Midtown Lunch

We wouldn’t normally post something like this since frozen prepared food is generally not our thing. But this concerns one of Midtown’s favorite food trucks and it’s for charity, for Pete’s Sake! For the next few weeks, Eddie’s Pizza Truck is moonlighting as the promotional Stouffer’s Mac and Cheese Truck. They’ll be traveling around the city offering a few varieties of their mac and cheese for $4 for a 16 ounce bowl. On select days, they will welcome a celebrity chef/TV personality (like Amanda Freitag and Marc Murphy) to serve a specialty macaroni and cheese. According to their schedule, which can be found on their Facebook page, they will be on 48th & 3rd. Before you complain about pre-packaged or overpriced mac and cheese, you should know that 100% of the profits will be donated to the Mayor’s Fund in order to continue to help the victims of Sandy.

Photo Courtesy of Robert Sietsema

• Robert Sietsema tries the Mega Dog at Hello Deli [Fork in the Road]
• Mapo tofu > twice cooked pork belly at La Vie En Sichuan [Food in Mouth]
• A Thai food truck is trying to launch using Kickstarter [Grub Street]
• Your First Look at Pho 66 in Hell’s Kitchen [Grub Street]
• Pie Face’s chunky steak pie is THAT good [Feisty Foodie]
• There’s no stale greasy aftertaste at Steak N Shake [Pink Pig]
• A 3rd round of Choice Eats participants have been announced [FITR]

If you like to eat, chances are you like to drink (read: a lot of you are freakin’ lushes), so I thought maybe it was time to introduce a happy hour column to the site. Every week, our Happy Hour Correspondent posts about a different bar in Midtown that fits the Midtown Lunch mentality: unhealthy food, not lame (unless it’s lame in a cool way), and most importantly… cheap.

I’m just going to go right out there and say it so there’s no confusion. Annie Moore’s is too expensive to be classified as a proper Midtown Happy Hour. Most glaringly because there are no happy hour specials. But over the past few weeks for whatever reason, I kept getting invited to go there for drinks. I thought the stars were telling me I needed to write something up, because the bar does have a few pieces of interestingness I can report.

Read more »

Fans of the Bryant Park Holiday market pop up Mmm…Enfes rejoice! The owners of the popular seasonal kiosk have opened a small storefront just off the SE corner of 39th and 6th Avenue where they sell savory and sweet Turkish pastries from including bourek, gul bourek, baklava, and gözleme, a traditional Turkish hand rolled pastry along with other lunch time options. Look for the full ML treatment on Monday, in the meantime, earlier adopters, let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Mmm…Enfes 70 West 39th Street , New York, New York 10018

Every Friday we go south of the ML boundaries in search of a delicious lunch. Sometimes it’s Murray Hill south or the Flatiron District, sometimes Gramercy and everything in between- but we just like to call it Flatiron Lunch.

I feel like I have been neglecting the readers in the northwestern corner of the Flatiron boundaries, so I ventured towards Madison Square Garden this week. On past walks through this area, I haven’t seen that many exiting options (sorry all of you who work up there!) But Urban Kitchen seemed worth a try, and the prices were good.

Read more »

We’ve always known that the TV show 30 Rock was actually filmed in Queens, and not right in the center of our lunch wasteland. But that hasn’t stopped us from imagining that the food loving Liz Lemon was eating at the same Midtown lunch places as us all these years. In Season 1 that dream seemed possible when Kenneth’s church was filmed as a secret doorway in the back of Margon, but mostly the references to food and lunch were relatively vague. Until last night that is! We here at Midtown Lunch consider it a pretty huge victory that a major segment of last night’s series finale of 30 Rock was devoted to making sure that Lutz didn’t get to order the crew’s final lunch from Blimpie.  Momofuku and Per Se were yelled out as suggestions before Liz settled on Nobu 57… but the running gag was that Blimpie is horrible.  Maybe they only felt that way because they never go to try the Indian Blimpie.

Anyway, thank you 30 Rock.  Not only for 7 great seasons, but for putting the important job of picking lunch for your office up on the pedestal where it belongs. If you could pick one Midtown Lunch to go out on, what would it be?

Lunch’er Hengde wrote in a few days ago to let us know about a brand new empanada cart on the NW corner of 38th & Broadway:

The owner said he’s there every day from 7AM – 4 PM.  I tried a chicken empanada, the dough was really tasty (it was deep fried, of course it was tasty), and the inside was actually a pretty moist mix of light and dark meat. Nothing fancy though, just the chicken. It wasn’t overly stuffed but still pretty filling. 3 of these would definitely make a filling lunch for most people for $6, albeit not the healthiest. Oh yea and the hot sauce had a real kick to it.

Check out a shot of the empanada after the jump.

Read more »

We haven’t been so great about covering the East side of Midtown lately, so we put out a call for new contributors a few weeks ago.  Luckily a ton of lunchers in Midtown East stepped up to the challenge, and you should notice us upping our eastside game in the come weeks.  To give you a little taste of what’s in store, here’s a report from Lunch’er Dan about a great Italian egg sandwich on 2nd Ave. 

Most pizza places feature dishes beyond the pies, and they almost always have a standard cast of hot heroes: the chicken parm, meatball, eggplant parm, and the rest. Sometimes you might even find peppers and eggs. They’ve got it at Pizza Rustica (2nd Ave. between 44th and 43th), but they also have a whole section of frittate (which the menu describes as omelettes on a roll), including potato and onion, smoked mozzarella, and spinach, tomato, and goat cheese. Being a fan of all things involving egg, cheese, and bread, I had to try one. And I was willing to walk one avenue outside of the ML boundaries to do it…

Read more »