Midtown Lunch

Eateries serving Mexican food alongside Chinese food are fairly plentiful in the city, with at least a couple within Downtown Lunch boundaries. One of those is called New Fresco Tortillas III on Reade St. (btw. Broadway & Church) and it’s just out of the way enough that if you don’t know it’s there, you’d miss it. There aren’t too many hole-in-the-wall Chinese spots left in Tribeca, with China Red on Chambers St. perhaps the most visible. I’m happy I didn’t walk right by New Fresco because I got served some of the finest Americanized Chinese food I’ve had in recent memory at a cheap price. Win win!  Read more »

Most of the Chinese food options in the Financial District average about $7 or $8 for a lunch special. China 59 on Nassau St. (btw Maiden Lane & John St.) pegs theirs at $9 which gets you something from a list of mostly Americanized Chinese food, pork fried rice, and an egg roll. I wondered if it was worth walking down the wide staircase to the basement restaurant for lunch. To my surprise, little touches made the couple of extra dollars spent seem worth it.  Read more »

New menu items keep popping up at A-Pou’s Taste cart and some of them are so different that I feel the need to try them. When I walked by the other day, there was a sign for a new dish called “brown meat sauce over rice” next to the ones for pork chop over rice and shrimp fried rice. What I was picturing in my head and what I got were pretty different, but the dish wasn’t like anything I’d eaten before.  Read more »

We’ve sampled the pork chop of Excellent Pork Chop House, as well as one of the noodle soups, but that was a long time ago in 2008. The Doyers St. institution now has its own Web site and pretty much everyone knows about it. The classics here are pork chop or chicken leg over rice with pickled mustard greens, but I had a hankering for rice cakes and saw that this restaurant had a decent selection. The version with shredded pork piqued my interest and off I went to carbo load.

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You may be able to get steamed buns at some of the Chinese spots in the Financial District, but they’re often over priced and underwhelming. Vivi Bubble Tea on John St. (nr. Nassau) is not necessarily a place you would think of for anything other than a liquid lunch. Yes, they offer many different varieties of bubble tea, but you can also get a couple varieties of steamed buns at lunch time although I’ve learned that you probably need to go as close to noon as possible, or even earlier, in order to get your hands on some.

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The faded red awning of China Red Gourmet is still intact on Chambers St. (btw. Church & W. Broadway), and the inside of the place is exactly the same as it was about three years ago when I checked out their awesome by-the-pound buffet.

You can still look at yourself eating in mirrors that line the wall, and you’re still not allowed to bring in outside food. What has changed are the prices which are a bit higher than when I was last here, with the buffet now $4.75 per pound. This time I ignored that buffet in favor of one of their lunch specials, and I think the former is the way to go here.

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Now you can get something to eat alongside your various tea-based drinks at Vivi Bubble Tea on John St. (near Nassau). The Taiwanese drinks shop now sells steamed buns filled with roast pork or sweet taro. I’m not sure if $1.65 apiece is a good deal, but it’s pretty much the only option for this kind of snack in the Financial District.