Midtown Lunch

We took a quick visit to Ramini Espresso Bar a while back, run by the team that brought the neighborhood-deli Artichoke Cafe, whose only major outlier was being an awesome supplier of macarons. Since their soft open followed by a less-soft, more-actual opening, not much food has yet to materialize. That’s probably because they left out anything that wasn’t a pastry. Artichoke’s savory offerings weren’t much to write home about, but it sure was always a good excuse to get a macaron for dessert with your create-your-own salad.

While nice, new, and clean, with a good area to pop up and savor your coffee, the only food coming out of their expanded kitchen upstairs are pastries and macarons. All homemade, it’s solely Midtown Lunch turf by virtue of the fact that the breakfast food is available throughout the day. More of a niche than a cramped shot at a generic deli, it seems to opt to leave the savory foodstuffs to the two-doors-down elevator-shaft Latin favorite, El Sabroso.

The pickings were pretty varied at around 12:15. The macarons do come out fresh throughout the day, and while they don’t have staggering variety of Macaron Cafe, they are relatively cheap at $2 per macaron.

I leave it to our readers if they want to do a croissant or a muffin for lunch, but their coffee facilities are top-notch and their baristas appear to know their stuff. A pour-over was being properly done as I came in to get some macarons for a co-worker, and the bong-like apparatus has since been revealed as a Kyoto iced coffee maker. They still do fresh squeezed juices, but so far Ramini looks less like a lunch joint and more like a less pretentious, larger version of the nearby Macaron Cafe outpost. Hey, at least it’s not pinker than a Komen-ified NFL game or a many-tentacled over-roasted coffee empire.

Ramini Espresso Bar, 267 West 37th St. (between 7th and 8th)