Midtown Lunch

One of the most interesting discoveries Brian made at the Choice Eats food truck event a couple weeks ago was a new truck from Chinese Mirch, a Chinese & Indian food mash-up chain that has a Murray Hill location Clay enjoyed a while back (as well as a now defunct location on the Upper East Side that I used to like very much). While running errands on the Upper West Side the other day, I ran across the truck, and while chatting with the truck staff, I found out they plan to hit up Midtown very soon — unfortunately for me, most likely on the East Side. In the meantime, I immediately abandoned my previous meal plans to check out some Tibetan momos and other goodies.

Tibetan momos were basically just chicken or vegetable dumplings. The hand-rolled perfect pleats were very pretty, and at $4 for 5 pieces, they weren’t a bad deal. The dumpling skin was nice and thin, and the veggie filling was pretty much your standard dumpling filling. Not sure what distinguishes these as Tibetan besides the name, but the momos were nice and light. My one issue was that dumplings cooled down a bit by the time I sat down to enjoy them, and the skin became less pliable and some dumplings cracked or broke open a bit under the pressure of my chopsticks. The chili-garlic sauce it came with was no-joke spicy, so if you are looking for sauce with a kick, these might be for you.

I also tried the $8 tamarind duck bao, three steamed buns with roast duck, homemade Szechuan tamarind sauce, scallions and pickled carrots.

These bao were tasty, and the pieces of duck were nice and big. The buns, themselves were not as soft as I imagined they would be, but they did hold the ingredients in the sandwiches well. For $8 worth of food, I would like to feel more full, especially considering you can’t afford a second menu item and stay within the Midtown Lunch budget.

They were also serving rice bowls ($8) that I didn’t try, which included the momos over rice with long beans — maybe the bowls are a more substantial meal? The staff mentioned that the menu will change often, so I’ll be back to check out what else they roll out.

As I mentioned, the the staff said the truck will be trying to hit up Midtown East in the next couple weeks, so keep an eye on their twitter for their location: @chinesemirch.