Midtown Lunch

You all have embraced the Biryani House Cart‘s kati rolls, biryani and chicken tikka as much as I have and for a while now they’ve had a second cart on William St. (btw. John & Maiden Lane) selling the same items as the original on Liberty St. Nothing makes me happier than seeing carts like this branch out, but the other day I realized I’d never tried the meat and potatoes at these two carts: The lamb/chicken over rice. I’ve seen people order it all the time and was curious how they spiced the chicken, or if they did anything different since they sell more than lamb, chicken and falafel.

I think you’ll be happy to see what I discovered.

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I wasn’t aware that we’d written about Pizza Italia on Stone St. (btw. Broad & Whitehall) when profiled lunch’er Matt gave his thumbs up to their round grandma and buffalo chicken slices. It turns out that former head Downtown Lunch’er Daniel had indeed checked out this round grandma pie during his tenure and gave it a thumbs up. That post even inspired Zach to muse about what exactly a grandma slice was.

All of this talk of grandmas and slices made me both confused and hungry, so I headed down to the bottom of the Financial District to check out this buffalo chicken slice and see what else Pizza Italia had to offer. Read more »

A couple of months ago, word reached ML that the Urban Lobster Shack in Midtown East had a lobster roll involving bacon. It turns out that the location on Stone St. (btw. Broad & Whitehall) also has this bacon lobster roll for $13, which is a couple of dollars more than the regular roll combo. It would appear it’s a roll with a strip of bacon inside, so whether that’s a good or bad addition is up to you to decide. I’m still a fan of their lobster scampi roll which is sounding pretty great in this warmer weather.

One day late last week I was absolutely starving come noon and that coincided with spying a new food truck making an appearance at the World Financial Center lot. Palenque, a truck serving arepas and other Colombian food, was going to be there, the weather was gorgeous and all of the stars seemed to be aligning for me to get meat-and-cheese-topped ground corn in my belly. That happened eventually, but during the hour-plus in between I realized that it really is important for food trucks to get their bearings before attempting to feed the hungry masses.

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I have pretty low standards for the Japanese food I review for this site. I know it’s chancy buying sushi lunch specials for less than $10, or buying maki rolls from a pharmacy chain. Yet, I do these things because sometimes I want rice and fish in a cheap format without street meat dumped over the top, or stepping into Terrace Fish & Chip. So when Sushi By Bento Nouveau shortened its name to Bento Sushi and got a fancy new look, I knew I had to check out its cheap offerings. Read more »

This winter hasn’t really been a nasty one, and so it is that at the beginning of March when it’s 60 degrees out, I think nothing of heading to an outdoor kiosk for lunch. Snac’Meal is next to Centre Melts on the northeast side of the 1 Centre St. building and has a hodgepodge of a menu for both breakfast and lunch that includes sandwiches, soup, falafel, shish kebab, pita pizza and curly fries. It was the “Spanish torta” sandwich that caught my attention, partly for the lunchtime price of $3.95 ($3.50 before 11 a.m.) and the fact that you could pair it with curly fries for an extra $1.50.

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A couple of weeks in a row, I’ve noticed that the Our Heros truck at Wall & Water has been courting the Catholics with its non-meat and seafood Lenten offerings. They’ve had a fried tilapia sandwich, another with potato, egg,  peppers and onions, and last week they had Manhattan clam chowder. The tilapia sandwich sounded good to me, especially since they paired it with the words “spicy remoulade.” After growing up being forced to eat the nastiness that is the McDonald’s Filet o Fish one too many Fridays, I can’t say I’ve ever really sought out fish sandwiches, but I thought this grown up, classed up version sounded much more appealing.

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