Midtown Lunch

This past Friday was the first day of the Bryant Park Holiday Market and with it comes some some more lunch options in Midtown West. Old favorites like Mmm… Enfes, Wafels & Dinges, Daisy’s Grits, and TopArepa are back and they’re joined by some exciting new kiosks. Hong Kong Street Cart (which has been at Madison Square Eats for years), Pao de Queijo (which are Brazilian cheese balls), and Sesame Bar (from the owners of SoomSoom) are among the new businesses serving at the market. The stalls will be open through January 5 and I recommend stopping by sooner rather than later because we all know how crowded this gets as the holidays approach.

What do you do if you’re a pasta company whose Italian namesake makes anti-gay remarks that the company is later forced to apologize for?  Open a chain of restaurants in Midtown, apparently!  In a campaign to raise brand awareness, the Italian pasta company, is launching a line of fast and casual Italian restaurants to make Americans eat more pasta, starting with the opening of Academia Barilla Restaurant at 1290 Avenue of the Americas. I think we’ll throw this one to the comments…

Academia Barilla (set to open by the end of 2013), 1290 Avenue of the Americas

Every Friday we go south of the ML boundaries in search of a delicious lunch. Sometimes it’s Murray Hill south or the Flatiron District, sometimes Gramercy and everything in between- but we just like to call it Flatiron Lunch.

Zach Brooks has taught me to keep my eyes open for hidden restaurants (El Sabroso, I’m looking at you.) So I noticed the Taste of Persia counter hanging out in a non-descript pizza place on West 18th Street. But Zach Brooks has also taught me to be very alert to prices. With only a soup (and a vegetarian soup at that!) below $10, I had decided that Taste of Persia wasn’t for ML. And then a friend who lives in the area and who has good taste in food told me she loves the soup. She encouraged me to go back. And she, and her fiancé, assured me it was very filling. It is also hard to argue with a glowing NYTimes write up (which is proudly mounted on posters all over the space.)

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