Last Tuesday night, I found myself perched at a counter in the Lower East Side, watching a chef who trained at a three-Michelin-star French restaurant delicately layer Persian tahdig with Hudson Valley foie gras. The woman next to me—a stranger until we both gasped at the same culinary magic trick—leaned over and whispered, “This is so New York it hurts.” We laughed, but she wasn’t wrong. Manhattan’s culinary identity has always been defined by a…