Midtown Lunch

Every Tuesday I turn over the site to a different Midtown Lunch’er for his or her recommendations for the best lunch in Midtown. This week it’s Tat (aka Streetmeasonsumer3008) a street meat fanatic who wonders if anyone will recognize him on the streets after he appears as today’s profiled lunch’er.

Name: Tat but very few people even call me that.

Age: 29

Occupation: Corporate Tax on weekdays, Lazy Hobo by night & weekends

Where in Midtown do you Work?: In a cubicle with my face glued to my desktop, located inside an office building between 51st & 52nd and Park Ave.

Favorite Kind of Food: Italian, Tex-Mex, and Chinese. I’m always down for healthy servings of pizza, hard-shell tacos, empanadas, paella, noodles/pasta dishes, congee, fried chicken, bacon cheeseburgers and steak/home/waffle fries. Street Meats was one of my favorite meals when I started working in Midtown but lately I’ve grown tired of eating it. Throw salads into the mix? Hell no! Unless the leafy greens are covered in a pile of fried chicken or grilled lamb. I also tend to over-season my food with black/ white pepper and hot sauce. I can’t say I’d measure up as a Phall monster but I do enjoy spicy and flavorful foods. And there’s no turning down chocolate cake for dessert.

Least Favorite Kind of Food: Poorly executed orders of street meats since I’ve grown to be highly critical of Halal carts food after eating it often. I know it’s cheap and I shouldn’t be nit-picky but I am still paying for it. Then again, poorly excuted anything will be disappointing to anyone when you’re paying for it. I’m also not the biggest fan of Thai food but will eat it with friends for lunch. If anything, I’m game for Malaysian which is similar. I use to be against curry but now I’m willing to give most foods a chance. I don’t like raw celery or raw onions but would eat either vegetable thoroughly cooked/ grilled/ fried.

Favorite Place(s) to Eat Lunch in Midtown: XPL‘s Chicken & Lamb with basmati rice or their lamb on pita, and a Philly cheesesteak with Fries at Gourmet 53 (3rd btw. 52+53rd) are my top lunch choices around my office. My infrequent favorite lunches in Midtown would have to be the hakata ramen at Menchanko Tei (55th btw. 5+6th), Carnegie John’s (on 7th Ave. and 56th) grilled chicken with rice covered in tzatziki sauce (my favorite type of white sauce in the Street Meats world), and anytime I can devour a Big Mac, McNuggets and fries. Let’s not forget about Popeye’s (on 40th btw. 7+8th) and 53rd and 6th Famous Guys remains a favorite lunch Halal cart despite not eating there all the time.

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Two weeks ago, Cer Te (on 55th btw. 5+6th) challenged the Midtown Lunch community to come up with special sandwich ideas for each of the next three months. (Cer Te has had a “special sandwich” every month since we launched the ML Sandwich Challenge last January.) Well… they got a ton of entries, and after careful consideration here are the three winners!

February: Warm, Soft, Crust baguette holding tender orange coated roasted duck meat slices with cilantro, a bit of hoisin sauce and a dab of chili, topped with cucumber and pickled radish strips (Submitted by Lunch’er Cindy aka ChubbyChineseGirl)

March and April are after the jump…

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Korean fried chicken fans will be super excited to hear this news… yesterday Metromix discovered that the plywood has been taken down from the soon to be opened Kyochon on 5th btw. 32+33rd. But even more exciting than that is the place Eater discovered last week just a few doors down. Apparently Midtown is getting a place called K! Pizzacone. Aren’t familiar with the concept of a pizzacone? School yourself here.

Related:
Kyochon Finally Bringing Korean Fried Chicken to Midtown for Lunch!

Photo Credit: Eater

Photo Courtesy of Food in Mouth

• The fish sandwich from Mike’s Deli on 32nd is just ok, but the fries are good [Food in Mouth]
• Reuters & MSNBC have the grossest cafeterias [Daily Intel]
• Want to run the bar at Momofuku Midtown? [Eater]
• Finally somebody thinks to talk to some old school street vendors! [Salon]
• A new kosher spot has opened on 44th Street [Andrew Strong]
• Dave Cook takes the 93 plates guy to Mad for Chicken [Eating in Translation]
• Midtown as seen through an iPhone [Sakura Pop]

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 “Mamacita” will post 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 love Greek food and I especially crave lamb, unfortunately most Greek restaurants in Manhattan are much too expensive to include in your regular lunch or dinner rotation (I’m looking at you Anthos!) There are the Halal-style ground lamb gyros, but that’s a far cry from Greek food- plus white sauce is not a substitute for delicious, tangy tzatziki! Last week I happened upon a sign outside Uncle Nick’s Ouzaria advertising a lamb, pork, veggie, or chicken sandwich with a draft beer for $7. I was incredulous. Really? A lamb pita with a full pint of beer for only $7 –and for dinner!? There has to be a catch right? Ouzaria’s sandwiches are usually $9 with fries, but I’ll gladly pay $2 less and trade out the spuds for some suds. Needless to say I made my way there yesterday.

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Between yesterday and Today the Jamaican Dutchy (which has been M.I.A. from 51st and 7th for almost 3 months) realized that Monday is a holiday, so they are postponing their return by one more day. They’ll be back on Tuesday, and they’ll be armed with a bunch of new menu items. Hamburgers, salmon burgers, turkey burgers, and the previously mentioned “Jamaican Dogs” will be added to the menu this Tuesday. Plus they are planning on doing some sort of different special every Tuesday from now on. The inaugural special? Salt fish with beans.

Alright back to the work at hand (aka finding lunch in Midtown).  Got this email from Lunch’er Matt about a street meat cart on 55th and 6th that he thinks everybody should check out (and you know I’m always up for new street meats!)

I’ve been meaning to share with you a newish street meat cart… but my co-worker who found it (and gushed about it) didn’t want me to. But I think we’d both like to insure its survival by having it appear on Midtown Lunch. It is called Kabab Express and it is located on the southeast corner of 55th and 6th, just in from the LOVE sign. I’ve only tried 3 things there so far, chicken and rice, lamb kabab over rice and the chicken kabab over rice. The standout is the chicken kabab which they marinate overnight in little bags for each skewer and come out tasting perfectly cooked and well seasoned with what I think is cumin and cinnamon. Because the kababs take some time as they are cooked to order, the cart has a phone number and a flyer that they give away so you can call ahead of time.

The flyer and more is after the jump…

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Ever since I started this blog (almost 4 years ago), friends and family have been telling me “You should expand!” “Branch out to other cities.” “Register a ton of ‘lunch’ domain names, and conquer the world!!!” And my thought was “Clearly you don’t read my blog. Or work in Midtown.” The site is called Midtown Lunch. It’s about lunch… in Midtown. It is what it is, and that’s why it’s so great. And even if I did want to expand, there’s one major problem: there is no place like Midtown. Seriously. We couldn’t have done this anywhere else. As much as we all like to joke and call it a wasteland, no city in the country has an area comparable to Midtown. Nowhere can you find so many people, crammed into such a small space, with so many lunch options. Despite all of its faults, Midtown is unique. Midtown is (dare I say) special.

The truth is, I never had any intention of turning this site into something bigger. Hell, I never intended it to be anything more than a hobby slash excuse to eat gross lunches every day. I started it for fun… a Midtown Lunch’er myself, eager to leave my co-workers to their boring turkey sandwiches while I went in search of something a bit more satisfying.

But clearly you guys had a different plan for me.

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