Name: This NYC Food Tour Feels Like Your Childhood
Uploaded: 2026-03-20T17:13:51.000Z
Duration: 10 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What do you eat when you want to feel like a kid again?

For me, it's things like cheese, minutia, chicken shawarma, and a chocolate chip cookie.

Adverbs of degree

Today we're going to visit some of my favorite spots in my neighborhood and eat some of the things that just transport me back to simpler times.

I'm Halman Whaley, and this is what I eat when I want to feel like a kid again.

This took me forever to find in New York City.

Akawi isn't a cheese that is commonly found.

Most places use a combination of mozzarella and another cheese to kind of mimic this texture.

Hakawi is a Palestinian cheese from the city of Hakka.

What makes this cheese so special is its texture.

So it's really clean tasting, and you just can eat blocks and blocks and blocks of it.

And of course, to complete the reminiscing, you have a juice box.

This is arguably my favorite juice box of all time.

Not only is it a triangle instead of a lame box, but it's pineapple flavored, and

Pizza is not the only artful form of flatbread.

There are plenty of other cultures and people doing it.

Look at that beautiful leopard spotting at the bottom that you get from that really nice oven.

It is better than any grilled cheese that has ever been made, and

We're at Hen House to have what is probably my death row meal.

A chicken shawarma with toum and french fries.

So the episode that I'm doing is about what I eat when I want to feel like a kid again.

And for lunch, nothing makes me feel more like a kid than a chicken shawarma.

And this is one of my favorite places in the city to get there.

It's a really hard to find a good, traditional Lebanese chicken shawarma.

I like a lot of non Lebanese ones as well.

It's not right without the pickles, and it's not right without the fries.

So I'm gonna go for chicken shawarma fries.

There's so many touches that make this so perfect.

It's like, this is an essential step that some places just don't do.

You can see the fries, and this is the classic fish finishing move that you have to have.

If you don't see it, you've gone to the wrong place.

It's the final swipe of toum at the end and then the crowning of a little handful of shawarm on top.

So you know your first bite is going to be the best bite.

And then the finish with pomegranate molasses is fantastic.

I can't think of a better flavor combination on this earth than tum and chicken.

You've gone viral multiple times for a lot of different things, but

the one that I see the most, which I haven't tried yet, is the knafette.

So, I mean, what do people line up for in New York?

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This NYC Food Tour Feels Like Your Childhood

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