Midtown Lunch

Have you ever been devouring a plate of lamb or chicken over rice from your favorite street meat cart and thought to yourself, “Wow, this food is really bad for me?” If the answer is yes, then I’m going to point you in the direction of Mimi’s Cafe on Church St. (at Reade) in Tribeca. It’s eye-catching with a wall of photos of the sandwiches and other vaguely healthy things found inside plastered all over the outside. It’s just a few doors down from another place also serving slightly healthier versions of street meat – Baba Ghanouge, aka, the place that stuffs french fries in its sandwiches. What drew me into this den of healthy food was the promise of an alternative form of gyro.

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Just yesterday I counted three trucks focusing on burgers in a two-block radius, including the newish Wall St. Burgers Truck (the other two were La Cense & GO Burger). Wall St. has been around for a couple of weeks, but ironically they only park in the Financial District a couple of days a week.  Click through for a look at the menu.

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That giant kosher place Milk Street Cafe that popped up in the old Mangia space on Wall St. (at William) nearly a year ago is opening its doors tomorrow. They’re having a ceremony and giving out free cookies and coffee from 10 to 11 a.m. and will be open for lunch afterward. Regular hours are 6:30 a.m. until 9 p.m. except for Fridays when they close at 3:30 p.m. Based on a press preview a couple of weeks ago it looks way better than most generic delis down here and should be a great destination for all you vegetarians out there.

Lately the number of trucks parking in the lower part of the Financial District has ratcheted up a notch as more and more encounter parking problems in midtown. It’s only a matter of time before this starts happening on the few blocks where trucks can park down here, but until then we can enjoy more diverse lunch options. From the look of it, you lunchers have fully embraced the Souvlaki GR Truck which is almost always parked on Old Slip (off of Water St.). So why did it take so long for me to go review it? Well, because the line is always 10 deep when I walk by and sometimes my stomach doesn’t have the patience for that kind of wait. Then came a day when I wasn’t ravenously hungry come lunch time and decided to brave the line.  Read more »

As frequent readers may have noticed I don’t often get sushi for lunch, not because I don’t like it, but because getting a bento box or something else at downtown Japanese places nearly always seems like a better value to me. Now that the weather has gotten more hot and humid sushi has started sounding better than a hot bowl of rice and meat. That’s how I ended up at Sushi A La Kawa on Maiden Lane (btw. Nassau & Broadway) because I work nearby and saw they have a pretty great maki lunch special, and better yet, the rolls haven’t been festering in a refrigerated case waiting for someone to buy them.

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Last week news came that Battery Park City would be getting a branch of Francois Payard Bakery (among many other eateries) later in the year. I’d heard good things about the locations just outside of the Downtown Lunch border, on the east side of W. Houston (btw. Thompson & Sullivan) and decided I’d finally eat lunch there and see if all of you World Financial Center workers could start getting excited. Find out the verdict, and see what kind of desserts you can look forward to after the jump. Read more »

At first when I spotted the Taco Mexicanos truck on Maiden Lane (at Water) last week, I was excited for their tamales and tacos since I love both of those items. Then I started thinking about the fact that they had something that other places in the Financial District didn’t: Ecuadorian food. That’s right, they have hornado, encebellado, guatita and the favorite of late-night drinkers everywhere, salchipapas, aka hot dogs and french fries. After asking what all they had for the day, and what was recommended from the Equadorian offerings, I was steered in the direction of the hornado ($7) after being asked how hungry I was. Check it out in all its porky glory after the jump. Read more »