Midtown Lunch

If you frequent the street food carts on Broadway between Liberty and Cedar streets you’re probably familiar with Zak’s Halal cart (later known by the man always working there, who told Daniel his name was Musthafa). A while ago, this affable man disappeared from the cart and I’ve never seen him working there since. There was always a line at this cart, mostly for the awesome chicken over rice plate. Lately I’ve noticed that line has disappeared and I was curious if the food had gone downhill or if everyone else was just suspicious with unknown faces cooking the food. So I did the only reasonable thing and went to eat a plate of street meat. Update: As you can see from the comment below, and confirmed by a couple of lunchers, Mustafa is back! He was just on vacation.

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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.)

Street Meat doesn’t generally peak my interest downtown. I realize you Midtowners have a great selection and crazy competition, but downtown the scene is not quite as fierce. So when I walk by a bunch of street carts I generally don’t stop for lunch, unless I see a line 20 deep- as I saw earlier this week in front of the big red cube on Broadway.

I asked a few people online why this cart was different from the other carts in the area and received answers ranging from “cause its crazy cheap” to “best chicken and rice you can get”, “I don’t know this is my first time but my friend said they have the best falafel.”

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