Midtown Lunch

The Gyro House Truck on Cedar St. (at Broadway) has a somewhat limited menu and thus sometimes I forget about it in favor of kati rolls and Thai food from the carts across the street at Liberty Plaza. They do a mean chicken over rice, and tasty falafel, but I’d heard rumors that the lamb gyro from this truck wasn’t too shabby either (and was in fact championed by one of my predecessors). On a day when salty meat and rice sounded amazing, and it was above freezing outside, I headed over for a street meat lunch.

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Back in the day when Daniel was on the downtown beat, he checked out the street meat truck that’s always parked on Cedar at Broadway and christened it the Frito Lay Truck, because that’s what it was in it’s former life of ferrying tasty snacks. A week or two ago I noticed the truck had been officially named the Gyro House, maybe after one too many people came by in search of Lay’s potato chips. In addition to a name, the owners got extra fancy and added a seizure-inducing sign on the top advertising the wares (I swear the above photo was a complete accident, and did not encourage me to order lamb). Daniel seemed fairly satisfied with the chicken he got there, but I was in search of falafel and wondered how this truck’s would stack up to the heavy hitters Sam’s Falafel across the street and Alan’s Falafel on the plaza in front of the truck. Read more »

Midtown workers shouldn’t have all the fun, so to even the score, I’ve brought on Daniel Krieger as an official Downtown Lunch Correspondent to write up some of the tasty stuff you can get in the lower half of Manhattan. He’s a great photographer (insuring good food porn), but more importantly he is a lover of cheap, unique and delicious eats (or as I like to call it- Midtown Lunch’ish food.)

First off thanks to Chris for covering my shift last week. I love lamb, and that cart looked pretty damn good. Anyway, on this week’s post… during a meeting with two recently engaged people to discuss their wedding, we started talking about one of my favorite topics, food. The groom-to-be told me he worked downtown so I asked what his favorite cart was. “Definitely the Halal truck right across from Men’s Warehouse on Broadway, they have the best chicken and rice downtown.” I had to check it out, so yesterday I headed to what I’ll name The “Frito Lay” Truck since they have no name or menu but several large Frito Lay stickers slapped around the truck. If the chicken was better than Musthafas Halal cart (aka Zak’s), which is about 20 feet away, I’d be a very happy camper.

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