Midtown Lunch

We get pretty excited when new halal carts pop up in Midtown.  Even though there is practically one on every block, new ones don’t come along that often.  So when I spotted Tazy Halal Food (on44th btw 2+3rd) last week right across the street from my office, I had to check it out. The menu looked like pretty standard Halal cart stuff (chicken and rice, lamb and rice, gyro and etc), but the cart quickly proved me wrong.

The chicken and rice ($5), at first glance, looked pretty standard. The pieces of chicken weren’t anything special (big chunks, dark meat, tender, juicy, and filled with the typical Halal food spices). Then once I dug into it, I found pieces of carrots, cauliflowers and loads of onion that were cooked with the chicken. I found the addition of vegetables cooked along with the chicken to be quite good and different as I have never seen carrots or cauliflowers in chicken and rices. The rice that Tazy served was different also. It was brown (similar to dirty rice), had bits of lentils which I thought was another great touch and wasn’t mushy or too dry. The guy at the cart also gave me a falafel and some not-so-crispy fries.

I did find the white sauce a bit thin and visually the hot sauce seemed to be nonexistent, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t spicy. The heat slowly built up and by the end I was sweating. Could these guys be a darkhorse pick for Street Meat Palooza 4?  Technically they’re half a block out of bounds, but we might need to make an exception!

Tazy Halal Food, 44th btw 2+3rd Ave