Midtown Lunch

Hing Won (on 48th btw. 5+6th) re-opened for business on Friday after being shut down by the Department of Health for the second time in as many months.  You have to wonder how long this can keep going, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  for good Chinese food, I’ll deal with the dirty.

Unfortunately some sad news on the Midtown East sandwich front.  Just after finding out that Hing Won had re-opened, I got an email from a Lunch’er reporting that Milant has been closed for “renovations” until further notice.  No word on whether this is related to their DOH closing a few months ago, but either way this is a huge loss… not just on the sandwich front, but on the cold gazpacho front.  It’s been really freakin’ hot out lately.

Got any news to report?  Email it to zach@midtownlunch.com

From this mornings NY Post: “A Queens man is suing [Subway] for $1 million after finding a large serrated knife he says was baked into the bread of his 12-inch cold-cut sub.  [He] bought the sub from a shop on West 35th Street, where he often went for lunch.” The article goes on to mention that although the man wasn’t harmed by the knife, he did become “violently ill with ‘severe stomach issues’ for three hours.”  There are only 3 letters for this one.  OMG.  Where to begin…  let’s see… uh… don’t eat at Subway?  That seems like a good start.  And then, if you do decide to eat at Subway, and you pick up your sub and feel something hard and knife-like inside the bread, you may not want to eat it.  Seems curious that part of his complaint was that the sub made him violently ill.  Isn’t a knife in a sandwich grounds enough for anger.  Do you really have to “prove” that you are owed restitution by admitting you still ate enough of the knife-filled sandwich to make you violently ill for 3 hours?  Awesome.

NY Times reports today on how the Unlimited Metrocard has changed the way office workers approach lunch.  “Today, many downtown office workers think nothing of hopping on the subway at Wall Street and zipping up to Union Square for lunch. Workers in Midtown might ride a couple of stops to Macy’s to get some shopping done during a break.”  It’s true, while my goto Subway Lunch is now gone, I have considered seeing how long it would take to lunch in other parts of the city via the subway.  Shake Shack?  Chinatown? Some have even suggested Jackson Heights could be done in under an hour if you hit the trains right.  That would be amazing.  And this idea is clearly spreading… some of my former co-workers have made it a habit to hop on the Rock Center subway to Nolita for lunch on Fridays.

Anybody have any intel on this topic?  Back when it was still open, the Manhattan Mall food court was easy in under an hour.  Have you gone farther?  How long did it take?  And where did you eat?  Comments please…

If you were hoping to cross the Avenue of the Americas for lunch purposes today, you may be very disappointed.  The MLB All Star Parade will be shutting down 6th Avenue from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. today, from 40th Street all the way up to 58th Street, and while there will be some cross streets open to pedestrians along the route, I think it’s safe to say you should pretty much steer clear of 6th Avenue during lunch;  unless of course you have an interest in watching grown men in baseball uniforms walk down the street for absolutely no reason (they didn’t even win nothing,) in which case you must be very excited.

Feisty Foodie, an avid ML reader, downtown lunch’er, and our very first Downtown Lunch correspondent, snapped this photo at Rosario’s downtown.  Looks like the Downtown Lunch column Daniel Krieger does for us every Friday has gotten noticed.  The takeover has begun… any other areas you’d like to see Midtown Lunch’ified?  This isn’t the only place in the city (or country for that matter) where crappy salad and fast food places need to be made fun of.  Nominations are currently being accepted in the comments…