PROFILE: Downtown Lunch’er “Kevin”

As is customary here on Midtown Lunch, every Tuesday we’ll profile a different lunch’er and get their recommendations for places to eat in Downtown NYC. This week, we have composer extraordinaire Kevin Clark, aka estarriolvetch in ML land, who hopes his fellow lunch’ers will help him find a very specific kind of taco downtown.

 

Name: Kevin Clark

Occupation: Theater Composer and Arts Administrator

Where you work: John and Gold streets

Age: 25

Favorite Kinds of Food: Narrowing it down is not easy. Cured pork of basically any variety, sushi (especially mackerel but really everything), buttery sardines, runny egg yolks, good hot sauce on deeply unhealthy crispy meat (wings, schwarma, burgers, you name it), dumplings – especially the fried soup dumplings with a name I can never remember, big bowls of noodles in soup, butternut and patty pan squash, and green zebra heirloom tomatoes. Garlic in all its many and varied forms. Really, the tomatoes should have gone higher on that list.

Least Favorite Foods: Melted cheese that’s half-recongealed so it’s hard but still stretches in that gross rubbery way, undersalted things, shredded coconut, microwaved pizza crust, dry fish, cucumbers where they don’t belong…

Favorite Lunches Downtown: Tokyo Kitchen on John St. (btw. Broadway & Nassau), Alan’s Falafel on Broadway (btw. Liberty & Cedar) Their fried eggplant – too delicious. Recent price hike – yeah, that’s fair. If I’m taking a long lunch it’s worth the hike up to Doyers St. for Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles (btw. Pell & Bowery), though it’s far. Sometimes they have this spicy cold tofu appetizer that’s just awesome.

The “go-to” lunch place you and your co-workers eat at too often: Jubilee Marketplace. They’re right across the street, and the steam trays plus a good deli counter are just an irresistible one-two punch of “eh, it’s good enough”. Close, fast, and not too expensive – so hard to resist. Plus they know me by now, so that’s fun.

Place you discovered thanks to Midtown Lunch: Alan’s Falafel (thanks – delicious), and Tokyo Kitchen actually. And some more distant pizza places I can’t remember the names of cause I can’t be bothered to go that far more than a couple times.

Dream job location, purely for lunch purposes, and why?: Probably Tokyo – udon and raw fish are perfect Kevin-bait. So is tako yaki.

Anything you’d like to ask the Midtown Lunch readers: Honduras style tacos. Where can I get them? When I lived in Baltimore I went to the farmer’s market, and there was a Peruvian stand that served these delicious torpedos made of deep fried masa filled with pulled chicken. You’d dip them in sour cream and this awesome curried mayo thing I could never quite figure out (the mayo I think was actually Peruvian, but I don’t really know). Breakfast of champions. Anyway, I asked and was told they’re Honduras style tacos. Anyone have a good lead on where I can find these things? I miss them very, very much. Help me Downtown Lunch Kenobi, you’re my only hope.

I am absolutely no help in the taco department as our selection down here is fairly sad, but curried mayo sounds delicious. Any of you lunch’ers able to help Kevin out? And as always, if you would like to be next week’s Profiled Lunch’er (or know somebody you’d like to nominate), email us at downtownnyc@midtownlunch.com.

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