Midtown Lunch

Midtown workers shouldn’t have all the fun, so to even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (ensuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food.) Everyone knows how much I love fried food, and this week Daniel has found a fried food palace…

At the amusingly named Sea World, located on the corner of Church and Lispenard, there are only 26 items on the take out menu and the word “fried” appears 27 times. How is that possible? Well, take item #23. Order that and you get FRIED squid, FRIED shrimp, FRIED rice. That’s alotta fried.

Sounds good to me though… and after Zach was robbed of his weekly grease intake a few days ago when lunching at Empanada Joe’s, I wanted to let him live vicariously through me today.

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Midtown workers shouldn’t have all the fun, so to even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (ensuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food.)

La Nueva Conquista Restaurant has been in the same spot for 50 years and although ownership has changed hands over that time, the food and atmosphere have stayed pretty much the same. And almost as important, the prices have held steady as well.

Located on Lafayette street near the corner of Broome, you will find a long ass line during lunchtime containing mostly a latino population. When I first moved to NYC I lived in Washington Heights for 4 years and got quite sick of eating the same food all the time, as back then there wasn’t much variety uptown (not sure how much the hood has changed since I left). On occasion though, I get that craving of a hearty meal of yellow rice and beans; the kinda lunch that sticks to your ribs.

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Midtown workers shouldn’t have all the fun, so to even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (insuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food.) This week, I’m particularly curious about this Pakistani “Hamburger”

If you’re walking up Crosby to Houston and you blink, you’ll miss Lahore, where according to the take out menu you can, “Feel the taste of East.” Personally I feel like their name and slogan may have gotten mixed up with a shady massage parlor, but I went in anyway on the recommendation of a friend who frequents this Pakistani Cabbie Stand.

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Midtown workers shouldn’t have all the fun, so to even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (insuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food.)

Unfortunately I don’t speak Chinese, so I didn’t know the name of the noodle shop on 144 East Broadway which doesn’t have any English words on the front. Fortunately though other parts of my body (nose and tummy) could care less if the words were written in Swahili or Hebrew. The language of love for me this week was found in the narrow quarters of 144 East Broadway, home to good cheap hand pulled noodles and dumplings.  (I found out later alot of people call it Lan Zhou, although that’s really just the region where this style of noodle comes from.)

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Midtown workers shouldn’t have all the fun, so to even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (insuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food.)

Downtown at Liberty park you can find a pretty nice selection of fancy food for lunch these days. Meridith’s Bread has a stand where you can buy a $7 quiche.  Red Jacket Orchards and Migliorelli’s Farm both have plenty of good looking food as well. But when you want your lunch to be less than a gallon of gas (who would have thought we’d ever say that?) try Sam’s falafel. When I checked it out earlier this week the line was about 8 people deep. Everyone on line who had eaten there before said it was the best they’d had downtown, so I knew I had to wait it out. The line went surprisingly fast thanks to owner Yasser’s 3 man assembly line (although his name isn’t Sam he says people call him that and he likes it.)  Read more »

Midtown workers shouldn’t have all the fun, so to even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (insuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food.) 

Capri Caffe is a real “Midtown Lunch” Downtown gem of a spot (does that even make sense?) located on 165 Church street between Chambers and Reade. It was recommended by a random guy I met early this week who lives in the area and swears by it. He eats there “once, sometimes twice a day.”  Not sure if he was exaggerating a bit but I had to check this place out.

When I first walked in I got the immediate feeling the dishes were going to be a bit too pricey to fall within the rigorous Midtown Lunch guidelines. Luckily everything seemed to fall under the $10 price cap, like the oh so attractive to me manicotti, which was $8.50.  Toss in the fact that the pasta for that particular dish was made fresh in-house and I was pretty stoked.  I may have even exclaimed “Mama Mia!” but if questioned I’ll deny it.  (It just doesn’t sound that authentic coming out of my New York Jew mouth.) The owners who seem just as authentic as the food will greet you with smiles, wearing their Italian bicycle hats with the fronts turned up. If you ask what’s the best thing to order, you’ll get a confident albeit not surprising “everything is good!”   Read more »

Making Downtown office workers jealous is something this blog has been doing for awhile now. To even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (insuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food).

How are you supposed to find the right Chinatown spot for a cheap lunch that is going to be better than the 100 other similar spots dotted on a downtown map? Well you can read this column every Friday to start. Or you can ask friends who work in the Chinatown area, which is what I did to find the Excellent Pork Chop House. I asked a friend of mine what her favorite place was for lunch and she immediately said, “Excellent Pork Chop House” on Doyers street. The name of the place is pretty confident and clear. If you go there you gotta try the pork chop because well, it’s probably going to be excellent. If it isn’t they should change the name to something else.   Read more »