Midtown Lunch

What I love about having SoHo in my coverage area is that a lot of its lunch options aren’t chains and can be within ML price range if you stick to the basics. Pepe Rosso To Go on Sullivan (btw. Prince & W. Houston) had been on my radar for a while after being mentioned in some profiles and also on Lunch Studio. Most of their panini are less than $10 and some of the pastas are if you go meatless. The reason I headed up there was for the lunch special, and I ended up being happy I hopped on the subway for something as lame sounding as pasta.

When I got to the tiny restaurant, which has about three tables and a church pew outside for overflow seating, I laughed at the signs on the bottom of the menu saying what they don’t have. The list includes skim milk, decaf coffee and Diet Coke. This reminded me of Alidoro and its lengthy list of things they don’t have, although there was more than one person at Pepe Rosso putting the food together, and they seemed a little more friendly. Another positive sign was that there was a table of Italians in the shop when I got there.

The lunch special is a little limited at two pastas and two sandwiches that come with soup or salad for $8.95. If you don’t want the soup or salad you can still eat here for less than $10. My choice was the fusilli with tomatoes and arugula with a salad, and you also get three or four small slices of bread. This is the healthiest lunch I can remember eating for this site in a long time, possibly because it involved an actual salad and not the kind you get with street meat.

I’m going to start by saying the pasta, despite being really simple, was friggin’ delicious and made with decent products. Is it bad that I get excited to have cooked to order pasta for lunch instead of steam table mediocrity? I could have easily eaten all of it, along with the great bread, and happily fallen into a food coma for the rest of the day.

Pepe Rosso To Go, 149 Sullivan St. (btw. Prince & W. Houston), (212) 677-4555