Midtown Lunch

In hindsight, it was unfair of us to post a mostly unfavorable write-up of Bai Cha, which opened on 9th Ave last August. We don’t call ourselves professional restaurant critics, but any professional food writer worth their salt will wait at least a month before visiting a restaurant with the intent to critique. So when I saw that Bai Cha’s bánh mì fell around the middle of the pack in Serious Eats’ recent assessment – earning a place right behind Bánh Mì Saigon, but besting Baoguette and Nicky’s among others – I knew it was time a for another visit.
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I love seeing scrappy underdog restaurants pop up out of nowhere. Word-of-mouth publicity from readers of Midtown Lunch carries a lot more weight with me than slick advertising campaigns. So, yesterday, when we heard through the grapevine about a new (but slightly-out-of-bounds) restaurant that serves Southeast Asian street food, our interest was piqued. On paper and in concept, I was instantly sold – Thai inspired papaya salads, Malaysian satay skewers and roti’s and what’s that… a BANH MI? To borrow a quote from Anthony Bourdain, I would cheerfully “crawl naked across broken glass” for a good banh mi. It’s my absolute favorite food, ever.

I was so excited for the prospect of good Malay and Viet food, that I skipped a work happy hour (sorry co-workers that may be reading this) and voyaged over to 9th ave to get my banh mi fix. So do we finally have a bonafide banh mi in Midtown West?
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A few weeks ago Lunch’er “Emily” (not today’s profiled lunch’er, but a different Emily) told us about Bai Cha, a self proclaimed South East Asian street food & market (on 9th Ave. btw. 49+50th) and today Life With Food and Drink confirms that it’s open and has posted a copy of the menu. Satay, salads, banh mi, roti and dumplings… It’s slightly out of bounds, but with a Vietnamese street food line-up like that I think we can walk the extra avenue to check it out. Early adopters, let us know how it is in the comments.