Midtown Lunch

There’s a strip of Church St. in the lower part of Tribeca that’s chock full of cheap eats. Many of them are steam table Indian or those weird hybrid Chinese/Tex Mex hole in the walls but there’s also falafel and delightful independent places like Mimi’s Cafe. A place called Kool Bloo opened a year ago and terrible, intentional misspelling aside, I never got around to checking it out because it just seemed like a crappy overpriced generic deli and there are plenty of those around already. After Kool Bloo shuttered, Church Street Kitchen quickly opened serving deli sandwiches, fried chicken, burgers and well, basically everything from a generic deli. What brought me there was the reasonable prices and want of some comfort food. And I’d have to say, they delivered.

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Once the temperatures hit 80 degrees or higher, my lunchtime thoughts turn from lamb over rice to what I can eat that won’t make me feel even hotter and disgusting. I guess eating ice cream for lunch everyday isn’t a feasible option, but a sandwich with cold ingredients is. Zucker’s Bagels on Chambers St. (btw. W. Broadway & Greenwich) is one of those places that’s  little off the radar come lunch time, but wouldn’t you know they have a lot of sandwich options involving smoked fish, and some of them are less than $10. When the heat got to me late last week I headed over for some gravlax eaten between bagel halves. Read more »

We here at Midtown Lunch like to harsh on generic delis a lot, especially if they are of the chain variety. Usually when I see that a place serves the holy trinity of paninis, create your own salads and steam table pasta I run the other way (or at least turn and walk out the door). A while back, though, I got an e-mail from lunch’er Lou asking if I’d tried Lane Cafe & Deli on Maiden Lane (btw. William & Gold). I’d walked by a thousand times and dismissed it as the weird deli that had fake hot dogs and boxes of crackers in its window, and served an interesting lunch special. Here’s his argument for the place:

Have you tried Lane Deli and Catering? Actual homemade food, usually have 3-4 meats, a few pastas, and some veggies/rices. That’s in the back. They also have a typical deli/panini counter, but the back section has the best selection in the place. I usually get flank steak over vegetables with a sweet potato. 10 bucks might be a little steep for an every day meal, but I’d rather have food made in the back of the house than the paninis shipped in from a production shop. Let me know if you get a chance to review it, interested to see what you think.

Lou also talked up the roast chicken and plantains. Wait, plantains? You can’t find that at Europa!  Read more »

I am always looking for a reason to travel to the farthest reaches of downtown, so on the recommendation of Lunch’er Katie, I headed down to the Water St. Gourmet Deli on Water (btw. Broad & Moore) for some Tabasco chicken. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into but figured since I liked all things spicy this wouldn’t be too much of a gamble. Find out what this lunch blind date looked like after the jump. Read more »

Just when I thought I was at least aware of most of the delicious food finds in the FiDi and Tribeca, I found another one thanks to a couple of downtown lunch’ers. That place is Downtown Deli on Church St. (at Park Pl.), which from the outside basically looks like any other so-called “deli”, selling cigarettes and crappy Boar’s Head sandwiches. But when you step inside, you notice the difference because there’s a sea of people, and two counters: one for cold sandwiches and one for hot, and really nothing else but a rack with bags of chips. Oh yeah, now we’re talking! Thankfully, both of the sandwich suggestions I got were on the hot side because the cold sandwich line was insane. Lunch’er Paul suggested I should check out the pastrami Reuben there, and lunch’er dkriese likes the beef brisket on a roll with gravy. Clearly, with two endorsements for this deli, it was worth checking out. 

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Back before us Downtowners hit it big and got our own Midtown Lunch website, we used to crave Fridays when that little corner Zach’s masterpiece would open up the boundaries a little bit and Daniel Krieger would give us the scoop on Midtown Lunches Downtown. One those posts I remember the most is Daniel’s trip to Champs Deli because I used to swing by that spot for anything from an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese to a cheeseburger deluxe.  For those of you with especially good memories, you may remember the image above as the one that opened Daniel’s Champs post. Well, consider this a sequel of said post, a bit of an homage to Daniel with the work he did, and an expansion on the glory that is Champs Deli.
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Café Water on the corner of Water and Pine looks like a run-of-the-mill deli in almost every way — hot bar, salad bar, Wall of a Thousand Beverages, etc. — but tucked away in the back corner is a Lunch’er’s dream: A made-to-order ramen soup bar. For $5.95 you get a steaming quart of ramen-y goodness that you think you won’t be able to finish.

Oh, but you’ll finish it. And an hour later you’ll find yourself slumped over your keyboard, comatose but happy. Good ramen from a deli? Believe it.

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