Midtown Lunch

There haven’t been many new interesting additions to the cart scene at Broadway between Liberty and Cedar streets lately. Last week Lunch’er Jeff wrote in to say that a new option serving Thai food had appeared next to the A-Pou’s Taste cart. A Thai food cart?! I’m on board with any cart offering food that’s more exciting than halal street meat.

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Some days, lunchtime goes awry and the place I want to go eat at is closed or no longer exists. The latter happened to me earlier this week, so when I walked past Peep on Prince St. (btw. Thompson & Sullivan) and remembered how good and cheap their Thai food was a couple of years ago I went inside to give the place a second go. You may know Peep as the place where you get an entree and appetizer for $8 or $9 at lunch, and this time my choices contained a win and a loss.

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It’s not unusual to have a Japanese restaurant selling Thai food. What is uncommon is having a chef from a decent, but mostly expensive Thai restaurant like Lemongrass Grill that shuttered on William St. last November, move to another restaurant and start serving the same food for a better price. Lemon Leaves is that reincarnation, opening in the Koodo Sushi on Nassau St. (btw. Maiden Lane & Liberty). When I called in my order the other day, the addition of the Thai menu was so new that the woman on the phone had to figure out what I was trying to order. It all worked out though, and I ended up with a great lunch.

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It’s always frustrating when a craving for Thai food hits me because as most of you know our options for that cuisine are mediocre in the Financial District. Bennie’s Thai Cafe is the best of the few options we have, although there was one I had yet to try because it’s off the beaten path and I tend to forget about it. That would be Budtharasa (also known as Bunrasa) on Washington St. (btw. Carlisle & Rector) over in the weird area of Irish bars, tourists and fancy hotels below the World Trade Center site.

Chris had christened it his go-to Thai spot in the FiDi after he had the chicken curry back in 2009. Since then, the scaffolding covering the front has come down and they have a lunch box for $8 that I thought was my ticket to checking this place out.

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There have been many times where food from Saha Thai on Centre St. (btw. Grand & Broome) has been featured on another site that features lunch, and I’ve vowed I would go check out their cheap specials. And then I don’t. It’s in that weird no-man’s land that’s not quite Chinatown and not quite Soho, and it’s often easier to just hit up the $4.75 Chinese buffet place a couple of blocks down Centre before getting there. I’m sure a lot of you Soho office workers eat at or order from this place (if you’re not going to Peep), so I resolved to finally make my way to Saha.

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Several months after paper went up on the windows in the former space selling “exquisite jewelry”, OBAO opened last week selling a mix of Vietnamese and Thai dishes that they mercifully didn’t fuse together. There’s a steam table with Thai standards and most of the Vietnamese fare is out of the ML price range. The prices are a bit high for a place that looks like a bit more downscale, but if you’re willing to toe the $10 line you’re probably going to be pretty satisfied with your lunch here.

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Cafe Sage had the shutter partially down on Friday afternoon, and apparently I wasn’t the only who noticed that the Thai restaurant on John St. was closed. A tweet from a downtown lunch’er alerted me that there was a yellow Department of Health sticker affixed to the restaurant. Sure enough, according to the DOH Web site they were shuttered with 40 violations included presence of mice and roaches. Suddenly, eating from that quick and cheap lunch steam table they were popular for isn’t sounding so great.