Midtown Lunch

If you like to eat, chances are you like to drink (read: a lot of you are freakin’ lushes), so I thought maybe it was time to introduce a happy hour column to the site. Every week, our Happy Hour Correspondent “Mamacita” will post about a different bar in Midtown that fits the Midtown Lunch mentality: unhealthy food, not lame (unless it’s lame in a cool way), and most importantly… cheap.

I was tipped off on this happy hour from our resident commenter Adam Prato. It turns out City Lobster is having an early bird special that pretty much puts the smack down on any food and drink special I’ve seen this early in the day. From 12pm to 5pm City Lobster offers appetizers and seafood specials that just meet the $10 ML price point. It’s a little early for Happy Hour purposes, but your lunchtime hour just got a whole lot happier! (Or you can just use it as an excuse to skip out of work early…) Plus, if you’re lucky, you might get a ginger haired bartender that moonlights as a Mary Kay consultant to man your helm and give you skin care advice.

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Following yesterday’s post about Jamie excellent falafel building technique at Maoz, Lunch’er “Chunk” chimed in with this comment:

“I haven’t been able to go back to Maoz since I observed the following a couple of weeks ago. As I was waiting for my bowl of balls, I noticed that a guy who seemed to be an off-duty employee, or at least a friend of the employees, was engaged in some major double dipping. I mean, he would take a bite and then go back to the bar, get more fixins, and then use the tongs to tamp them down on the just munched part of his pita. The on-duty employee definitely noticed.”

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I came across the Treats Truck yesterday and the winter special is a cup of Mexican hot chocolate for $2.25 made out of Abuelita cocoa. She also makes an amazing Mexican chocolate brownie ($3) that is perfect for dark chocolate lovers, and anyone (like me) that doesn’t like a sickly sweet snack. It’s moist and abundant in flavor. Check it out now! Dooo iiiiiiit!  The Treats Truck is on 45th and 6th today from Noon to 3:30pm.

Today is the first Friday of Lent, which for many practicing Catholics means no meats. Now there’s plenty of other great midtown meatless options, but for me there’s something about Lent that goes hand and hand with cheap fried fish sandwiches.

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Now that Downtown has its very own section of the site, what are we going to post on Fridays at 10am? Answer… how about a new column devoted to those lunches just south of the ML boundaries. Please give a warm welcome to Jason Lam from the blog Me So Hungry. Every Friday at 10am he’ll post about lunches in Murray Hill south, Grammercy, Flatiron, and everything in between… or as we’ll call it from now on: Flatiron Lunch.

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Happy Chinese New Year! I suppose it would be fitting to talk about one of my go-to Chinese lunch spots, Jimmy’s House, over by Baruch College. If you can get through the rowdiness of the students hanging outside, you’ll be treated to a heaping container of four items over rice for $6.

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Knowing full well that a mobile vendor can’t survive on selling fried chicken alone, the NYC Cravings Truck has had a long history of menu expansion.  First pork chops, tea eggs, and tianbula, then it was zongzi, and chicken wings (which are currently on hiatus.)  For the latest expansion they were forced to go cold, due to limited space and cooking appliances.  “We are now serving 3 types of cold appetizers: seaweed salad, Buddha’s delight (a vegetarian option made up of bamboo shoots, fried tofu, wood ear, dried bean curd sticks, yellow flower vegetables and wheat gluten), and anchovies with peanuts and chili peppers. All are sold for $4.”  To find out where they are parked today, check their twitter account or the ML Twitter Tracker.

When Maoz opened their first Midtown location last year (on 40th and 7th) I completely admitted by failings as a master falafel sandwich builder. I guess I should have been taking lessons from Jamie over on Midtown Lunch: Philadelphia.  She just visited the Maoz in Philly, and completely schooled me with her massive sandwich.  I still can’t believe how much she managed to stuff all that stuff in there.  Check it out for yourself>>

Between Mamacita’s review, and the original Fork in the Road report, you’re probably Duane Reade sushi’d out, so this is the last of it (and quite possibly the best)… the NY Post got Masaharu Morimoto to take the Duane Reade sushi challenge, and even though the article reads like he hated it, he ended up giving the sushi a 5 out of 10. Isn’t that a borderline rave for drug store sushi coming from an Iron Chef? Also makes us wonder what sushi he’s giving, say, a 3!?