Korean BBQ Cart
After reading about the Korean BBQ cart on Midtown Lunch’s blog, I convinced my friend Harlan to walk with me to the cart (on his birthday, too!) It was rainy and windy, but I promised that the food was really good, so we got our umbrellas and walked down the block to Varick. At first, we couldn’t find the stand and I felt really bad for making Harlan walk all the way to this fictitious cart that I had talked up, but then he spotted it by the HSBC Bank. Whew!
The cart looks like any standard food cart in Manhattan except their offerings sound a lot tastier:
I was bringing back a lunchbox for my brother, David, so I decided to get one order of bulgogi and one order of fish. The fish is a standard white fish that’s battered and fried, served with a side salad and fried rice or white rice:
They also offer white sauce/red sauce like most halal carts (which I thought was kind of weird considering it’s Korean food), but I got a side of the red sauce. The fish was really flaky and moist and probably the best fish I’m ever going to have served to me from a street vendor. Adding a bit of the hot sauce really made the fish taste even BETTER.
I ordered David the bulgogi with some red sauce (and a little white sauce on the side):
I thought the bulgogi was a little dry and tasteless, and although the red sauce helped a little, I wasn’t a fan of the bulgogi (to be honest, I prefer kalbi to bulgogi so it’s probably not their fault that I wasn’t a big fan of the dish).
Harlan ordered the chicken with barbeque sauce, but I didn’t think it was that great and I didn’t have a chance to take a picture because he dug right into it when we got back to the office. Overall, I liked my dish the most and I’d definitely go back for the fish, especially since it’s really cheap AND so close to my office!