Downtown Lunch: Greek Street Meat Cart

Midtown workers shouldn’t have all the fun, so to even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (ensuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food.)

Downtown Lunch: Greek Street Meat Cart

Call me a Midtown Lunch infidel, but I’ve never been a huge advocate of street meat. I’ve been burned too many times eating lunch at a cart, only to have my stomach sounding like a garbage truck rumbling down the West Side Highway a few hours later.

But I’m a Midtown Luncher now (well, a Downtown version of one anyway), and so with a heavy heart (all those burgers have an effect on the arteries) I set out to find my own local street meat peddler…and boy, did I ever find one.

Downtown Lunch: Greek Street Meat Cart

At the intersection of Wall and Broad streets I found one of the better street-sourced snacks I’ve had in this town. It’s proprietors, a Greek man and woman (they might be married but I didn’t want to pry), have been running this pushcart operation for 31 years! Damn- that’s a long time to be standing selling food, if you think about it.

Downtown Lunch: Greek Street Meat Cart

I bought a philly cheesesteak ($4.50) and I wanted to sample the chicken with rice and salad plate ($5). The cheesesteak, as you can see, is nicely marbled and actually looks like real meat. They overcooked it a bit as I realized a few minutes into the cooking that she never took it off the grill. They probably would rather be safe than sorry, but when I go back I’ll probably ask her to make it a bit rarer.

Downtown Lunch: Greek Street Meat Cart
Downtown Lunch: Greek Street Meat CartOverall though it was great.. the grinder roll had a nice texture to it, and the onions and cheese all blended together in that gooey-good-way a cheesesteak should. I ate half and then tasted a few bites of the chicken with rice platter. Definitely one of the better one’s I’ve had; the chicken was not overcooked and had a nice flavor to it. I packaged it up though after a few bites, and gave it to a homeless man on the subway (at least I think he was homeless.) But then I finished the other half of the sandwich because it was really damn good.

If you’re down in front of the stock exchange check this place out. There’s also a bunch of tables with chairs right there for people to sit and have lunch or watch the gawking tourists take photos. It was really a nice little lunch… well it was, until a man walking by just stopped, vomited on the sidewalk, and then kept walking like nothing had happened. You know…like he had spit out a piece of gum. True story.

Greek Street Meat Cart, Corner of Wall St. & Broad St.

Photos and post by http://www.danielkrieger.com

ADVERTISEMENT

12 Comments

  • Did you ask him where he had eaten? Just, you know, as a precaution…

  • Hey, I walk by there all the time. Can you give more info about which corner it’s on? I mean, clearly not on the Southwest corner, cuz that’s the NYSE and it’s gated off, but there are a bunch of carts all there… thanks :)

  • That cheese steak looks good. And very promising that they cook it up for you. Do they serve the chicken with tzatziki? And more importantly…do they have real lamb? I’ve been trying to find something that comes close to the street gyros I had in Greece.

  • Perhaps he was regurgitating the excess he had from a large meal?

  • Cheesesteak looks great and at almost half the price of most brick and mortar places..

  • I’m all for a little grit in life, but that grill…… damn at least run the spatula across it occasionally.

    What’s next? A hot dog cart?

  • Bossman, as Al Bundy knows, the flavor on a grill comes from the fossilized ashen remains of meals past.

  • Vyo – in the top photo of the full cart, you can see a smidge of the big American flag above the guys head (walking with the ipod) so that kinda shows you exactly where it should be.

    The cart actually used to be down the street for the majority of their years but there’s construction going on now so they had to move it.

    Bossman – This is my second cart post since I’ve been here.. but isn’t something like half of the main posts on ML lunch all carts? Not sure what the “hot dog cart” line means??

  • xlnt street food review here

  • Zach,

    I think a little critical punctuation is order here: “Greek Street Meat” could be interpreted as “Greek Street-Meat” or “Greek St. Meat”. I know you meant well but some of the degenerates on this board including DocChuck’s Hamster are salivating.

  • I beg your pardon, but I do not *TWITCH* belong to any political parties, and I have never been *TWITCH* chosen to attend one of them political conventions. I will however happily bite *TWITCH* your nuts off.

Leave a Reply

You must log in or register to post a comment.