Results tagged “tapwater”

The Post set their fine-print gumshoes loose on the city’s restaurant menus and uncovered numerous crimes against the dining public, like restaurants charging for normally free items like bread, butter, and tap water. Times dining critic Frank Bruni thinks that charging extra for nice bread and butter is perfectly acceptable, but for the most part, everyone’s like holy crap, this is totally outrageous. Apparently there’s “A 20 percent mandatory tip on all checks at the Little Italy tourist spot Grotta Azzurra,” and bobo in Greenwich Village charges $1 per-person for filtered tap water.

The debate about how wasteful it is to buy bottled water never seems to go away around the Big Apple (home of the #1 water around—at least in the state.) But this weekend, a reader writing into the Times' City section wanted to put a specific dollar amount on tap versus bottles. A spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection was able to do just that, telling the paper that city tap water costs $5.99 per 100 cubic feet, eight ounces of New York water cost five one-hundredths of one cent, or $0.0005, including the cost of treating the wastewater. That makes the same size eight ounce bottle of Poland Spring check in at 2000 times the cost at one dollar. Of course picking up a bottle of New York City tap water in stores will cost you even more than that.

Not too long ago New York's tap water hit the marketplace; bottled and labeled TAP'D NY, the company even suggested refilling the $1.50 bottle from a tap when its empty. Craig Zucker is the man behind the idea, a for-profit business that gets its product from the city's public water system "to source the world's best tasting tap water, purify it through reverse osmosis and bottle it locally, leaving out ludicrous transportation miles." Zucker told us a little bit about his idea, future "water pairings" taking place around the city, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Just as we were patting ourselves on the backs for our top shelf tap water, a Bushwick local went and tested their own H2O after it began stinking up shower time and dish duty with chlorine fumes. BushwickBK used a water testing kit to analyze pH levels, alkalinity, chlorine, total hardness, iron, copper, and nitrites. The results? "My tap water scored a 4 out of 10 in total chlorine content, which is safe according to Pro-Lab pamphlet, but the water in the Brita pitcher recorded a 0.2 out of 10 total chlorine content." However, the test showed that it was acidic (or “soft”) which can mean there are heavy metals and/or lead present (a lead test costs $30 and wasn't performed). They report the test "recorded a pH of 5, the level of acidity in coffee...and my Brita pitcher only increased the acidity in the water, pushing it down to a 3, the level of orange juice and vinegar." Yikes! If you want to perform your own tap water test, there are kits available for $10. And if you're in the beer-making biz, note that low pH levels are good for it, "The German immigrants that dominated Bushwick in the mid-1800s got filthy rich off the water acidity."

NYC tap water on sale at a local store. Now, we know that NYC tap water is pretty darn delicious (it did get first place at the state fair last week), but is it worth buying a bottle full of it?

You may recall that back in July our tap water placed 2nd in a tap water taste test, coming in behind Bethpage (wherever that is). Well, we've been vindicated, because at the NY State Fair in Syracuse--we placed 1st! The New York State Department of Health has announced that NYC "won the coveted title for best-tasting drinking water in New York over 150 other municipal water systems during the final competition." However, they note it's a "nonscientific competition," and the Health Commissioner downplayed the achievement by declaring:"Considering that NYC's water comes from reservoirs in Delaware, Greene, Ulster, Putnam, Westchester, Schoharie, Sullivan and Dutchess counties, these counties are also winners." Whatever, the blue ribbon is all ours...along with the A grade Riverkeeper gave us for tap water back in May.