My consort was bitching that I spend too much time housebound (maybe soon I can reinvent myself as a Paula Deen recovering from “agoraphobia”?), so I picked myself up, dusted off my Metrocard and headed for the Essex Market, with Chinatown or maybe Curry Hill as my final destination, as they say at 30,000 feet when you really don’t want to contemplate what that really means. And what do I wander into but the Grub Street food festival, where the lines for anything interesting were absurd. So I was happy the next day to find everything at the New Amsterdam Market instantly accessible, whether Porchetta’s daintily stuffed panino or Luke’s excellent lobster roll. But what was good for us is bad for those superb vendors. They — and the city — need a covered market that runs 362, like the Ferry Plaza in San Francisco. Bloomberg claims to care so much, so why can’t he water one of the worst food deserts, the South Street Seaport? Walking back to the subway, passing all those sidewalk cafes dishing up tourist fodder, we just wondered why bigger signs weren’t posted to steer the lost souls to the great regional stuff. And then we realized we’d answered our own question. That crap is what makes New York run.