Midtown Lunch

Restaurant row (46th st between 8th & 9th) barely registers as a blip for any New Yorker who’s plugged in and knowledgeable on the local food scene. This is for good reason, as the street serves as a sluice-way for the tourist overflow in Times Square, and the restaurants found here tend to serve safe, affordable, but uninteresting food catering to tourist taste buds from Italy to Iowa. With the exception of Becco, which serves reliably good pastas and affordable wines, I’ve never found reason to dine on this street. However, my bias caused me to overlook Grand Sichuan, which opened on restaurant row in June of 2010, and has an attractive $7.95 weekday lunch special.

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As we told you a couple weeks ago, the east side Whole Foods is open, bringing our favorite generic deli to the upper east corner of the ML boundaries. Since I don’t work anywhere near there, it took me a little time to make the trek to check out what they’re offering, although my suspicion was that it would be like the one on the west side. I was right, which is great news for you Midtown east readers. For the rest of us, it’s a bit of a hike, but can be a rewarding one.

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Photo courtesy of Serious Eats New York

• Num Pang’s grilled bluefish sandwich is seriously fishy [SENY]
• B&D Halal is a little out of bounds, but looks damn tasty [Pink Pig]
• A look at the rise and fall of Toffenetti, an old Times Sq. restaurant [Eater]

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.

Have you ever found yourself in a quandary about where to go to happy hour when you’re choosing a place for a large group? You want to find a cool place, but you know if it’s too crowded, things can get awkward. There’s nowhere to sit. It’s not great for claustrophobic coworkers. You can’t squeeze into the bar to get a drink. And how do you split up the tab with 8 people? Buy rounds? Surely someone is gonna get the shaft. What about conversation? Can you hear the person a few feet away? Can you even hear the person right next to you? How do lightweight drinkers get food in their bellies so they don’t get too inebriated and embarrassing? There are so many questions begging answers before one can confidently suggest a good spot for a group.

Last week, myself and a few other folks (I won’t mention any names but many of them can be found on this page) found ourselves in this situation. Luckily, I had a great recommendation from Chris. He suggested Pan, a truly hidden gem in Koreatown that opens at 5:00 pm (entrance on 32nd btw. 5th and Madison, 2nd floor) and is so obscure I couldn’t find it listed on Google Maps. Even when I arrived it was a challenge to find the entrance which is not on 5th Avenue as its address on Yelp suggests. Then, even when I was standing at the front door, I didn’t spot it right away because the outside looks like an underground cinema.

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In case you haven’t heard two of midtown’s own have been named Vendy’s cup finalists. We’ve been raving about Uncle Gussy’s for ages and while the Cinnamon Snail Truck has been on our radar since they hit New York last December (we just reviewed their awesome fig pancake special), it seemed high time to give them the official ML +/-. Read more »

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.

Sometimes you just want a sandwich. Something a little more simple than the gourmet exotic sandwiches you might find at Num Pang (see exciting news that one is opening in Flatiron this year) or Sub No. 7 (although they both make insanely delicious sandwiches). And a little more special than a Boars Head turkey sandwich at the deli. Blue Dog has the sandwich you need.

In fact, they have a lot of sandwiches you might need. They also have smoothies, juices, wraps, egg sandwiches and salads, but I focused in on the sandwiches and soups. And almost everything is under $10. Even with many sandwiches featuring avocado, they don’t charge an extra $3 or so for avocado like so many Midtown Lunch spots. The sandwiches come with the option of baguette, multi-grains, ciabatta, or focaccia bread.

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Here’s a bit of Flatiron Lunch news before we lay this week’s review on you…

Entire libraries could be filled with prose about Num Pang. I know the above photo doesn’t look like much, but we have been informed that this is the future site of Num Pang. With the new branch opening later this year, Flatiron Lunchers have a few months to read up and prepare for the opening. To that end, find some light bedtime reading here, here and here.

Num Pang, 1129 Broadway (btwn 25th and 26th Streets), Opening fall/winter 2012

The other day I noticed a new big blue truck set up near Union Square, alongside Nuchas and Korilla. This is the kitschy-designed Taco Bite, which just launched last week. I tweeted to them asking when they’d be coming to Midtown and received a response of “Pronto,” which translates to “soon,” for those Spanish-challenged readers.

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There are some foods I wish I didn’t know existed. But knowledge can’t be reversed and I can’t stuff Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookies back inside their puffy cloud covered Pandora’s Box. Resistance is futile. This is a battle I’m destined to lose so instead I’m going to share the burden of these habit-forming chocolate chip cookies. Read more »

You’d think that 34th and 8th would be a hotbed of vendor activity. There’s a whole southeast corner that’s solely occupied by a Duane Reade and a tree. Why it took so long for a vendor to pop up in this space is a mystery, but imagine my surprise when one Friday an empanada cart shows up. With the loss of Shachi’s Arepas, whose empanadas were amazingly done complements to their arepas and the source of many a carb-laden delicious lunch, this may well be the only fixed location where you can get your flaky goodness on a regular basis. Are they heirs to a great fried-filled-pastry dynasty or merely pretenders to the throne?

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