Midtown Lunch

We don’t get much of the fad foods downtown, unless you count The Meatball Shop or the million cupcake places. A new Italian place called Da Mikele opened on Church St. (btw. White & Franklin) recently and while I was scanning the menu my eyes immediately skipped to the words “pizza cone.” Those of you who read the midtown site may recall the hype and rapid flameout of K! Pizzacone, which I could tell just by the pictures I would not want to put in my body. I was pretty sure the cones at Da Mikele were going to be a step above and not just a vehicle to get a wad of cheese into my stomach. And I found a co-lunch’er to go along so I could also justify sampling the pizza.

This is not a slice joint (as you can clearly see from the inside that screams “artfully rustic”), so plan accordingly. You have to wait a bit for your pizza or pizza-like item to be baked and if you don’t have a gameplan you might take a little more than an hour for lunch.

If you’re going solo you can’t go wrong with the pizza cone. It’s $8 and could easily fill one person up with its bready, cheesy goodness. And they give you delicious free bread to up the ante…possibly the best free bread imaginable. Basically, you’re going to need a nap after eating the carb-filled lunch here.

The cone was packed with ground sausage and broccoli rabe with a healthy amount of cheese lodged at the bottom. It was indeed in cone shape but you’d be crazy to try to eat this thing with your hands. My co-lunch’er observed that it was like a calzone, but I think it was a little less cheesy than that and there was no tomato sauce.

Now let’s talk about the pizza. We got a small diavola ($16), or “the one with the spicy salame,” and it was cut into four decent-sized pieces. If you pay a couple of dollars more you can get a large pie and that should be sufficient for filling up two or three people depending on the levels of hunger. This pizza was top notch, although not optimal for eating with your hands. That salame was spicy and greasy like a good pizza topping should be. Delicious.

We ended up going over the ML price barrier for the sake of research, but you could easily get out of here for about $10 per person depending on how much you order and how cheap you are with tips. If you work in the area it might be worth your time just for the pizza cone alone.

THE + (What somebody who likes this place would say)

• I feel like I’m eating in a rustic Italian village for lunch.
• The pizza is high-quality and you can still eat for less than $10.
• My long search for pizza in cone form is over!

THE — (What somebody who doesn’t like this place would say)

• It’s a little too expensive for lunch purposes.
• I don’t want to eat my pizza with a knife and fork.

Da Mikele, 275 Church St. (btw. White & Franklin), (212) 925-8800