It’s dreary outside. Wet and misty.
Today I’m eating at Whole Foods. Chicken rice soup and a turkey sandwich on cranberry bread. The second floor of Whole Foods is packed with people, most of whom look like they are just sitting around with their laptops and not eating anything.
For what it is, this lunch is very expensive. But we are at Whole Foods.
The sandwich is quite bland. This reminds me of hospital food.
So if it isn’t clear, I’m now working as a full-time freelancer and I’m no longer in the midtown area. While this of course opens up whole new worlds of lunch places, I also don’t have the luxury of a steady check, so I need to be a little more careful and probably not eat out as much as I have been doing. This bums me out a little bit, because the goal was to eat somewhere different every business day for an entire year. But you know, things happen. What are you gonna do?
Anyway, on to lunch. Today I am lunching at Kalustyan’s, which is this incredible store and deli on Lexington Ave. in Curry Hill. Any kind of spice you can possibly imagine you can buy here. They also have an incredible selection of nuts and dried fruit and even teas and weird bottled beverages with things floating around in them. It’s a food lover’s and cook’s paradise, for sure.
On the second floor is a small deli counter where two kindly old gentlemen wearing paper diner cook hats will serve you a gigantic platter of food or a gigantic pita sandwich. The pita sandwich will fill you up for an entire day it’s so much food. Every once in a while I will get a vegetarian platter and it’ll keep me eating for about 3 meals. The falafel is pretty good here but it’s a little grainy and dry for my taste. What is killer is the mujadara, which is this kind of lentil casserole that is seasoned with crispy onions. It’s so delicious! When you get a sandwich they really pile it in there. You also get a couple of stuffed grape leaves and some pickled vegetables.
The only kind of bad thing about this is that it’s very intensely spiced and you kind of wind up tasting it all afternoon.
I love that this place still exists. A tiny little hole in the wall on 17th street, forever shrouded in scaffolding, yet still serving up delicious falafel sandwiches. This is one of the tastiest falafel sandwiches I’ve had in NYC. Glad to be able to enjoy it for lunch once again.
It’s Friday and today is my last day working at Rockefeller Center. To commemorate this occasion Nick is joining me for lunch at Rock Center Cafe.
I love this place. The food is OK but it’s such a wonderful old New York-y kind of experience, sitting by the ice rink and having a view of the golden Prometheus sculpture, and the flags waving in the wind, and kids stumbling around on the ice laughing… There are so few places left in New York that still have this feeling. I was reminded of the chapter in the Catcher in the Rye where Holden takes a girl ice skating here. You can totally picture it happening right before your eyes when you’re here.
The food was OK. I ordered very heavy things: fried calamari and an open face steak sandwich with fries. Lunch was pretty expensive but this isn’t the kind of place you go very often.
Goodbye for now, Rockefeller Center.
Qdoba is located on 51st Street between 6th and 7th. It reminds me of a mashup between a Pier One Imports, a Chipotle, and a prison cafeteria.
I walked around for about 20 minutes and just gave up and ended here. It’s that kind of place. And yet, there was a line out the door. People really love burritos and burrito related foods for lunch!
There are too many weird options here. Too many decisions to make. The nice thing about Chipotle, at least, is that it’s pretty simple.
I opted for a “naked” burrito, which is a burrito without a flour tortilla dumped in a bowl. As you can see, it’s not very pretty. The pork was yummy, but the whole thing overall was sloppy and relatively unappetizing. The way you are forced to stand in a slow moving line and have someone shout at you, ‘what do you want’ and then watch them slop food into a bowl… I mean, how is that good?
Qdoba: thumbs down.
Today’s lunch is a crepe from the Crepes Truck parked on 50th and 6th. I’ve never seen this truck before, but who can resist a vehicle that is sporting a sassy red beret and a curly moustache? Not me!
I ordered the “Norwegian,” which is a buckwheat flour crepe filled with goat cheese, smoked salmon, tomatoes and cornichons. The crepe was of course made fresh and because I didn’t want it to get cold I decided to just eat it right in front of the Time Warner building.
Totally delicious. It was the kind of lunch that made me wish I could start over again with every bite. This lunch made me want to eat crepes all the time.
Cucina & Co. in the Rockefeller Center Concourse is a restaurant that also has an extensive takeout section. It’s part of the Patina Restaurant Group which also owns Rock Center Cafe and the Sea Grill. The food from the takeout section is great. Very flavorful and fresh and reasonably priced.
The soups here are really great, especially the Italian wedding and chicken noodle soups. But when I get lunch here I almost always get the teriyaki chicken bowl, which consists of your choice of rice, vegetables, tofu, and chicken with teriyaki sauce. Today I got tofu, vegetables, and chicken. It’s a pretty clean meal that you don’t have to feel too guilty about eating, and it’s relatively inexpensive for what you get. It’s a lot of chicken.
Located very close to the F train is an Au Bon Pain. I’m having a super late lunch today because I had a super huge breakfast, and I opted to just get a smallish bowl of turkey chili.
I was surprised at how good this chili was. It tasted pretty fresh and not bad for you, and not too salty. Thumbs up for Au Bon Pain turkey chili!
In other news, my midtown lunch experience is coming to an end, though my year long lunch experiment will continue on in a slightly different way. I decided that for the time being it’s best for me to continue my work on a freelance basis.
Everything will change a bit after the 24th, so I’m going to try and make the last four lunches a bit more memorable (no more midtown steam tables or divey Panda Expresses).
I’m close to exhausting my lunch options in the concourse, so today I experimented with Manchu Wok, which turned out to be a horrifying version of Panda Express, if you can imagine that.
For 7.99 you get fried rice or noodles (I opted for steamed white rice, there is no brown rice) and three sides. I chose orange chicken (gristly and overbattered and greasy), green beans (cooked to oblivion and drowning in salty brown sauce) and chicken with broccoli (more gristly oil). I got halfway through this meal and had to put it away because it was so salty and oily and nasty I thought I was going to be sick. I almost NEVER not finish a meal!
It’s shocking to me that places that serve food like this continue to remain in business. It was that nasty!
Pret is in the concourse at Rockefeller Center. You can never go wrong with Pret, and given the kind of week I’m having I decided today I will go to Pret and get something that is fast and reasonable and relatively healthy. So today’s lunch is a banh mi style baguette sandwich (delicious and fresh) and a small bag of salt and vinegar chips.
What's for Lunch? 