Midtown Lunch

Judging by the massive line greeting me at the Cinnamon Snail truck’s weekly stop in the Financial District on Tuesday, a lot of you are fans. Thus, it’s no surprise that they’ve been nominated for this year’s Vendy Cup to be given out at the Vendy Awards on September 15 on Governor’s Island. I’ve only eaten at the truck once but really enjoyed my five spice seitan sandwich. As you may or may not know, the truck serves nothing but vegan lunches and baked goods, but unless you have some irrational fear of fake meats, you shouldn’t let that scare you away. My second trip to the truck netted an open-faced sandwich of sorts and a doughnut. Would my second vegan lunch be as good as the first one?

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Yesterday was the opening of the rebranded Genji counter inside of Whole Foods Tribeca on Greenwich St. (at Warren) as a Dosateria and Lassi Bar in a first-ever collaboration with Cafe Spice. It turns out the restaurant is more of a split-space now with Japanese food still being made on one side and the rest of the space being used to make Indian dosas, uttapams and Bombay Frankies. You can also get a variety of lassis, or yogurt drinks, some sauces and salads and desserts like gulab jamun from a grab and go case. There were some people standing around to answer questions on ordering (and the ever popular “What’s a dosa?) and I got in the short line to procure some food. My take on what I was served, and why you may want to go vegetarian for lunch here, straight ahead.

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As is customary here on Midtown Lunch: Downtown, every Tuesday we’ll profile a different lunch’er and get their recommendations for places to eat in Downtown NYC. This week, we have not one person being profiled, but a lunching collective known as the 4 Tupps (which you can find on Tumblr here and Twitter here). They do most of their lunch’ing on Fridays and tend to favor the mobile options.

Name: We’re The 4 Tupps, a collaborative lunch club working in an office downtown.

Occupation: Affordable housing non-profit

Where you work: Wall and Water

Age: 26 (Kerri), 28 (Claire), 27 (Adam), and 35 (Chul)

Favorite kinds of food: The 4 Tupps’ general rule is: If you put it in front of us, we will eat it. We’ve been known to chew in four-part harmony and condition our hair with homemade gazpacho. When we picnic on the Elevated Acre, it’s in perfect concentric circles. You want what we’ve got, and we get it from eating these favorites: Kerri’s is Mexican food; Claire’s is Mid-east and Indian flavors – big spice and warm rice; Adam likes anything with lots of garlic, along with Thai and Italian cuisine; Chul’s favorites are BBQ, Asian and Latin American.

Least favorite foods: You can probably count the number of things we won’t eat on one hand. Anything poorly or irresponsibly prepared is generally a no-no. Even our pickiness is refined (Kerri will gladly tell you why cream cheese is okay, but sour cream is most certainly not.) And for one of us, it’s bananas…never bananas. Kerri dislikes fast food (particularly Arby’s); Claire doesn’t like Subway or cold sandwich wraps; Adam abhors everything banana related; Chul dislikes those nameless Wall Street buffet-style delis.

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Fancy food market All Good Things opened last weekend and while it’s not exactly a lunch destination, you can definitely find some tasty eats here. There’s ice cream, doughnuts, fancy coffee, cured meats and cheeses and some other items to make yourself a midday meal or find a snack. See the inside and what vendors are there after the jump.

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