Midtown Lunch

I’ve had my eye on the Fishing Shrimp truck, which has shown up in Midtown and also one day a week in Soho while otherwise parking in Brooklyn and other parts of Manhattan. The truck’s premise is simple – fry a couple of types of seafood and serve them in a basket or sandwich, with fries if you choose. It’s nice that they didn’t try to throw in some other influence (cough, cough, Korean food) as many trucks do to varied success. But if you’re only serving fried seafood, you’d better do it well.

Midtown contributor Anna seemed to like the fried fish OK, but was less enthusiastic about the “chips” which are just hand cut fries. While the fried conch sounded really good, I just couldn’t bring myself to pay $15 for lunch from a truck. Instead, I ordered the fish and shrimp combo with fries ($10) because it had everything in it that I wanted to try.

Isn’t that a nice looking pile of fried seafood? The mixed basket gets you four jumbo shrimp and two reasonably sized piece of fried whiting, along with a decent portion of fries. Whether or not this is worth $10 is up to you. I really liked the shrimp, maybe a bit more than the fish, and both were seasoned OK, but I agree with Anna that there could be a bit more salt in the batter. One fix is to load up on sauces. I got both hot sauce and cocktail sauce (there’s also tartar if that’s your thing) and both were good. I especially liked the cocktail sauce that had a healthy, nose-clearing dose of horseradish in it.

The weakest link in this basket was the fries. Not that they were bad, but they were definitely not English style chips (but then again, the fish was not English style either), and I could have used a bit more crispness. Really, it may be better to just load up on the seafood or get one of the po’ boy sandwiches and skip the potatoes.

Fishing Shrimp Truck, on Twitter and the Web