Midtown Lunch

A program called the Melting Pot Obscurities is coming to the Vesuvio Playground at Spring St. & Thompson on Wednesday from 1 to 2:30 p.m. What is this, you might be asking? Well, a guy named Eric Zawacki came up with the idea of making a menu of different cuisines and serving it at locations around the city. This is the second installment, and the menu is themed on Sunset Park which as you may know is a neighborhood in Brooklyn that has large Mexican and Chinese communities. Menu and ordering info after the jump.

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If you’ve ever visited the Ear Inn on Spring St. in Soho, you likely walked past Pao on the corner of Greenwich without even noticing it’s there or what it was. I know I’ve done it on more than one occasion, but their lunch menu stood out to me because there aren’t many places in the city offering Portugese food, and probably even less with lunch time sandwiches for less than $10. Read more »

There are now two cheap eats spots on a grimy stretch of Canal St., with a branch of $1 pizza spot Roll And Go and the recent addition of Black Burger right next to each other at the corner of West Broadway. Both places were clogged with high school students and because Black Burger is little more than a counter with a couple of stools for eating, it doesn’t take much for the line to stretch out the door. Inside, you’ll find a simple menu of either single or double hamburgers or cheeseburgers (fresh, never frozen!), fries and shakes with a grilled cheese and calamari fries thrown in for good measure. And beware the warning on the wall: “Once you go Black, you never go back.”

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In recent months I’ve seen multiple posts about Famous Ben’s Pizza on Spring St. (at Thompson) and their Palermo slice. It looked like a delicious brick of carbs, perhaps made not such a gut bomb by its absence of cheese. Then there was a post last week by Ben Leventhal basically calling the slices at Artichoke Basille’s overpriced crap (my words, not his) s0 I opted to head up to Soho for a taste of Famous Ben’s. What I found was a good pizza experience slightly soured by tourists.

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I probably wasn’t the only one surprised by the Twitter announcement on Tuesday of another food truck lot spawning downtown. The lot’s called the Lent Space Food Truck Court at Hudson Square, located at 70 Varick (at Grand) next to Duarte Park, and it’s another one involving the NYC Food Truck Association’s members, like the collection at the World Financial Center five days a week.

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Everyone moans about how terrible the burritos are in NYC, which perhaps explains why there’s a line out the door at every Chipotle come lunch time. There are some decent burritos, in my opinion, but I’m no expert. Lupe’s East L.A. Kitchen has been selling Mexican food on Sixth Ave. (at Watts) for 20 years according to their Web site, and I’d heard good things about their burritos so I decided it was time to give them a shot. Would I find the burrito of my dreams a short subway ride away?

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In a continuation of my quest to tell you about some delicious food that I haven’t gotten around to sharing with you on Downtown Lunch yet, today’s installment comes from Fanelli Cafe on Prince St. (at Mercer). I’ve never eaten anything at Fanelli’s other than the burger and vegetable burger, and I really don’t think there’s much else worth ordering except alcohol. This bar is one of my favorite old-timey spots in the city and is one of the few non-pretentious places to get a beer and some decent food after dealing with the hordes of tourists in the area. But back to this veggie burger. I think it’s the sum of its parts that make it great, or perhaps the fact that it doesn’t fall apart into a pile of mush when you bit into it. And dare I say it tastes a little meaty?

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