre for this cozy little place are the burgers, Brazilian style. One of my favorite burgers here is the X Calabresa — a good-sized patty with two types of white cheese, lettuce, tomato, corn, potato sticks, an egg, and a slice of smoked sausage. The thing will set you back only $7.50, and you won’t miss the french fries. By the way, ask for specials when you go to Pan de Queijo. Sometimes there’s black beans and rice, sometimes an entire feijoada.

The high quality of the food at this Mexican deli in Corona is apparent the minute you spy the orderly displays of cheese empanadas, meat-stuffed flautas, and chicharrones preparados: fried cracker platforms used as vegetarian pig skins. Heaped with queso, guacamole, crema, and salsa, they make excellent street snacks. Other specialties include picaditas, sopes, and tlaycoyos. Weekends, there’s goat barbacoa.

On the roof is a giant rice bowl with chopsticks poking out. Jonathan Gold once wrote that you could see it while landing at LaGuardia. The café has evolved into a street-food landmark, with a window open to sidewalk traffic that displays charcuterie and grilling sausages, including the spectacular do chang bao xiao chang: a small link known as a Taiwanese hot dog stuffed inside a bigger rice sausage with a slice of cucumber. For carryout are ducks, pork chunks, sliced cuttlefish, chicken wings, and other transportable morsels. Inside, a café specializes in clay-pot congees, Chinese BBQ over rice, and soups, plus house specials such as whelk, frog, blue crab, and pork chops. Open 24 hours.

In its unique culinary traditions, the southern Indian city of Hyderabad — which has become a high-tech hub — has more in common with northern India. This is reflected in its signature dish, biryani, a wonderful rice cook up. The biryani here is some of the best in town, available in eight varieties — one vegetarian, one vegan. Rather than sitting on the steam table and drying out, it is assembled to order with freshly cooked morsels of meat and vegetables. The rice is kept exceedingly fluffy, delicately flavored with ginger, garlic, and cardamom. Other don’t miss regional dishes include Kerala pepper chicken — which is so spicy it will burn your mouth — and so will “bullet naan,” shot with fresh jalapenos.

The number of cheap cafes in Jackson Heights serving the food of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh has dwindled as the Tibetan and Nepalese presence has ramped up. And most of those remaining have switched over to buffets, where the food on a per-pound basis remains inexpensive, but who wants to eat such a compulsively humongous meal? One alternative is Al-Naimat, which magically occupies the old Jackson Diner space. Meal combinations go for under $10, and might include a light take on keema featuring chicken rather than lamb, an excellent palak paneer with abundant cheese, basmati rice, fresh-baked naan, yogurt raita, and salad.

There have long been inexpensive Brazilian cafes in Astoria, peddling pao de queijo, elaborately dressed Cariocan burgers, and big Saturday servings of feijoada, the national dish of black beans and pig parts. Now a new one has scampered over to Jackson Heights. Brazil Aroma seeks to at least partly emulate the great churrascarias of Newark’s Ironbound. The buffet clocks in at $5.99 per pound, and it’s easy to fill yourself up for six bucks or so. But you’ll likely be distracted by the order window at the end of the room. Therein find a guy working a gleamingly new charcoal oven with a dozen spits, on which skewers of meat are pinned. This selection costs $7.99. The skirt steak, pork sausage, and chicken legs are terrific.

The soup dumplings are absolutely killer, and you've probably never had them with such a gossamer-thin wrapper before. Of the four varieties available, the pork version ramped up with a small amount of crabmeat ($6.95 for six) is highly recommended, but for something really unusual, check out the dessert dumplings filled with molten chocolate. Be careful not to squirt it on your shirt!

The owner hails from Bicol, a region 50 miles southeast of Manila. The dining room is small and boxy, with just a handful of tables and a convivial hostess. One more thing: The karaoke is continuous. Once a customer stops singing, another picks up the cordless mic and plows onward. Highlight of a recent meal was a wonderful sinigang, a tart fish soup floating a pompano and Napa cabbage in a tamarind-laced broth. Other enjoyable dishes included crispy pata (a pair of whole pork shanks, skin-on, roasted to perfect crispness) and the national dish of chicken adobo. For a pork- and fish-intensive cuisine, there are a surprising number of vegetable-focused dishes, though vegetarians beware: these often contain fish or fermented-shrimp sauces.

Sky Café is a real Indonesian warung — a small family owned restaurant specializing in everyday food, often selling groceries as well. The gado gado is spectacular: a composed salad of lettuce, cabbage, tempeh, and boiled egg furnished with a spicy peanut dressing creamy with coconut milk. If you haven’t tried lontong (one of Southeast Asia’s most interesting rice-delivery systems), give lontong sayur a try, a thick soup flavored with anchovies and fried shallots, with some bonus beef rendang in its depths. Most one-plate meals run $7 or $8, a real bargain.

Since 1952, Rego Park’s Knish Nosh has been enfolding tasty fillings in spongy dough and baking the heck out of them. The primary result is the Jewish snack called the knish, which was probably brought here by Polish immigrants around 1900. Knish Nosh makes them in the traditional round format — not for the pillow knishes associated with hot dog carts and Coney Island — and offers a choice of eight fillings. These include cabbage, kasha, potato, and the undefined “meat.” The innovation here is simply making them much bigger than usual. Also available are several varieties of pastry-wrapped hot dogs, including the dazzling foot-long.

You might not think of downtown Jamaica as being a hotbed of Sri Lankan cuisine (that designation should probably be reserved for Staten Island), but there is at least one formidable Ceylonese restaurant along Hillside’s amazing restaurant row. The premises is dark enough for a romantic date, and the food is halal at Spicy Lanka. Highlights of the menu include kothu roti, a pyramid fashioned from torn-up shreds of flatbread tossed with slivered vegetables and a main ingredient that runs to egg, chicken, mutton, shrimp, or kingfish. Other recommendations include godhamba roti (a buttery wadded flatbread), and chicken biryani, which comes embedded with boiled eggs and sided by an excellent piece of fried chicken for no apparent reason. The humongous entrees easily feed two.

The city’s foremost Salvadoran pupuseria makes them from scratch— walk in the front door and you’ll hear the “thwap, thwap, thwap” of the pupusas being hand-patted. Pick various combinations of beans, cheese, chicharron de puerco, and loroco flowers (which taste something like pickled oregano), and you’ll have yourself quite a snack or a meal, especially if you slit the things and spoon in the cortado (pickled cabbage) and squirt in the hot sauce. All sorts of other Salvadoran set meals available.