Midtown Lunch

Sometimes you need a taco for breakfast. Courtesy of FitR.

• Maybe it’s time to check out this chicken sandwich at La Esquina. [Lunch Studio]
• Tacombi has a tasty breakfast taco. [Fork in the Road]
• Why yes, those are some good looking wontons at Tasty Dumpling. [SENY]

It seems like just yesterday that everyone was waiting eagerly for the first NYC outpost of Potbelly Sandwich Shop to open on Maiden Lane, and now it seems like there are a million of them. A new location was spotted in a building at 90 Broad St., so now you who work far down in the Financial District can enjoy waiting in a line out the door for a sandwich, too. These two shops join one near City Hall on Broadway just off Chambers.

There was quite a lot happening on Water St. between Maiden Lane and Pine yesterday, with the return of Nio’s Trinidad Roti Truck and a new cart called Indian Biryani Delights spotted on that block. The man working at the cart confirmed it’s brand new and will be parking in the same spot daily. There’s meat and vegetable biryani for $5.99 as well as regular street meat, kati rolls and (according to the sign) chapli kebabs. It seems to be something of a cursed place to park as the second A-Pou’s Taste cart was parked here, but now seems to have disappeared, and Fun Buns only lasted a couple of days selling its pork and beef buns before finding somewhere else to park. I hope this cart has more luck. Go try some biryani everyone!

I can’t remember the last time I got a lunch for less than $10 from a place where the greeters wear suits. Au Mandarin in the World Financial Center is a hybrid of classy Chinese food being served to finance workers in a food court. If you look at the signboard in front of the restaurant, you’ll notice a piece of paper announcing an $8.95 lunch special which seems like a good deal since everything on the menu is more than $10. The catch is there’s only one dish for the special every day and you have to go around the corner to the cheapskate’s entrance to get it from a lady at a steam table. Read more »

A Lunch’er alerted me to a little Caribbean turf war that happened yesterday when Nio’s Trinidad Roti truck park on Water St. near Pine, right in front of the plaza where Veronica’s Kitchen cart has sat for years on Front St. The menus looked somewhat similar with various meats served with peas and rice, along with roti (there weren’t prices posted, so no idea if they’re comparable). A search of the Web shows that Nio’s parked down on Front St. for many years serving three kinds of roti and doubles alongside the meat and rice dishes. The truck appears to be a mobile version of a brick and mortar roti shop on Church Ave. in Brooklyn. Did any of you eat at the truck yesterday or when it used to be down in the Financial District ages ago?