I started on a new block - the south side of 45th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. The first place to eat on that block is a hot dog cart, but my whole reason for doing this today was to get food indoors, so I skipped it. I also haven't decided if I'm going to include hot dog carts in the challenge. Midtown Manhattan has a lot of hot dog carts that aren't very different from one another, so this could start to become a very boring challenge if I include them.
After the hot dog cart, the first place was Cafe 45, a place I first visited back on a hot day in July for a salad. They now have a full Korean menu, including ramyun, bulgogi, bibimbap and what I got - the spicy chicken.
The Korean dishes are made to order at the stir fry stall. It was bustling when I was there and a lot of people seemed to get the noodles. I decided on the spicy chicken since that's usually my go-to dish and therefore a good point of comparison.
The spicy chicken came with vegetables and white rice. They let you pick 4 vegetables (which confused me at first, as I was not expecting to choose the vegetables myself). I went with onions, green onions, bean sprouts and mixed vegetables (corn, peas, carrots - a bit odd in spicy chicken, but I was not going to pick broccoli or cauliflower with my food intolerance). I watched them cook the chicken and the vegetables, throw on red spicy paste and then add some brown sauce from the teriyaki bottle. I hoped for the best.
The dish wasn't bad. It didn't have the depth of flavor that I usually like in Korean spicy chicken dishes, but it still had a lot of flavor. It was better than I thought it would be, considering that the chicken wasn't already marinated in spicy flavoring before cooking. Would I get it again? Maybe. I might try the bibimbap first though, as quite a few people in line near me ordered that and it looked good.
Two annoying things happened during my visit that don't make me feel like rushing back here for my next lunch. First, I told the guy working the stir fry station that I couldn't have broccoli in the vegetables (back when I didn't know there was a choice). Then as I'm choosing the vegetables, he went for the broccoli when I said "bean sprouts." This meant I had to look through the whole dish for stray broccoli pieces while eating, taking away some of the enjoyment. Luckily I didn't see anything but it was a pain. Second, I got charged $1 more than I should have. I could have sworn the very nice cashier said $8.66 but when I looked at my credit card receipt, it was $9.66. Unfortunately I had already left (they don't make you sign for such low amounts) so it was too late. I'm going to assume this was not intentional and was just a typo on the credit card keypad (at least I hope it was). Still annoying.
So the first stop on my new block by block challenge was a mixed bag. Let's see what the rest of the block brings.
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