Midtown Lunch

I wasn’t aware that we’d written about Pizza Italia on Stone St. (btw. Broad & Whitehall) when profiled lunch’er Matt gave his thumbs up to their round grandma and buffalo chicken slices. It turns out that former head Downtown Lunch’er Daniel had indeed checked out this round grandma pie during his tenure and gave it a thumbs up. That post even inspired Zach to muse about what exactly a grandma slice was.

All of this talk of grandmas and slices made me both confused and hungry, so I headed down to the bottom of the Financial District to check out this buffalo chicken slice and see what else Pizza Italia had to offer. Read more »

If you work near the Fulton St. Transit Center construction area, you probably know it’s a nightmare trying to walk around with streets torn up and sidewalks narrowed, but on John St. there are also a bunch of other building projects going on. Unsurprisingly, it’s affecting businesses in the area, including the old-timer Roxy Coffee Shop on the block of John btw. Broadway & Nassau. It’s been there since 1944, was renovated a couple of years ago, and sits next to one of my favorite sources of pizza in the area, It’s A Pizza which I’m guessing has also lost business. As noted in the forums, a neighborhood resident talked to the owner of Roxy’s about how the construction was affecting business, and what he found out wasn’t good.

A couple of months ago, word reached ML that the Urban Lobster Shack in Midtown East had a lobster roll involving bacon. It turns out that the location on Stone St. (btw. Broad & Whitehall) also has this bacon lobster roll for $13, which is a couple of dollars more than the regular roll combo. It would appear it’s a roll with a strip of bacon inside, so whether that’s a good or bad addition is up to you to decide. I’m still a fan of their lobster scampi roll which is sounding pretty great in this warmer weather.

One day late last week I was absolutely starving come noon and that coincided with spying a new food truck making an appearance at the World Financial Center lot. Palenque, a truck serving arepas and other Colombian food, was going to be there, the weather was gorgeous and all of the stars seemed to be aligning for me to get meat-and-cheese-topped ground corn in my belly. That happened eventually, but during the hour-plus in between I realized that it really is important for food trucks to get their bearings before attempting to feed the hungry masses.

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Sad news on the soup front – it looks like the beloved Cafe Doppio on Beaver (at Broad) has shuttered instead of simply closing for a fix-up session. I know a lot of you liked this place for their huge selection of soups, but they were also next door to a Hale & Hearty and around the corner and across the street from a Cosi and Au Bon Pain. Round that out with the Pret A Manger further up Broad St. and that seems like a little too much soup and sandwich competition in one area for a mom-and-pop store to survive.