Mausam Curry n Bites Bringing More Curry Options to Midtown
Last week we started getting tips about, Mausam Curry N Bites, a new curry truck parking around midtown. With some solid recommendations trickling in from Lunchers in the field we had to check it out.
First lets hear from Lunch’r ladyeatalot
I know we have a few good Indian carts/shops popping up in our nabe but I have to say this one is pretty darn good.
I had a combo of chick masala and palak paneer over rice– chicken was super moist and palak paneer had in depth flavor and spices – really deelish. I asked for a bit of their hot sauce and the dish is a bit spicy but I thought it was the right amount of heat. the meal came with a side salad too (dressed with some spices and then a light dressing). bc I get so excited when a truck comes to this desolate truck area I ordered a lot of food. I got two samosas as well – veggie (potato, carrots, peas, & onions) and I think chicken (but I swear it looks like beef) great flavor – the meat one was a teeny bit dry on the inside but they give you two sauces and that was all it needed. I have no idea if it comes with but I also asked for a nan and they gave it to me. Nan was a little heavy but still good.
the whole meal was 12 but it was side the samosas but me over the $10 limit. I am stuffed to the gills and (I’m not a delicate eater).
The menu is interesting. They have a design your own option where you pick your curry and then pick your style. Or you can get the curry rush, a pre-selected lunch option. Rounding out the menu are some chaats and kati rolls.
I went for the design my own option but the longer I stared at the menu the less I knew what I wanted–chicken? Chick peas? Paneer? Baby corn? Ahhh. I wished that they had little descriptions for each of the options to help you pick. In the end, I decided to let them pick for me and ended up with a mixed curry box with saag (spinach), chick peas, chicken, and paneer. I told them I was up for spicy and they delivered. The box came with a chapati on the side and at $9 was a solid value.
Being a huge kati roll fan naturally I had to try out the goods here. Just like the Biryani Cart they do 2 Kati Rolls for $6 and you can choose between chicken and paneer (cheese with veggies). The rolls come with a tamarind sauce and a spicy cilantro sauce. The fillings were decent. Both were a little be on the spicy side–hot enough to leave your mouth a little tingly. Rather than being big chunks of chicken and cheese there were smaller chunks inside ensuring a better distribution. But the roll itself? Tasted like a tortilla to me. Oh no. This is midtown. We are kati connoisseurs. You can’t pass a tortilla off here as a kati wrapper.
Fortunately my curry meal came with a side of chapati. I did a little kati transplant, shifting my leftover kati innards to the chapati and rolling it up myself. Much, much better.
The chapati was buttery and just a touch sweet. I would say it was slightly more floury tasting that Biryani Cart, but a more than decent chapati and a much better kati wrapper.
While the kati roll itself is a miss (unless they change up the wrapper) overall I’d say this truck is a welcome addition to the midtown lunch scene. Have you caught up with the Mausam Curry N Bites truck? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
To find the Mausam Curry N Bites’ location check their twitter: @mausamnyc.
Posted by Brownie at 9:00 am, October 8th, 2012 under Mausam Curry N Bites.
23 Comments | RSS comments feed for this post
23 Comments
-
-
Oh man. Tortillas for kati rolls when chapati is available? Dang, that’s a pretty stinging indictment.
Maybe they’re just new and didn’t have the supply line to make it happen, but my eyebrow is raised at this.
-
I cannot understand the tortillas for kati rolls. But on the positive side, I like the mix-and-match curry.
-
Thank you for the information! I visited the this truck today and am impressed with the choose your curry options and your style. Now I can indian meal more than 2 times in a week. Taste of food is so great. Mango Lassi is delicious!
-
Probably a shill?
-
-
Just looking at the thickness and layers, that chapati (which is on the menu), it looks more like paratha to me.
I wasn’t a fan of the raw onion they serve in the side salad — I would much prefer pickled red onion….but I think regional differences come into play here.
-
Also, I know these things take forever, but what about adding them to the twitter tracker?
-
Good food and good taste. Samosa is so good. Idea to make your own curry and own style is great. Though I had chicken tika masala i love it. next time I will try curry and style options.
-
A shill?
-
-
Whats with the flood of blatant shillers of late? Sheesh.
-
Gotta go somewhere now that the forums are down.
-
MJP: shillers, not spammers.
-
No difference – one wants to convince us to buy rock crushers, the other tortilla-encased kati rolls. At least the shillers have the dignity to attempt normal user IDs. I know I can trust my boy fhqwhgads for Louis Vuitton, if nothing else.
-
-
-
There’s a cottage industry of paying for “fake reviews”.
There was an article in the paper today about how
up to 30% of the reviews on Amazon, Tripadvisor , Yelp and others are shills, faking positive reviews. But us New Yorkers can spot them a mile away. The shills tend to be new posters who sign up at the same time and very recent. They tend to use adjectives such as “wonderful”, “great” or phrases like “the best I’ve eaten” or “highly recommended”. ML’ers who spot them here should just call them out and expose them and the places they’re shilling for. I probably wouldn’t cater to places who resort to dishonest marketing.-
Just ignore them.
-
Yeah, we all know to be skeptical in general, and more so of superlative-laden reviews.
-
-
Never seen a Kati roll using a tortilla wrapper. I like the grease on my fingers after eating a kati roll and you just don’t get that from a tortilla wrapper.
-
They should be ashamed of themselves
-
-
This wonderful great truck is the best I’ve eaten, and highly recommended.
Ok but seriously, I just tried it and was really pleased. The guys running the truck are super nice. I was looking at the menu and the guy was like “just order anything, we make it for you! No problem, next time you try something else!” So I got the chicken with saag, and asked for some extra chickpeas with it, also got a “no problem” to that. When the order was ready and the other guy garnished it, he was like “you asked for extra chickpeas yea? Oh that’s a very good combination! Chole very good with this one!” The first guy also insisted I take a bottle of water even though I didn’t really want one.
As to the food, the quality is really great. I’m a regular at Bombay Fast Food but this tasted much fresher and ‘cleaner’ if that makes sense. You can really tell these guys care about what they do. The amount of food you get is also really good, at first I wasn’t sure but I kept finding more and more pieces of chicken in the rice, which (I’m not an expert) seemed to be real basmati rice. It was tasty either way. Oh yea and even the salad mixed in with the rice made a nice combination. And the hot sauce was perfect – spicy but not burning, just a nice heat throughout the whole dish.
Also, they get bonus points for using biodegradable vegetable fiber packaging. The sticker on top had this: “Curry Lesson: palak sauce + corn = corn palak”. Now I know. And knowing is half the battle.
-
these guys are on 52/6 today. do these guys tweet much? can we get them added to the twitter feed if not already?
-
They tweet every day.
-
yea, i just added them to my account.
-
-
-
Mausam was back at 52nd/6th today, so I gave it a try, ordering my standard Minar chicken saag, spicy. They were quick — quicker than Minar, certainly — and at $8, roughly the same price.
It’s a filling meal. I wish the saag were thicker, as the spinach “juice” ran out of the container on the short walk back to the office; but it had a good kick to it and reminded me an awful lot of Minar otherwise. There’s cardamom galore in the rice — I think that’s what I bit into — but I think I prefer the Minar rice by a bit.
Overall? I’m happy to double my Indian takeout intake at lunchtime if they want to continue to show up nearby.
Hey ML,
thanks for the shout out! seriously since discovering this website a few years ago my lunch has never been the same! I’m a bona fide truck-aholic.
Regards,
Lady EatALot