Visiting Citi Field to preview this year’s food offerings, as I did the week before the Mets’ opening day, one must embrace certain dualities: People are there for the food, but really for other reasons. It’s snacks for the fans—but also for the people (Citi Field has received national recognition not only for the quality of its food, but its diversity, mirroring that of the Flushing Meadows–Corona Park where it lies). It’s food that needs to travel, back to your seat, say, but that is eaten in place, mostly from laps, which is both quite gross and rather comforting. Most importantly, it is food that is meant to be delicious and sustaining—but also junk. I, like billions before me, love a ballpark dog; it’s good, but it’s not supposed to be good for you.
It is this tension that gave me the most pause, and brought me to the unholy caloric monster that was Adam Richman’s four-patty “Home Run” hamburger, my first stop on a base-rounding tour of the 2026 Citi Field food vendors.
2026 Citi Field Eats: The Good, the Bad, the Utterly Excessive
Richman, the host of the Travel Channel’s “Man Vs. Food” presides over Adam Richman’s Burger Hall of Fame, located in Section 105. He offers a tasty version of a classic smashburger: Pat LaFrieda patty, American cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles, and secret sauce on a potato roll. Delicious. Reasonable. Food. But, because this is a ballpark, you can “make it a double (two patties), triple (three patties), or Home Run (four)! Who wants a four-story tower of burger? Someone, evidently. Mr. Richman had each version of the burger on display, except the largest: “I had a four,” he said. “But a food blogger ate it.”
Next door there was a stand promoting a chopped cheese by Chef Kwame, aka Kwame Onwuachi of “Top Chef” fame. In 2022, his sophisticated Afro-Caribbean creations earned him a James Beard for “Rising Star Chef of the Year,” but here at Citifield at Chef Kwame’s Patty Palace (Section 415), an otherwise sensible and sensuous Jamaican beef patty arrives between two pieces of toast, along with shredded American cheese, lettuce, tomato, as well as a “house sauce” (not sure whose house, but I’m guessing all the inhabitants are on statins). A perfectly decent, transportable, even slightly exotic foodstuff becomes mutant and unlovable, especially later on.
Here is where the central separation of eating at Citi Field begins to dent and warp the girders that sustain it. A mode of eating for pleasure crashes into an epicurean orgy of calories, cheese, and grease-impregnated meats, wherein eating is less of a necessity than some form of vicious competition between your stomach, heart, and liver to see which organ will give up, or give out, first.
Take the Loaded Cornbread from Pig Beach BBQ (Section 135), a once-lovely piece of baked corn bread teaming with pulled pork, cheddar cheese sauce, and BBQ sauce. Or Willets Point Brewery’s Backyard BBQ Burger—a brand new addition to Citi Field—approximately the size of a toddler, girded with cheddar, BBQ pulled pork, onions rings, whiskey BBQ, shredded lettuce, and pickles, all atop two, count-em-two, patties. These items aren’t bad, per se, they just feel a little wrong, like when you see a child riding a dog.
They’re balanced by two new arrivals: Eat the Cave, and Taqueria Ramirez. The former offers fried but nonviolent vegan and traditional empanadas, while the latter’s nopales boast plump pieces of cactus, coddled—not covered—in salsa verde. These are decent options, with tons of flavor and plenty of fat and protein, but less bent on destruction than the (checks notes) pornography of pork available at Amazin’ Deli’s Chopped Italian. Or the aforementioned cornbread, or the overfleshed waterfall that is the porchetta from Roast Pork (I’m not sure I can definitively break down the collective noun of “pornography” as it applies to the porcine, but you know it when you see it).
To be sure, there are lighter options at Beyond Nightlife Sushi and Lobster Shack and indulgent but measured fare can be purchased at almost every outpost, from Judy Joo’s Seoul Bird, to Shake Shack, to Napoli’s Pizza Co. It’s just that each of these items tends to be offered next to something so inappropriate it stops resembling food. Napoli’s Round Cheese slice (Original Pizza Sauce, Grande Mozzarella, Pecorino Romano) makes sense, as does its Pepperoni (ibid, plus Cup and Char pep).
Where things go off the rails is in the Chiddy’s Square Pie, which looks like something an eight-year-old dreamed up (“I want cheeseburger pizza!”) and has amongst its toppings shaved ribeye and Cheese Wiz. When I looked at this monstrosity, my question was less “What?” than “Why?” The answer, though complicated, may also be straightforward. “That’s America,” a friend said, with a shrug, as I regaled him with my tales of these arterial filibusters.
Well it is and isn’t. There’s a duality, a multiplicity, therein, too. America, and its favorite pastime, has some of the most serene, intense, gorgeous displays of the tension anyone has ever managed to imagine. Not all of it is pretty. But visiting the Mets home stadium, even though no contest was in session (minus the war games in my own stomach), I had to step outside into the stands and take in the field in all its unadorned glory. Even empty, it was majestic.
Although I cannot salute the lack of restraint in chopped cheese on top of a Jamaican beef patty, or of four stacked hamburgers, or Cheese Wiz on a pizza, I love that there is a place for these items. There’s a place for everyone. And that place is Citi Field.
The Insider Take on Eating at Citi Field
Our editor John Ortved loves food and New York and baseball, but he’s not Mr. Met and he knows it. We asked a real longtime Mets fan Max Cantor for his take on all things snacks and Citi Field.
On the ballpark itself: It’s heaven on earth. I like to go by myself and listen to the radio while the game is playing. This year, they’re doing an in-stadium radio feed directly, in sync with the action, not on a delay.
Why it’s the stadium for food: Everything immediately around there is just junkyards. It’s like 25 minutes to Flushing. This isn’t like Wrigleyville. It has to be self contained.
No one misses the Polar Bear burger: It was named after Peter Alonso, a first baseman (Mets 2019-2025) whose nickname was “the Polar Bear.” And it was disgusting. It was like 9000 calories; it cost like 17 bucks. It was one of those things where you had to eat it with spoon. It was monstrous.
The food is new and improved: In general, a lot of their food is thoughtful. They try to reflect Queens and the diverse community. And mostly it’s pretty good. But then they’ll have these fucking gigantic things that should be at Chuck E Cheese.
The best place for Mets food: We have tickets in Section 113, behind the Mets dugout, near the sausage grills that are always manned by two people. It’s actually the best food in the ballpark: just the classic Italian sausage. They have four or five stands that do that. But there’s always a long line.
Max’s CitiField plan: Most of my strategy now revolves around the fact that there’s a pitch clock; the game goes so much faster than it used to. It used to be you’d wait in line and you would miss two batters. Now, if you wait in line at the wrong stand, you miss two innings. Such a nightmare.
The alternative: There’s an expensive workaround: On the field level sections, below a certain seat number, there’s a diamond or gold section, and a QR code that lets you order. There’s a service charge—it’s pretty low, maybe seven percent—to have someone bring you the food. And it’s super fast. In the pitch clock era, that’s the real way to enjoy the experience.
Not all nachos are equal, maybe: I’m convinced it’s a scam. There are the Goya Nacho stands, three or four of them around the park. And those are different nachos than what you get at the general stand, where they do burgers and dogs too.
The real deal: I have a friend who always gets a lobster roll, not because it’s particularly good, but because you pay such a premium for everything in the ballpark. That’s the one thing that kind of costs the same outside and inside. That, and pastrami.
Walk it off: You want to go for at least one walk per game. I just leave my seats and I walk the length of the ballpark, because—not all ballparks are like this—you can always see the game from a good vantage point. At Citi Field, it’s nice to take a little tour and feel like you’re getting your money’s worth. And sometimes I’ll walk up to the Coca-Cola corner, above the bleachers; there are almost never lines there.
