Midtown Lunch

I’m not sure if the New York Times cafeteria is back open after last week’s health scare, but Andrew Schnipper sent me an email last week wanting to make it clear that him and his brother would never take joy in the sickness of others. He also reiterated how excited they are to have the Shake Shack opening just 3 blocks away from their spot.

Hi Zach:

I hope you are well. I generally enjoy your blog and reading about your well thought out recommendations for midtown lunchers. I think you do a great job of discovering good values and interesting places for people to eat that they might not find on their own. However, I was disappointed [Thursday] regarding your comment that my brother and I would be “chest bumping” because we might get some extra business due to the fact that some people were made sick from a competitor. I can assure you we don’t ever want to see people get sick and certainly don’t want to benefit from it. Fortunately for us, business is great and we were busy [Thursday] as we usually are on a Thursday. And if we could help a neighbor and have prevented any food bourne illness, we would gladly do so. You clearly don’t know my brother and I well enough to think this would make us happy and I just wanted to set the record straight. I have no idea whether they have reopened the cafeteria, but let me be the first to tell you that I hope they did and that the employees who likely lost hours of pay yesterday will be back to work today.

But wait, there’s more.

Read more »

Dan Dan Noodles from Lan Sheng. Photo courtesy of Blondie and Brownie

• Brownie is also a huge fan of the Dan Dan Noodles at Lan Sheng [Blondie and Brownie]
• Here’s another fan of the goat curry at Salt & Pepper [Ultraclay]
• Dave Cook posts an early look at Gan Eden [Eating in Translation]
• NYC Cravings doesn’t do that bad in a head to head with Wah Mei [Feisty Foodie]
• Blondie takes the new Grand Central Financier for a test drive [Blondie and Brownie]

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.

It’s well documented that Zach and many of us Midtown Lunchers love to go hog wild on an all you can eat buffet. Likewise, once the clock reads quitting time the happy hour ideal consists of gorging ourselves on free appetizers with a good drink to lull us into the night. We all know Spice Fusion has been an ML Indian buffet mainstay, but I was surprised to find they also have an all night happy hour with free veggie or meat hors d’oeuvres. This might be the only Indian food happy hour I’ve ever heard of, so my curiosity and appetite were piqued!

Read more »

Is this too much Pump for one day? Or is it good to get it out of our system and never speak of it again? The Pump location in the food court on 3rd Ave. btw. 49+50th (with Sophie’s, Pampano, & the new Urban Lobster Shack) has closed. Makes sense now that they have their crazy new Chipotle-like location on 52nd btw. Lex+3rd.

I see a trend developing here.  A few months ago I was enticed by “chinese crunchy things” and “Thai peanut sauce” into trying something at Just Salad for the first time, and more recently Pump started offering their healthier version of “Rafiqi’s street meat”.  Like the Thai crunch wrap at Just Salad, it was enough to get me to enter a place that I would have never considered eating at before.  Clearly it’s a smart marketing strategy.  How else are they going to expand their business?  They already have the mindless, boring, Midtown masses eating their “healthy” less flavorful lunches (I don’t care what they say, fat=flavor people), so the only way to get to us (the real eaters) is to offer stuff like this.  And what can I say?  I couldn’t resist.

Read more »

In perhaps the craziest 8th Ave. price hike of all time, the Times Restaurant (formerly known as Kashmir) has raised the price of their lunchtime buffet to $14.95!?! With the New York Times cafeteria closed yesterday for health reasons, I have no doubt the places around 8th Ave. and 40th Street will be extra crowded today.  But $9 to $15 in under a year?  That’s crazytown.  I’d recommend walking up to 47th for Spice Fusion’s $11 buffet. [Photo and News Courtesy of The NYTPicker]

Related:
Adventure Lunchers Should Flock to Kashmir Buffet
Kashmir Becomes “The Buffet of Record”?

The pop up branch of Ma Peche located in the mezzanine of the Chambers Hotel (aka Momofuku Midtown) has made a few changes to their lunch menu.  The $10 Midtown Lunch specials remain untouched, but they’ve replaced with the fennel salad with a satur farm lettuce/leeks number topped with a poached egg ($14).  And they are also starting to randomly offer items from the dinner menu during lunch service as specials. Yesterday, you could have gotten the dinnertime pork ribs ($16) or the fried brussels sprouts dish (that is just like the ssam bar dish minus the puffed rice.)  Now all this stuff is completely outside of the ML price range, and you know I never spend more than $10 for lunch. But let’s say I happened to forget that rule on one particular day… and maybe ended up trying a bunch all of those new dishes… and then posted about it… that post would probably say that everything I ate was delicious.

Related:
Your First Look at Ma Peche’s “Midtown Lunch” Specials