(4 out of 5 hot dogs)

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Silk Road Palace
447 Amsterdam (81^st and 82^nd)
Time: All the time
Price: Crispy wontons, entrée, and unlimited wine, $9-15.

For over 3,000 years, the Silk Road was an essential system of trade across three continents.  Today, the Silk Road Palace is an essential system for transporting cheap booze straight to your liver on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As soon as you sit at your table, a server brings you a carafe of white wine, which is obsessively refilled every three minutes throughout your meal.  If you come during prime dining hours and there is a wait, then they give you endless refills of wine as you are waiting.  Just to be clear, I don’t mean actual wine, I’m talking about white Franzia straight from the cardboard box, a dream-come-true for Maggie Griffin and the freshman-year version of myself. But as impeccable the wine service was, it is nearly impossible to get a glass of water in this joint…maybe they don’t have a sink?  The food was edible, I had steamed vegetable dumplings to start, and shrimp sha-cha for my entrée.  The whole experience was definitely frat-tastic, with an abundance of college sweatshirts and “Chug! Chug! Chug!” being chanted at the table next to ours.  Regardless, a little bit of your dignity for a great time and a cheap-wine headache seems like a fair trade to me!