Midtown Lunch

The gates were down at Goodies on Fulton St. (at Gold) and I wasn’t exactly reassured by a sign in the window saying they would reopen soon. In a good news, bad news situation, Goodies has indeed bitten the dust, taking its menu of things you might expect to find in Chinatown and not the Financial District with it. Lunch’er Seaweed noted that signage had gone up for its replacement called Asian Wok. During a walk by today, it didn’t appear they were actually open, but a new menu was hanging in the window and as I feared it’s full of the usual Americanized Chinese suspects without any dim sum selections in sight. I guess it’s the only Chinese food option in that area if you don’t want to walk up to Yip’s on William St. This is one of the sadder closings in recent memory and I guess there will have to be more treks up to Chinatown now.

It’s been a while since I ate a plate of lamb or chicken over rice, and I set out with the intention of rectifying that earlier this week, after noticing a couple of new carts in the lineup on Broadway between Pine and Liberty streets. Shafiq’s Halal cart is one of those and although I initially was going to stick with the standard lamb and chicken over rice combo, I saw several people ordering biryani and changed my mind.

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Just in case you managed to walk by the corner of Hanover Sq. & Pearl St. yesterday and missed this new attention-grabbing cart, it’s an offshoot of the Our Heros truck and it serves nothing but sliders. You have four choices of what’s put between wee buns, all of them involving meat or seafood. I stopped by yesterday (as did Midtown contributor Brian who sent along pictures) and sampled two of the sandwiches. Find out my thoughts on them and take a look at the menu after the jump.

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There are days that some specific food sounds really good, and it becomes a mission to find exactly what I’m craving. The other day this happened and it was falafel that sounded good, but I also wanted to go for a little bit of a walk since it wasn’t raining outside for once. Baba Ghanouge popped into my head because I remembered a sign in their window for a $3.99 falafel sandwich. When I took a glance at the menu, though, something else caught my eye: The man-ushi sandwich section. How had I missed this before?

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Have you ever thought your life would be complete if there was a truck roaming the streets of NYC serving food cooked on a hibachi? Well, get ready to live (or die?) because a truck called Hibachi Heaven is making its debut on Tuesday in the Financial District somewhere on Water St. The concept seems somewhat similar to one of those Mongolian grills where you choose protein, vegetable and sauce and then it’s all cooked on a hot flat top for you. You can check out the menu after the jump, but it looks pretty simple and thankfully they chose not to fuse the food with anything other than Japanese flavors.

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Ever since Cafe 41 opened in the space formerly occupied by beloved deli Patuca on John St. (btw. Nassau & William), they’ve been trying to find their hook. First, it was trying to lure people in with healthy eats, but then they started offering $1 slices and that’s when I took notice. Because I think we all know that while people don’t really want a chopped salad, they do want dirt cheap pizza.

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Last week, we at Midtown Lunch: Downtown got a tip that Nio’s Trinidad Roti truck was parked directly in front of Veronica’s Kitchen cart on Water between Maiden Lane & Pine. I went in search of the truck on Monday in the rain and when I didn’t see it parked in that spot, I turned around to see what the situation was at Veronica’s, only to find that the cart was MIA and Nio’s had taken their regular spot on Front St. My brain screamed “WHAT?!,” but I calmed down enough to realize that maybe Veronica’s wasn’t out that day because of the non-stop rain. So I stepped up to the window at Nio’s, feeling like I was betraying an old friend, and ordered some lunch.

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