Midtown Lunch

The annual Vendy Awards commenced this past weekend with typical fanfare – the live bands played with gusto, the crowd happily munched on food and sipped beer & wine, a mob of volunteers ushered in order and cleanliness, and an eclectic gathering of vendors busted their ass and served some seriously amazing food. This could have been any Vendy award, other than the fact that this festival marked its 10 year anniversary, and that for the first time in this writer’s memory, Mother Nature paid a visit.
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Of all of the notable culinary contributions that Hawaii has gifted the world, I would argue that none is more perplexingly low brow yet delicious than loco moco. Like many dishes from the Hawaiian culinary repertoire this garbage plate marries elements of east and west – a hamburger patty over white rice, drenched with brown gravy and gilded with a fried egg over easy. It’s a blue collar sort of dish, rich as hell, and in the right hands, a thing of beauty.

Enter Big D’s Khao cart which launched a few months back (typically located at 50th and 6th). Instead of Korean inspired tacos and grinders, the Khao cart has tightly focused on rice bowls (khao translates to ‘rice’ in Thai and Lao) accented with Vietnamese and Thai flavors. But there’s also a very successful riff on loco moco on the menu, called the Loco Grande ($9).

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Despite the frigid winds outside, there will be a point soon where we will all want to go outside during lunch without fear of frozen toes. And Big D’s Grub will be bringing us a new cart option! Over the winter, the guys behind the truck have been working on this new venture where the meals will be based rice-based (‘khao’ means rice in Thai.) The menu will be rotating, but the starting menu should include Bangkok basil fried rice made with grass-fed sirloin or panko-crusted chicken, and a dish called “Grande Loco” which will consist of a premium blend burger served over Jasmine rice and a fried egg, with Thai country gravy.

No word yet on when the cart will open, so keep an eye on their Twitter or Facebook page.

In late May I blogged about the new breakfast service at Big D’s Grub truck. On my first trip I enjoyed the jalapeño corn cakes. But on a second trip I took Lunch’r beastegrl’s suggestion ordered the cakes with cheese (which Lunch’r beastegrl called “a MUST to balance sweet with salty”). Delicious. Sweet, salty, spicy, this makes for a killer breakfast. Adding the cheese will cost you an extra $.50 on top of the base $3.50 price but it’s totally worth the extra quarters. My only complaint is that they utilize the typical midtown fast breakfast technique of sandwiching the cheese between the hot cakes and wrapping it, thereby using the residual heat from the hot cakes to melt the cheese–if you tend to be eager to tear into your breakfast immediately, you’ll have to remember to wait for optimal melted cheese enjoyment.

Big D’s Grub Truck serves breakfast until 10ish (lunch service starts at around 11), and they should be on 53rd and Lex tomorrow (Friday), but as always check the Twitter Tracker before heading out.

Anytime I’m feeling light in the wallet, I want the Big D’s Grub Truck to be in my neighborhood. Both Blondie and Andrea were impressed with the amount of food that they received in their taco orders, and last week, it was my turn to be impressed by the size of the spicy pork grinder that I received for $7.
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Summer may not start until this weekend, but on Monday I rang in the season early by performing a New Yorker’s seasonal ritual: standing in line with a couple hundred people at a food festival. It’s something I tend to avoid no matter what time of year, but despite that I made my way to West Chelsea to the Zagat Food Truck Frenzy in order to get a taste of some of the food trucks that don’t often make it to Midtown South or Flatiron. What I found was a number of tasty tacos and a bunch of trucks I want to try out some more.

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There are plenty of generic coffee carts in midtown where you can grab a quick breakfast, and so far few of the gourmet food trucks have ventured into this territory. When I saw a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of the ML Twitter Tracker, that Big D’s Grub Truck had started serving up some AM grub, I had to go check it out. Read more »

I’ve been wanting to try Big D’s Grub Truck ever since they came onto the scene back in January, but they tended to spend a good amount of time in Long Island City and Downtown. Downtown Lunch’s Andrea has checked them out a few times, noting that one should go for the pork or meat. When they were in Midtown last week, I saw on their Twitter that they were testing Chili Sesame Chicken and made my way over for some lunch.

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