Midtown Lunch

Yesterday, our friends at Eater announced Burger week, in which they will all sorts of festivities celebrating the hamburger in all its glory. They’ve arranged specials at restaurants around town and prizes that the freeloader in the know will want to get their hands on. They’ll also be running a poll all week to determine the best burger in town. Clearly, it’ll be full of all sorts of fancy-types, but all are invited to nominate their favorites by emailing tips@eater.com before Sunday at noon. Last year’s Midtown Lunch poll was a huge upset as Five Guys beat out Shake Shack, so this should be interesting to see.

One thing we failed to mention during our look at Social Eatz the other week is that there are several menu items that are definitely worth a splurge, because let’s face it – we can’t all be cheapskates all the time (I’m looking at you Zach.) Like luncher Huck, I’m a huge fan of their tomato curry soup ($5) and I agree with our friends over at Immaculate Infatuation that the $12 Bibimbap Burger is a truly good and exciting riff of the classic Korean dish that it gets its roots from. For the lunchers that have the financial means, both of these items are worth a look.
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If there’s anything worse than a gimmicky restaurant in Midtown, it must be a Midtown restaurant with an overabundance of gimmicks. 4Food (Madison btw. 40+41st) arrived on the scene last year with a semi-healthy (?) burger concept called (W)holeburgers featuring patties with holes in them, along with a multitude of creative sandwich toppings, an industrial chic look (complete with iPad stations), space age packaging, and an aggressive social networking strategy. None of that made me anxious to try it, but it was one of their other gimmicks that finally got me in the door, and convinced me to create a Midtown Lunch inspired burger – their Billboard-esque chart of customer burger creations.

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I love a good deal as much as anyone else, but it’s been years since I’ve found any great pleasure surfing the dollar menu anywhere. That said, when I saw the sign for $1 burgers and dogs at Pop’s in last week’s Links, I knew I’d have to investigate. Lunchtime Monday afternoon, I went over to 7th Avenue to check it out.

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Every day, the Chef’s Table at Cucina & Co. in the Rock Center Concourse offers a different lunch for $9.50 from 11:30 to 12:30. The lunches change each week (Brownie enjoyed their pork tenderloin medallions with pasta), but Fridays are always the same. Chef Juan anchors each week with his cheeseburger sliders, and they’re popular enough to have gotten the attention of Concourse neighbor Tri Tip. We’ve never had the sliders though, so I decided to head out for an early lunch last Friday (the Chef’s Table is known to run out of food). See what I found after the jump.
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In the two years that it has been open, Schnipper’s Quality Kitchen has always seemed to covet a spot amongst New York’s burger elite. Initial reactions to their signature offering were good, but not great. While Schnipper’s was quietly stepping their ground meat game up, by cooking patties to order and switching to LaFrieda beef, Shake Shack opened a few blocks away and the stakes got higher. Schnipper’s burgers have seemingly been climbing up the ranks of public opinion for a while now, so I decided to celebrate their 2 Year Anniversary with my first visit, and one of their new and improved cheeseburgers.

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Wined and Dined put together a list of NYC’s best budget burgers and more than a few are in Midtown. ML mainstays the Burger Joint (on 56th btw. 6+7th) and Black Shack Burger (on Lex btw. 37+38th) made the cut, but the place we’re most interested in trying is the just out of bounds Stag’s Head (on 51st and 2nd Ave.) Their $7.25 burger comes with fries and is made with Pat LaFrieda beef. Yes please.

Burgers made from Pat LaFrieda beef are becoming more and more common in Midtown. It’s long been the calling card of Shake Shack, and recently other burger places like Bill’s Bar & Burger and Schnipper’s have used LaFrieda beef to try to separate themselves from the pack. With so many “burger places” using LaFrieda beef, it wasn’t a total shock when Zagat reported that Bread Factory Cafe (on 8th btw. 55+56th) was now advertising LaFrieda beef, even though Bread Factory is an all purpose, generic Midtown deli (minus the by-the-lb buffet), not a place that specializes in burgers. Clearly this situation warranted further investigation.
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Over a year has come and gone since we’ve written about the food that Frites n Meats offers to lunchers all over the city. Since then, they’ve shown quite the penchant for generating non-food headlines, whether it be the frequent tussles with other food trucks, their indirect involvement with an increased crackdown on food trucks in Midtown, or even DeBragga-gate of 2009. As interesting as it may be to read and report on restaurant and food truck drama, it’s always been about the food here at ML, and I decided to fight this week’s cold weather with their spicy jazz burger and a cup of chicken noodle soup.

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I love 2  Bros Pizza. Their $1 slices of pizza represent the marriage of value and quality that I believe is at the heart of all the best Midtown Lunches. Back in July we noticed that the newest 2 Bros. (on 46th btw. 5+6th) was going to be launching similarly budget-conscious burgers. Cheap burgers are a more dubious proposition than cheap pizza, but I had to find out if the 2 Bros. crew could pull off the same magic they have with their pizza.
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