Midtown Lunch

Soma By Nature has been a standby for Korean food in the Financial District with sushi and a few other Japanese offerings pushed to the side. On Friday I noticed they have changed the name to BentOn Cafe (of which there is a location in Midtown), although the sign promoting the $6 Korean lunch specials remained outside. What has changed is a rack of grab and go bento boxes and Japanese sweets prominently featured near the Korean food station.

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The section of John St. between Broadway and Nassau St. is continuing to be revived with new places to eat – this time gelato (or yogurt? So confused) and coffee. Gelato ti Amo has opened alongside Go Go Curry and Aroy Dee Thai Kitchen, making this a pretty great stretch of places for cheap eating. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking this is a nice change of pace instead of yet another branch of Red Mango.

Just in time for warmer weather is the appearance of Yogurt In Love on Pearl St. (btw. Wall & Pine). It’s a chain of self-serve frozen yogurt shops that seems to have a lot of pink furniture according to their Web site. No word on whether they locally source their milk like a certain drug store/fro yo source in the FiDi.

There are no shortage of ice cream options in this city, but Soho’s going to get another one for a day next week. Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream will be driving its Street Treats Truck from Ohio to take part in the Meatopia event, and will then make stops in Manhattan and Brooklyn, including in front of Dean & DeLuca at Broadway & Prince St. on Tuesday from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. The best part is they’re giving out free samples of delicious-sounding flavors like sweet corn with black raspberries. Freeloaders, you know what to do.

Yesterday the new Wafels & Dinges cart made its first appearance in City Hall Park, and ML contributor Brian spotted it at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, taking advantage of all those tourists and hungry employees from 1 Centre St. The cart will be there wafting its delicious smells from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, so now you can get a taco across the street at Nixtamalito and supplement it with a waffle with spekuloos. Or put the taco meat on top of a waffle? The possibilities are endless.

Tip of the hat to ML contributor Brian who sent the above photo alerting us that there’s a cart called Swirl at Front & Pine selling frozen yogurt,  and currently giving out free samples. Based on the cart’s signage it looks like their thing is to not just throw the toppings on the frozen yogurt like they do at Red Mango or all of those pink YoGo trucks you see everywhere, but instead it’s swirled into the actual yogurt from whatever you choose at the mix-in bar. Hopefully the prices are also a little more gentle than at the chain places.