midtown lunch (over rice!).

If I had to live on one kind of food for the rest of my life, it would probably be Saucy Things Over Rice.  No, really.  I seriously can’t imagine a world in which such foods didn’t exist.  Curries over rice!  Claypot rice!  Gumbo! Other dishes I’m not going to describe because you’d be horrified that I’d consider combining such things, over rice!

So when I realized on Monday morning that the NYC Cravings truck would be parked relatively close to my office, I knew I had to act.   Their Taiwanese fried chicken with pork sauce (ground pork and soured cabbage) — over rice! — makes me incredibly happy, even though I usually forget to check their Twitter feed to see if they’re gonna be nearby.   So with my pal Tony and his friend Trevor in tow, we left our respective offices, made our way to 46th street, got our food, and chomped away.  I have no idea how “authentic” this stuff is, or if I should ever even think about authenticity as a necessary or productive framework for anything (the answer is no, I know), but man, this was great.  Tony and Trevor got the half-chicken, half-pork combo, while I went for the straight-up chicken platter.  So much food!  Over rice!  I saved half for Tuesday’s lunch.

I had the Spotmatic in tow, so of course there was going to be documentation (unlike many of my weekday lunches, which involve a spectacularly unspectacular soup chain and my windowless office).   Felt a little goofy and conspicuous, sitting in one of those generic public plazas, amongst all of the midtown office drones (of which I am one), pausing between bites to take photos of my most perfect, grubby, over-riced lunch.   But no matter: gastronomic pleasure in midtown, midday, is pretty hard to come by.