Midtown Lunch

This site has previously had reviews of fried chicken noodle soup and other items from the Korean portion of Cafe Hanover at Hanover Sq. & Pearl, but for some inexplicable reason we’ve shunned the Kyedong chicken. This brand of Korean fried chicken is advertised in a poster in the window and in panels on the wall behind the front counter where you pay. Sandwiched between offerings of pork belly for $40 and whole chickens, there are portions of chicken at Midtown Lunch-friendly prices. Click through to check out the behemoth lunch box it comes in, housing equally oversized pieces of chicken.

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Last Friday I had my mind all set on a nice, healthy lunch to try to purge the plates of fatty pork and street cart fare I’d eaten earlier in the week. That all went down the drain when I saw the Real Good Truck was parking in the Financial District that day, and I’d been wanting to check out their weird waffle sandwiches since the truck launched at the beginning of January. Donny ate their beefwich sandwich soon after they hit the streets and wasn’t overly impressed by the deliciousness-to-price ratio that I often find to be the downfall of the new-school trucks. Their fryer is now operational, so I headed over with the fried chicken waffle in mind. Read more »

I don’t often venture over to the edges of Tribeca because it’s mostly full of restaurants so far out of the ML Downtown price range that it’s laughable. But a couple of weeks ago I was doing a little online digging to see if there were any decent BBQ spots downtown, and a place called Cornerstone Grill on Greenwich (at Duane) was mentioned. Sure enough, when I walked over I spotted an awning bearing the glorious words “chicken and ribs.” Was I even in Tribeca anymore?

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It came out last week that the Bon Chon Chicken location on Chambers St. had been cast out by the company for using unapproved sauces. This leaves the larger John St. location as the only one downtown, and that might be for the best based on my experiences at both locations last week. The Chambers location was still called Bon Chon and prices and everything seemed the same. I decided it might be worth a look at what they’re serving there since that location has never gotten an ML review, and I also revisited the John St. location for some head-to-head Korean fried chicken comparison. Read more »

On a particularly cool and rainy day, I was in the mood for something meaty and hearty. In other words, I wanted some good old-fashioned comfort food. That was how I ended up at Texas Rotisserie & Grill on Fulton Street – where you can get a gut bomb or a marginally “healthy” meal squarely in the Midtown Luncher price range. Read more »

Korean food has to be one of my most favorite cuisines of all time.  Good soup? Check.  Awesome BBQ? Check.  An affinity for fiery condiments and sauces? Check and check.  So the first time I had even heard that there was such a thing as Korean fried chicken, there was no decision making to be done. It was simply a matter of dropping what I was doing and proceeding to the nearest purveyor of that delicious, crispy treat.  That place happened to be what was once Bon Chon on the corner of 32^nd and 5^th Ave.  Even though it’s now still essentially the same thing, a little part of me died the day they closed their doors.  So you can imagine how thrilled (and I do mean thrilled) I was to find that Bon Chon had moved in practically next door to my workplace.  There could be no waiting.  Lunchtime was now. Read more »

For some reason there are a lot of lunch’ers outside of Midtown who read this blog.  And even more surprisingly, it has caused some people to actually say they wish they worked in Midtown, so they could eat at some of the places I’ve written about.  Let me speak for everyone who works in this hell hole when I say- you people are insane.  That being said, I’ve decided to allow some of these people to make us jealous, by writing about a lunch in a different area.  The workers of Downtown New York seem to be the most vocal, so this week I turn the site over to Yvo, a downtown lunch’er, and Midtown Lunch reader, who also has a blog of her own (The Feisty Foodie).

Reason for jealousy?  We’ve got a lot of carts and trucks in Midtown.  But none of them serve fried chicken!  Why don’t we have a fried chicken truck.  Wah!!!!!!

You Midtown Lunch’ers think you have it bad.  Try working Downtown.  Any small jewel found in the dregs of Downtown gets me excited… so I was delighted to finally try Mobile Fried Chicken.  What a genius concept; fried chicken in a truck.  Can you imagine anything better?  The execution is a little flawed, but who cares.  It’s fried chicken in a truck, and ever since I began working on Water Street, I’ve had to walk by that smell of delicious fried food every day.  I love fried pretty much anything, although I draw the line at deep fried Oreos and Twinkies.  Something about that skeeves me, but I’m sure one day I will give in…

I got there at a bit past 1, and there was a decent line- but it moves fairly quickly.

What Yvo got, and more Fried Chicken Truck porn, after the jump… Read more »