Midtown Lunch

Websites and Twitter accounts have become an invaluable tool to many mobile food vendors. The internet is generally the playground of new school vendors with fusion-y menus, gourmet ingredients, and (mostly) smart, aggressive marketing campaigns. But every once in a while, an old school vendor decides to step into the cyber-arena with amusing/confounding results. Such is the case of Kimo Food (aka the self-proclaimed best street food in NYC), a cart whose site actually makes them harder to locate (and features picture of other people’s food, lifted directly from Midtown Lunch!)

Their location page points you to 45th St. btw. 6+7 and even has a picture of a cart with a Kimo Food sign on it. But when you get there, all you see is the Sarah’s cart that has been there for years. It looks like the cart on the website, but minus all the Kimo Food signage. The cook assured me the carts were one and the same, which means they doctored their own photo so that no one would recognize them.

And that’s not the end of the internet shenanigans. On the menu page of their website, among stock images of professionally photographed food, Kimo uses a picture I took of a Little Morocco plate of chicken and falafel over rice. They even use it twice… for two dishes that don’t feature falafel. I’m no fuddy duddy, I’m hip to the “everything on the internet is in the public domain” game, but this just isn’t very good presentation.

Between ludicrous Best in NYC claims, a hard to find cart, and pilfered pics, Kimo Food was clearly a must try.

I went with the lamb and chicken over rice, the universal measuring stick for standard street meat carts (there’s a bunch of fluffy yellow rice under all that). At $7, it was plenty of food for lunch, but you can get much more gut-busting plates of street meat other places for less, so the more gluttonous Midtown Lunch’ers should consider themselves warned.

At this point, I assume Midtown Lunch readers know what they’re getting from a cart like this. There is nothing here to make Sarah’s/Kimo stand out as much as Little Morocco or the Trini Pak Boys or Kwik Meal, but there are a few things that I think put it above many of the anonymous carts out there, namely the inclusion of fresh grilled onions and green peppers. They break up the monotony of a fairly homogenous meal, and add a nice bit of crunch (and some nutrition?). I was also impressed by their hot sauce. The heat hit me immediately, but it didn’t really build in intensity after that. It was a presence throughout my whole lunch, but it never became painful. And that’s kind of exactly what a hot sauce should do.

Other than those few things, Kimo is pretty standard street meat, which means it’s delicious. This is no destination cart, but when you’re looking for a very standard plate of street meat at a fair price and without the lines of more popular carts, Kimo Food/Sarah’s delivers.

Kimo Food/Sarah’s cart, 45th (btw. 6+7), website

The +
They serve standard street meat, done well
Their green peppers and onions break up the monotony of sauce drenched proteins and rice
They are clearly fans of Midtown Lunch

The –
It’s basically the same street meat you can get anywhere
The prices are just a little bit high considering the amount of food and the quality