Midtown Lunch

Our friends over at NYMag’s Grub Street recently unveiled a massive line-up of up-and-coming restaurant openings. While we’re looking forward to some exciting expansions and new additions to the NY food scene, we couldn’t help but be a little disappointed over the lack of new midtown restaurants. In fact, the only real Midtown Lunch worthy newcomer seems to be an outpost of South Korean dumpling chain, Daheen Wang Mandoo, which will serve their awesome and cheap steamed dumplings in K-town (32nd St & 5th Ave).

Other potential midtown lunch spots include a “retro soda shop” concept called The Skylight Shoppe at 50th & Madison, which will serve an oysters Rockefeller po’boy. Additionally, Laurent Tourondel, formerly of the BLT group, will be opening an upscale burger joint at 40th & 5th, and will be serving his signature burgers, kobe hot dogs, and boozy milkshakes. In brighter news, it looks like the new Midtown Ippudo is finally set to open in December.

Ramen lovers in Midtown, it looks like the second coming of Ippudo will be much later than originally expected. Last year, we learned that a January opening might be in the works, but one only needs to take a glance at the space to think that Crain’s might have meant January 2013, not ’12.  Although I’m certainly not an expert at interpreting these things, the work permit seems to indicate that construction approval was only recently granted on April 18th. I called the East Village location to get more information, but received a “No Comment” from the person that answered the phone.