Midtown Lunch

It’s true this site has a bias against the many generic delis dotting the downtown landscape. It’s also true that some of them serve at least one thing that differentiates them from the others, whether it’s roast pork, rare roast beef or Korean food. A while back, someone tipped us off that Variety Cafe on Broadway had a mongolian grill where you pick your fixings and they cook it for you. After an investigation, it seems that you need to employ some sort of strategy to keep your lunch here under $10.

You need to follow a series of steps before taking your food to the guy manning the flat top who will cook your lunch in front of you. First, grab yourself a silver bowl located on the right side of the buffet full of raw vegetables, meat, seafood, sauces, rice and noodles. Then comes the hard part, which is filling your bowl with whatever you want in your stir fry and then coming up with a sauce combination that won’t be disgusting.

The buffet is $9.50 per pound and is weighed after it’s been cooked. I didn’t realize this, or I would have gone a little bit more crazy with the large number of sauces and seasonings like teriyaki, cooking wine, soy, sweet chili, barbeque, black bean and something mysteriously labeled “traditional sauce.”

I put in some thin rice noodles, various vegetables including mushrooms, peppers, green onion, bean sprouts, carrots, along with a few shrimp and a piece of salmon. It was then cooked up in a couple of minutes on the large griddle, and then off to be weighed and paid for. I was pretty confident that I hadn’t gone overboard but my total was still $10.25. As you can see this equated to about a half container full of food which filled me up but wasn’t nearly as much as you’d get from any of the Chinese or Thai places nearby for the same amount of money or less.

I guess if you’re trying to be healthy and want to control what goes into your stir fry lunch, this is a good option, but otherwise for me it wasn’t worth rationing what I put in out of fear I’d have a two pound, $20 lunch.

Variety Cafe, 65 Broadway (nr. Rector), (212) 430-6888