Your First Look At the New Mac Truck
After a tricky day in Midtown earlier in the week, Mac Truck didn’t give up and returned later in the week, selling mac and cheese on 45th, just east of Fifth Avenue. It appears to be a one-man operation, and the guy running the show was pretty stoked to be in Midtown. Although this was just his first week out, and we all know first weeks can be bumpy, I couldn’t wait to check out the truck. Who doesn’t love mac and cheese?!
Voila, the menu. The mac of the moment was buffalo mac and cheese, which was regular mac and cheese topped with buffalo chicken and blue cheese. Since this was my first trip, I decided to forgo the daily special and opt for the traditional to get a sense of their regular fare. However, Lunch’er hungry wrote a bit in the comments of a previous post, as did Lunch’er Eat me, who gave the buffalo mac a thumbs up.
While I scrolled through the pictures I took of the truck, I noticed there might have been an additional menu item that sold out (see giant white space after the fourth asterisk above). Feel free to let us know in the comments if you were there earlier and saw an additional menu item!
This time around I didn’t doctor up my mac, but you can bet that next time I’ll be adding some condiments. Sriracha on mac and cheese sounds like a fantastic idea!
The mac and cheese ($6) came in a Styrofoam cup, filled right to the top. I’d say it was about 1.5-2 cups, which might sound like a lot in concept, but looks pretty small when you receive your portion. It’s pretty much a standard-sized soup container. There is just one size available, but I might suggest the option of a larger size for hungry Midtown Lunchers willing to pay a buck or two more?
The mac was served out of a large pot, so there was no crispy top (which I’m usually a big fan of, but oh well). The cheese sauce had a luscious creamy texture — no gooey cheese here! — with a slight tang that I couldn’t quite place.
The pasta, itself, was nice and al dente. I was pleasantly surprised, actually, that it had really good bite. It seemed to me that the pasta could very easily have become soft or mushy, coming from a large pot on a truck, but Mac Truck seems to have the cooking down. It was plenty cheesy, but not overly so.
If Midtown is lacking in a type of food, mac and cheese might be it. On the walk over to Mac Truck, I was trying to think of my favorite Midtown Lunch mac and cheese, but I came up blank. Hopefully this truck can create a niche for itself!
Mac Truck’s website isn’t up and running yet, but you can follow them on Twitter (where they recently posted you can now add a poached egg to your order for $1!), and they’ve been added to the ML Twitter Tracker, so — as always — be sure to check it before heading out!
Posted by Rachel Goldner at 11:45 am, September 24th, 2012 under Mac Truck.
17 Comments | RSS comments feed for this post
17 Comments
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$6 seems a little pricey for essentially an appetizer portion of mac n cheese. I would need to supplement this with a little more food for a proper lunch- unless this fits in with Mayor Bloomberg’s upcoming guidelines for the right amount of food obese New Yorkers should eat for lunch.
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I was away for a month. I guess the forums are simply done?
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It’s the elephant in the room….The whole site has gone downhill because of it. Many posters who used to be regulars are nowhere to be found. The volume of comments in posts have trailed off as well.
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What’s the deal Mr. Brooks?
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i’m not sure why they can’t simply be pulled offline while they institue a fix. hate to be snarky (or whatever), but i presume though annoying, it is providing ML (and Mr. Brooks) with a ton of site hits, thus generating more $.
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Such a shame. I kind of agree that since Zach moved to LA, the quality went down a bit.
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I work in the industry and I’ve never seen a contract between a owner, agency, and advertiser that counted offshore hits. It wouldn’t make sense because, depending on what’s being sold, there’s very little chance of a substantial conversion rate overseas.
That’s like showing a commercial for Flea Market Montgomery during the Superbowl. Sure, you might reach tens of millions of viewers nationwide, but only a miniscule fraction of those viewers live in Montgomery, AL (the target audience most likely to shop there) and still less people who’d see the commercial would actually go… even if it’s just like mini mall.
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1.5 – 2c of mac sounds *fine*, but it’s not something I can make a lunch out of. If the “mac of the moment” is just a topping, why not have a selection all the time of things like broccoli, bacon, peas, tomatoes, sausage, etc? A little veg and protein for a buck or two more and I’d be a happy camper.
Maybe the tang in the sauce was mustard? I’ve seen that before in bechamel / cheese sauces.
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I have thought the site started to suffer when Mr. Brooks left for LA…..but with him now playing cafeteria rock star…it’s apparent its just getting worse. And for the most part some of the new writers are not that great. I still think the most consistent writer is Andrea. I miss MidtownLUNCH.
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I miss Rudy
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Believe me I wish we were making $$ from the spam! The sad truth is, Midtown Lunch is held together by rubber bands, super glue, and the passion of our contributors. Nobody is getting rich off this thing (myself included) and we are currently in between developers so finding somebody who can come in and do anything quickly without bringing the whole site down has been a struggle. It’s just bad timing… but believe me we are doing our best to get somebody who can fix the issue. Hang in there. I promise that once we find the right person there will be some great changes to ML that will hopefully make up for this forum disaster.
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There are programs out there that will generate “reverse- SPAM.” What they do is flood the SPAMMER’s servers with multiple messages seeking authentication to hopefully overload and crash their servers. Might be illegal though.
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Looks really boring, if they offered things to add it would be a meal, but not just M&C, I guess for a snack this can work but does not appear to be a lunch option.
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That blank spot was Salad of the Day: Tomato. The special used to say: mac, salad or chips, and drink. Though if you chatted the guy up, he would give you both salad and chips.
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the dude in line is HOT!
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Is it possible the unique taste is from some beer being added to the mix? I swear it feels like they put some lager or guinness in there or something
Are you sure that tang wasn’t just from the type of cheese they used? Could be some kind of sharp cheddar…