Midtown Lunch

Even though Szechuan Gourmet is the ace-in-the-hole for spice loving ML eaters who work around 39th street, there are still other options in the area. And not just Zaiya and the rest of the Japanese food corridor on 41st street. I’m talking Chinese food options. We’ve already seen Lan Seng join the scene last year. But there’s actuallya restaurant on 38th street, just a block away, that’s been doing business for a while. I’ve always walked by Evergreen on 38 and dismissed it because it looked like just another Chinese take-out place. I think they used to have another branch of the restaurant by the NYU campus, but it’s been long gone. If the 38th street location can stay open, then maybe it’s half decent? Last week I thought it was good time to give Evergreen’s lunch specials menu a shot.

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A couple of weeks ago, a new cart called Grill & Noodle popped up on 50th btw. 6+7. The cart has an old school no-frills appearance and an odd Chinese/Japanese hybrid menu that ranges from lo mein to teppanyaki. That kind of identity crisis is often a bad sign. I found myself walking by the cart the other day and figured I might as well give a shot, especially when I noticed the mysterious Casanova steak.

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Now that Downtown has its very own section of the site, what are we going to post on Fridays at 10am? Answer… how about a new column devoted to those lunches just south of the ML boundaries. Every week we’ll post about a lunch in Murray Hill south, Gramercy, Flatiron, and everything in between… or as we’ll call it from now on: Flatiron Lunch.

Chinese food is everywhere in NY. It’s in tourist shops, it’s in generic deli buffets, it’s even kosher. But Indian Chinese food?  Well, that’s completely new to me.  I’ve walked past Chinese Mirch, in the middle of Curry Hill, dozens of times without thinking much of it. It’s actually been mentioned a few times on the site… but it wasn’t until Luncher ‘Steve’ told us recently about their $5.95 lunch special, that I finally made it over there to check it out. I didn’t have very high expectations, but was happily surprised with what we got.

Details on the special and food photos after the jump.
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If I say 5th Avenue Empire Cafe… you say… wha?! Exactly. Where is that? You could walk up and down fifth avenue and never see this restaurant. They have a banner outside on the sidewalk but it fails to mention the name. What’s more strange and awesome about this place (and certainly has contributed to its anonymity) is that it’s in a place where most Midtown Lunchers would never visit… a touristy souvenir shop. Beneath the shadows of the Empire State Building on 5th Ave btw. 33+34th, sits a little souvenir store that would be like any other… except they have a restaurant on the second floor. Of course, it’s a Chinese restaurant. With bubble tea! And General Tso’s chicken…

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From the outside, Eden Wok on 34th street looks just like any other generic Chinese food take-out place… save for one thing: a newspaper article in the window from The New York Times. There are number of old school Chinese places in Manhattan that have blessed by coverage from the paper of record- but this isn’t some 2 star review of a Chinese dinosaur (we’re looking at you Shun Lee.)  This article was about Eden Wok’s hot dog egg roll. Yeah, you read that right. Eden Wok is a Kosher Chinese food restaurant, and the star of their menu (according to the NYT circa 2005) is a “Chinese Hot Dog”. I wasn’t sure exactly what that was going to be, but I had to find out… you know… for the sake of science.

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Midtown can always use more spicy tofu dishes. Just ask the the profiled Midtown Luncher from this week. Even though what we have today isn’t exactly a ‘stew’, it does have all the elements of a good spicy tofu stew – soft luscious tofu, fiery heat, and some meat/vegetable element to compliment the flavor of the dish. A tofu dish is exactly what one would expect from a restaurant named Mapo Tofu. This location used to be a Wu Liang Ye and was embroiled in some contraversy about who the owners are. We’re not exactly sure what the real truth is about the restaurant, but when in doubt- we choose to side with the food!

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It takes a special kind of iron stomach to be able to appreciate the gut busting powers of a Chinese steam table take-out lunch. Many people are into Ying Du (on 38th btw. 7+8th), but I think they’ve not been the same since they changed their name from 38th St restaurant and bakery and then had to stop cutting roast meats to order (and apparently portions are getting smaller as well.) Even though they do pile on the food, and the price is ridiculous, I still try to find the next hidden treasure of steam table goodness. So when my former roommate told me about Fuji Restaurant and Bakery, I got intrigued about the possibility of another good option for cheap and filling Chinese food.

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It’s been a duck kind of a week. Yesterday I wrote about the Thursday duck pancake special at Yushi… and then subconsciously (or consciously) I felt a sudden urge to try the duck soup from Aura Thai. I’ve seen the soups at Aura mentioned a bunch of times on Midtown Lunch (most notably by Lunch’er “Nantini”) but the place is out of bounds (9th Ave. btw. 35+36th) and there are plenty of good soups in Midtown. We don’t need to be hiking out to 9th Ave. just for soup.

Now that I’ve tried the soup, though, I think hiking out to 9th Ave. is exactly what we all need to be doing (especially now that’s it starting to get colder.)

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It might surprise some of you to hear this, but sometimes even I have trouble deciding where to eat lunch.  (It’s a daily dilemma we all share.)  And on Friday, I was having an especially tough time picking a place to go.  I even asked for recommendations via Twitter and Facebook, and offered free lunch to anyone whose suggestion I ended up taking.  Of course that was before I read Friday’s Downtown Lunch column.  After that, there was no question what I was eating for lunch… bourbon chicken!  And I didn’t even have to head to the FiDi to get it.  I just walked over to DC Fusion Cafe (on 7th Ave. btw. 37+38th.)

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I love all you can eat buffets… and within that vast and wonderful realm the Chinese buffet is probably my favorite.  I don’t discriminate against any buffet, but sushi buffets tend to be too expensive, Mexican buffets don’t seem to stand up well to the steam table treatment, and Latin buffets are fine- but rice and beans and plantains always kill me in that equation!  Indian buffets are plentiful in Midtown, and I’m all about a good Indian buffet… but Chinese is my all time favorite.  Sadly Manhattan is practically devoid of Chinese buffets.  And in Midtown, there is only one option.  The “Midtown Buffet” on 7th Ave. btw. 40+41st.

It’s only $8 (and actually used to be cheaper) and I used it as the backdrop for the Midtown Lunch Guide to Beating the All You Can Eat Buffet a few years ago.  But it didn’t really get a full +/-, so yesterday on the holiest of holy Jewish days I hit up the Midtown Buffet for a little Yom Kippur lunch action.

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