Midtown Lunch

There will be some sad vegetarians in midtown (or sad cart mash-up lunch’ers), as the 99% Vegetarian Food Cart has moved downtown from its former spot on 52nd St. & 6th. I spotted the cart on Liberty St. (at Broadway), and the guys working there said they’d been there since Monday.

It seems things like the hassles with the hot dog carts finally got to them. For those downtown uninitiated with this cart (and wondering why it’s only 99% vegetarian), they mostly serve vegetarian fare…but also chicken. It’s definitely the fanciest cart to be parked in that area, but I could see a combo from the 99% Vegetarian and Alan’s Falafel carts in my future.

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… Read more »

More mobile sweets are coming to the South Street Seaport, with Cupcake Stop bringing a new truck to Pier 17 at Fulton St. starting Thursday.  If you are truly a cupcake addict and a freeloader, then you can take a picture of the truck roving around the city from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. today or Wednesday and send it to the truck via Twitter or Facebook to win four of their classic cupcakes. The cupcakes join a permanent cart from Wafels & Dinges that launched a couple of weeks ago. This only means that more tourists on a sugar high will make their way into Abercrombie & Fitch.

It looks like two new places are coming to Maiden Lane, one of which is also opening two locations in Midtown. Hot Clay Oven is bringing Indian food to 101 Maiden Lane (btw. Gold & Pearl). There’s no menu up on their Web site yet, but it does say that it will be the first of several locations in the city. I’m also intrigued by its tagline  of “really fine Indian food the American way.” What does that even mean?

The other place is Hello Pasta on the next block at 125 Maiden (btw. Pearl and Water). Its other two locations as of now have been spotted in Midtown and open at the beginning of June, and the downtown one is set to open at the end of that month. Apparently this is only the first step in the chain’s domination plans. We’ll see what the early word is from the lunch’ers to the north before passing judgment.

Both of these are on a stretch of Maiden Lane that’s crowded with other higher-end chains like Pret, Chipotle, Au Bon Pain, Just Salad and Hale & Hearty. I guess at least the area is sticking with a theme and running with it.

It’s not often I get in on naming anything, let alone a place that serves me cheap-ass food. I headed to a cart in front of 7 Hanover Square (at Pearl St.) on a mission to get their chicken curry ($5) that I had spotted a few days before. They serve it every day, but I guess it’s popular because when I ordered it around 1 p.m. I was sadly told that they were out of it. The guy who was manning the grills must have seen the crestfallen look on my face as I tried to figure out what else to get, and offered to cook up some chicken and put “gravy” on it for me. Read on to see how this improvised street meat turned out. Read more »

This is what comfort food looks like in Malaysia, courtesy of Lunch with Front Studio

• Malaysian mini-chain Nyonya can hook you up with some “reliable comfort food” at their newly-fancified Grand St. location. [Lunch With Front Studio]
• Apparently if you don’t have your shit together at Katz’s Deli and lose your ticket, they will slap you with a $50 fine. [Eater NY]
• The twice-weekly (including Wednesdays) Fulton Stall Market opens for the season on South St., for all of  you who love putting a lunch together from multiple sources. [Diner’s Journal]
• Torrisi Italian Specialties gets another glowing blogger endorsement for its sandwiches, which toe the ML price line. I want to go to there. [Food In Mouth]
• Fancy pants Vietnamese sandwich shop An Choi expanded to the space next door and built some hipster-looking tables to sit at. [Grub Street]

Midtown Lunch’er dkriese tipped me off that a new Japanese bakery was opening on Murray St. (at Church). I did a walk by, and there is indeed a place called Takahachi Bakery going in on the ground floor of a new condo building called Tribeca Space. The sign on the window doesn’t say when it’s opening, and the bakery’s unofficial Web site (aka, a Facebook page) says they still can’t announce an opening date, after an initial May 17 date was delayed by at least a week due to the Building Department. If the photos they have up are any indication, there will be breads and pastries, and hot dogs will be involved.