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).

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!

I walked in here once before and walked out because these places are everywhere and basically serve the same, exact food (where does it come from?) but I did notice their cold table selections seem a little bit different from other places.

For example, risotto balls (room temperature). I’ve never seen these before in other steam table places.

Well, I was wrong, this place is a dump, and the risotto balls were not good. I had some other weird things that don’t really belong together in one meal — this kind of happens to me when I am presented with too many options at a steam table.

The back of City 75 features a cavernous dining room that only a handful of people were using. There was some very interesting black artwork decorating parts of the walls and ceiling but upon closer inspection I realized this was some kind of accident and whatever the black stuff was, was peeling off. This room overall had the feeling of a steam table dining room that had been abandoned due to the zombie apocalypse.

At noon on Monday this place was packed, and half filled with mostly Asian people. Good signs! I sat at the bar, a very awkward and shallow space, and ordered the tan tan ramen and a side of pork gyoza.

This place looks like a dive. It looks old and yellowed and in desperate need of new everything. Not helping matters is the very open kitchen behind the bar, where 6 cooks (only one of whom were Japanese) are doing a lot of prep work that just doesn’t look very appetizing. Watching someone boil 20 pounds of chicken and straining it — or dumping a giant bag of frozen gyoza into a frying pan (it’s a dive, so this shouldn’t be surprising) just doesn’t make for a very pleasant meal.

My tan tan ramen (spicy ground pork ramen) was served almost immediately and was very mediocre. The ramen noodles tasted like Top Ramen packaged noodles, and the broth tasted watered down. Very unsatisfying. The gyoza were fine, though they arrived long after I finished my ramen. I was a little annoyed but you know what, there are a million other ramen places in this city.

This place has a special section where you can order bibimbap and udon AND soon dobu, which is a soft tofu stew. I ordered the beef soon dobu.

I’m not sure where they got the recipe from but this didn’t taste like any soon dobu I’d ever had. First of all, it was so hot that it literally burnt off several layers of the inside of my mouth. And on top of that it was crazy spicy. For me to say that something is crazy spicy is pretty nuts. I ate it upstairs in their dining lounge, which had the ambiance of a steamy prison cafeteria.

My stomach made really strange noises all afternoon.

It’s good, though. I ordered the “crisp mexican” which is a falafel sandwich with avocado, corn, salsa, and “nachos with jalapeno dressing” which I didn’t really understand. There were jalapenos, for sure, but no nachos. I was feeling gluttonous so I also ordered some CRISP fries. The total came out to just under $10.

I really like this cart because this food is very fresh and with the exception of the fried falafel balls you can’t really feel too guilty about eating it. It’s a pretty huge falafel sandwich, and they put it in this strange box with a zip strip which I guess is to help you not make a huge mess. While I was eating this I was wishing that I had some wet naps from Bill’s Burgers. Falafel sandwiches can get kind of messy.

The cilantro pesto sauce was quite good. I would definitely come back to CRISP.

I ordered the dal over rice, which is lentil stew over basmati rice served with garlic pickles and salad for $4.50.

This meal made me sad. The styrofoam clamshell was like 99% poorly cooked, lukewarm rice. There was maybe a quarter cup of the dal, a sprinkle of the garlic pickles, and the “salad” was basically a few chopped up leaves of iceberg lettuce.

I ate the dal, and then tried to eat more of the rice, but totally lost interest. That’s pretty rare for me.

It’s pretty small, and the menu offerings are somewhat limited. There’s a bunch of refrigerated stuff but I was jonesing for some hot soup action, so I ordered the beef udon, which did not disappoint. It was a little bit on the salty side, but that’s OK because I tend to like saltier foods. The broth actually reminded me of french onion soup. Very oniony and salty. The noodles were perfect, just the right texture. And the beef was delicious, shaved very thin, and a generous portion of it.

The portion size of this lunch was perfect. You usually get udon at takeout places and they serve it to you in a giant trough you can fit over your head. This was a small bowl that left you feeling satisfied, not gross.

So, I didn’t know that Saks Fifth Avenue has a cafe located on the 5th floor. It also features a FULL BAR, which is good to know in case you are desperate for alcohol and you happen to be on that block. Though this can be dangerous because shopping and alcohol do not mix.

SnAKS is very strange. It’s a total old lady lunch place, but they tried to make it modern seeming, and it’s on the same floor with more progressive designers like Prabal Garung and Philip Lim. I always find it weird that they put these restaurants right next to expensive clothes. Who wants to smell chicken when they’re shopping for a fancy cocktail dress?

The menu is pretty limited as you can imagine. It’s basically shrimp cocktail, iceberg lettuce and white wine. But today I tried the chicken tortilla soup, which was delicious, and the chopped salad, which had about as much flavor as water. I had a club soda to drink but probably should have ordered a Tab, as I’m sure they had it.