Midtown Lunch

There aren’t a lot of Puerto Rican food options downtown unless you count Sandra’s Food Spot Cart on Nassau St. in the Financial District, or lump West Side Coffee Shop or Sophie’s Cuban together in that vague category of “Latin food.” There is, however, Sazon on Reade St. (btw. Church & W. Broadway) in Tribeca. Yes, it’s a fancy take on Puerto Rican food, but the lunch menu has a few options at the $10 or below mark. I decided to try out their take on the jibarito – the sandwich with fried plantains in place of bread – and was pretty happy with what I got.

The options that are cheapskate friendly are some soups, a half sandwich/soup or salad combo, a Cubano or the chicken jibarito. There’s also a jibarito featuring steak but that’s $1 more and I thought the $10 chicken version sounded just fine. All of the sandwiches come with rice and beans, yucca fries or potato salad.

I’d ordered my meal online and it was ready in the 15 minutes it took for me to walk there. The sandwich smelled great when I cracked the lid of the plastic takeout container and I’m not sure what the thin pieces of grilled chicken breast were marinated in, but it was great. No dry white meat here. The sandwich also contained avocado slices, tomato, lettuce, roasted red pepper and red onion and a container of mojo sauce came alongside which I used for dipping. This greatly enhanced the fried plantain and other bits of the sandwich that were a bit bland on their own.

I couldn’t resist getting the yucca fries, but in the end wished I’d gone with the beans and rice. They were more like yucca home fries and their plastic to-go container unfortunately held in the heat a little too well, leading to sogginess, but then when they cooled down were hard little nubs made impenetrable to my plastic fork. I ate them anyway because, hey, fried carbs!

I know some of you may balk at paying $10 for a non-massive sandwich, but this plus the yucca nubs kept me full until just before dinner. And I guess it’s really not much more expensive than Sophie’s since they did away with their cheap lunch combos.

Sazon, 105 Reade St. (btw. Church & W. Broadway), (212) 406-1900