Midtown Lunch

Yet another source of coffee is coming to the upper part of the Financial District as Oren’s Daily Roast announced it will open its 12th location at William St. & Fulton. The shop won’t be caffeinating us until the end of the year, but a look at their Web site shows that they focus on the coffee and tea and it’s not really a lunch destination (unless you consider coffee lunch).

Ever since Sushi by Bento Nouveau (which is now called Bento Sushi) remodeled its store at Broadway & Cortlandt St. I’ve been going there more frequently, mostly for udon soup or one of the protein over rice dishes. The other day when a craving for sushi hit I couldn’t be bothered to go to a restaurant and wait for food so instead decided to go check out Bento Sushi’s pre-made maki rolls. The place is constantly busy which is a good thing since the sushi you grab from the refrigerated case is likely to not have been sitting there long in frigid purgatory (where good sushi rice goes to die). I grabbed a sushi combo on one visit and later went back for a California roll. Sadly, it looks like the hot items are the way to go here rather than the sushi namesake.

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Many people wanting lunch from a cart tend to gravitate toward the collection on Broadway between Liberty and Cedar streets, but some more interesting options can be found a few blocks away on William St. The stretch between Maiden Lane and John St. is home to a smoothie cart, fruit seller along with a Biryani House cart and Halal Gyro Express which serve an interesting mix of street meat, falafel, biryani, kati rolls and some Afghani dishes. A while ago a new cart called NY Express Biryani started parking right across William St. from Biryani House serving some of the same dishes including kati rolls, biryani and chicken tikka. It wasn’t until yesterday that I walked by, though, and noticed a substantial lunchtime line outside NY Express Biryani so I thought I should finally post about its presence. Have any of you eaten there? Is the food worth crossing the street for?

NY Express Biryani Cart, corner of William & John streets

Sometimes curiousity gets the best of me and I end up eating something that I know full well is probably going to be terrible. You see, I love a good banh mi, even if I have to shell out more than $5 for it. A good sandwich is a good sandwich and sometimes you have to pay more than rock bottom Chinatown prices, especially in the Financial District. The thing is, though, that we have several sources of Vietnamese sandwiches in the area that are actually good so when a chain steps up and sells something called a banh mi, it had better be solid. Yushi on Pearl St. (btw. Maiden & Pine) tried its best, but really they should just stick with their Yu Bowls and overpriced dumplings and leave the sandwich game to someone else. After the jump I will tell you what happens when you try to make a Vietnamese sandwich with sourdough bread.

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You may have eaten from the Shorty’s on Wheels truck at some point since it launched a while back (and which I realize I haven’t reviewed), as it was a regular in the Financial District for a while and now parks in the WFC food truck lot on occasion. But did you know that truck is an offshoot of two Shorty’s cheese steak shops in the Flatiron and Midtown? Well, Shorty’s announced on Twitter Friday that they’re opening a shop at 62 Pearl St. between Coenties Slip & Broad sometime around Christmas. Their cheese steaks are said to be good, although the roast pork is supposedly better. Either way, they will also have a bunch of beer on tap and whatever a whiskey wall is for your liquid lunch and happy hour needs. Photo courtesy of ultraclay.

It’s been a while since we checked out a street meat cart that hasn’t already been written about on this site, so earlier this week I took walk over to the Wall St. Food Cart that’s always sitting in the middle of food trucks at the corner of Front St. & Wall. The cart has a few oddities on its menu (a ham & cheese sandwich, a BLT, spaghetti!) meaning it’s not exactly a halal cart, although I’m not sure whether they actually serve these things. I was here for the chicken and lamb over rice combo ($6) and while one of the meats was a disappointment they’re doing a lot of things right.

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It had been a while since making a visit to Nicky’s Vietnamese Sandwiches on Nassau St. (btw. Fulton & Ann) and I was pleasantly surprised to see the small space was jam-packed with people ordering and consuming banh mi and pho. Scenes like this make me happy that not everyone chooses to stand in line at the nearest chain for lunch, but I digress. I’m here to talk about the third lunch-worthy item on the menu at Nicky’s which is the pork chop, chicken or tofu over rice or rice vermicelli. Yes, at $8.50 it’s more expensive than most places in Chinatown but as I discovered, if you want Vietnamese food and aren’t in the mood for a sandwich, Nicky’s will still fix you up right.

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