In the last 3.5 years, Zach Brooks has turned the website Midtown Lunch into one of the most eagerly read food blogs in the city, and thousands upon thousands of office workers depend upon him to provide them with a cheap and delicious lunch. The concept is brilliant, and Zach had been intrepid in seeking out both small and obscure places, and putting much-ballyhooed spots to the test.

Dumplings! They come five to an order ($3.50), but I ate one on the way home.

Eton Chan is making some very nice dumplings at his new shop in Carroll Gardens. The storefront is small, with just a few stools by the window. The small kitchen sits in the middle of the room, behind a counter, so you can watch the cooks smash garlic and dice scallions, and you hear your dumplings when they hit the oil and start to sizzle. There are just three varieties: pork and beef with cabbage, chicken and mushroom and vegetable tofu.

I stopped by today and got one order of pork/beef and one of vegetable. The dumplings are large, almost the size of my fist and come five dumplings to a $3.50 order. One order would be enough for a light lunch, two orders if you're hungrier.

The dumplings are first pan-fried, then steamed, so that one side of the dumpling skin is brown and crispy, and the others are white, soft and slightly chewy. They come to you piping hot, cooked to order (you'll probably have to wait 10 minutes for them to be ready).

I especially liked the pork/beef variety. The homemade wrappers give way into a bouncy meatball that gushes juice under your teeth. The vegetable-tofu were less delicious, stuffed with a dull cabbage-carrot-lentil mixture that was very underseasoned; plus, they fell apart easily, shedding cabbage everywhere. But Eton makes a spicy-sweet plum sauce (you can buy a bottle for $4); dousing the vegetarian dumplings in that sauce improves matters.

There's also Hawaiian shave ice, in sweet fruit flavors, which you can top with things like red beans, marshmallow fluff or condensed milk. Eton's shave ice season, though, is about to be over on October 31st. It will be replaced by noodle soups, featuring hand-pulled noodles augmented with braised short ribs and pork belly. Look for the soups starting in November.

Eton
205 Sackett Street
718-222-2999

Dumpling guts

Roast pork lunch special: $5. Eat up, big spender!

Cheap Lunch! In which we find good eats in cheap places.

J&R Restaurant
468 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn
718-788-8437
How cheap? $5

If there was ever a day for a cheap lunch, this is it, agreed? J&R Restaurant is a very old-school Puerto Rican spot, with a Pepto Bismol-pink counter, pink plastic stools and fake pink roses on the tables. The stern older woman behind the counter has a very serious beehive hairdo, and is also very serious about the telenovelas that play on the television in the corner.

By the window, there are craggy piles of cuchifrito, the various Puerto Rican soul food-ish snacks—gigantic balls of fried plantain, pasteles and dark links of blood sausage.

The lunch special, an enormous plate of yellow rice with pigeon peas, beans and meat sets you back five dollars. You have your choice of roast chicken, beef stew or roast pork. I got the roast pork. The rice are beans here are very good, and the pork is faintly gamey in a good way. The woman behind the counter got out a whole roast pork leg, and hacked up some meat and crisp skin for my plate. It can use a sprinkle of salt, but on the whole, a quality pile of meat.

And, because I never know when to stop, I also ordered a salt cod fritter. They cost $1.50 and are the size of a small pancake. Hot and crunchy on the outside, gooey with salt cod and herbs on the inside, this is a very, very good fritter.

Salt cod fritter

Pernil, $7

Cheap Lunch! In which we find good eats in cheap places.

El Nuevo Sabor Latino
620 4th Avenue, Brooklyn
718-788-9063

How cheap?
$7 whole roast chicken (so about $3.50 a serving)
$7 gigantic plate of pernil, plus rice and beans (again, $3.50 a serving, easily)

I walked by El Nuevo Sabor Latino about a hundred times before I really noticed it. It's on a drab stretch of 4th Avenue, right at the Prospect Avenue R subway stop. The tiny Dominican lunch counter with a burgundy awning doesn't look like anything much. The fanciest thing about it is the enormous flat-screen TV that plays Yankees games in high-def.

Once, on a whim, I stopped in and ordered the roast chicken— $7 gets you the whole bird, hacked into wings, thigh, breast. I'm not a fan of any old rotisserie chicken, but this one is totally sublime, dripping garlicky juices and covered in salty, burnished skin.

The pernil comes with slabs of pork skin that are as crisp as a potato chip, and big hunks of lucious, porky meat, deeply browned in spots. Squeeze on the lime and try to control yourself.

The rice and beans are pretty mediocre, but I, for one, don't really care. This is a place that knows its way around meat and garlic. There's also a selection of Dominican breakfast items, which I haven't tried, like mashed green plantain with eggs, cheese and salami, or cassava with sausage.

You're probably not in this neighborhood for lunch, (called Green-wood Heights, or South Park Slope, your pick), but pick up a chicken and it'll feed you for two days, or at least be dinner for two. (Unless you are a total pig, like me, in which case the pernil will be gone before your boyfriend even knows you bought it.)

Roast chicken, $7 per bird

Hey big spender! Clockwise from bottom left: Tofu in black bean sauce, rice, tofu in soy sauce, bean curd skin-wrapped chicken, cold eggplant

The rising cost of food and the precarious financial status of most restaurants continues to be a big story, with the NYT weighing in again today on the subject. (To summarize: Rich Europeans are the only big spenders now...Restaurants will soon be overbooking reservations just like airlines...sigh.)

So to cheer up, we're turning to cheap lunch—reviews of places that you can actually afford.

Lunch under $10 is a fairly big category. Lunch under $5 is much harder—especially if you want a plate with some variety, something more than a couple dumplings or a hot dog on the street.

I was curious about Lunch Box Buffet (195 Centre Street), which sports a yellow awning that screams the bargain: $4.50 eat in/$4 take out for a five-item plate.

You pay first, and the cashier will ask if you want white rice. Keep in mind that the rice will count as one of your five choices. The room is lined with a very long steam table buffet, containing the rest of your choices, and tended to by stern ladies who dish it out.

Wander around the room and check out the options before you decide. Some dishes look decidedly better than others. If you're a fan of those lacquered, sesame-seeded, fried chunks of indeterminate meat common at Chinese-American places, you're in serious luck.

But there are other dishes that are worthwhile. I especially liked the big slab of fried tofu in black bean-garlic sauce. Yes, the sauce had a little more cornstarch than it should have, but it also had big slices of garlic, salty black beans, diced carrot and ginger. I also liked the cold, garlicky eggplant and the bean curd skin wrapped around dark-meat chicken.

Much of the food here is mediocre, but if you choose carefully, you're rewarded with an enormous plate of pretty good food for less than the price of one of those big, crazy drinks at Starbucks.

Plus, the amount on each plate is absolutely enough for two, and if you're sneaky about it (or you do takeout with a friend) you can share, bringing the cost down to $2.

Cheap Lunch! Tabla's new street cart (11 Madison Avenue; Mon-Fri 12pm-3pm)
How cheap? $8 (Okay, not that cheap, but a lot more affordable than Tabla or Bread Bar.)

Chef Floyd Cardoz recently opened a street cart outside Tabla/Bread Bar. It serves frankies—a kind of Mumbai burrito, made with an eggy roti rolled around a filling—and bhel puri, a variety of chaat, the spicy-sweet-sour crunchy Indian snacks. There's also kulfi, boiled peanuts and pomegranate lemonade.

I was really excited about this. I happen to love Tabla, and I think New Yorkers should eat more chaat in general. In fact, we should have chaat stands all over town! I think it would catch on quickly. At least, I'd be there everyday.

But anyway, I stopped by Tabla's cart for lunch. You can see the menu and the pricing above.

Bhel puri is basically puffed rice and boiled, diced potatoes mixed with several chutneys and topped with sev, the fried vermicelli-like crunchy bits you can see in the picture below. The bland ingredients (puffed rice, potatoes, sev) are meant to be zipped up with the sour, sweet and spicy chutneys, and sometimes onion, chiles and tomatoes. This version was just a little bit disappointingly bland, with green mango standing in for sharp coriander chutney, and not enough tamarind chutney to lend sweetness. Bhel puri is not meant to be subtle; this one needed oomph. Still, it was tasty, and I bet if you asked them to make it stronger, they would.

The frankie was great, with garlicky, mint chutney-smeared chicken tikka inside. The pomegranate lemonade was refreshingly tart and not too sweet. So, if you get tired of waiting in line at Shake Shack, you can scamper over to Tabla for some Indian street food.

Bhel puri

Chicken tikka frankie

Cheap Lunch! A new feature highlighting places to get great, cheap lunches.

Deluxe Food Market

How cheap? $3.75

Deluxe Food Market practices truth in advertising. Yes, it is a very deluxe food market, with a fantastic meat-fish-frozen grocery selections (with rapid turnover), as well as two long sets of steam tables and two Cantonese roast meat take out counters. There's one whole freezer dedicated solely to frozen dumplings, where you'll find big, utilitarian bags of everything from crab shumai to watercress-chicken. It's a fantastic place, and could just as easily be filed under Best Markets. The only drawback is that you shouldn't go if you're feeling stressed or are in a hurry, as the space is very tight, very crowded and sometimes difficult to navigate quickly.

Join the line at the steam tables near the back entrance (where there are tables and chairs) if you want to eat in, or stick to the steam tables down in front if you want to take out. The deal is this: 4 items (not including rice; rice can be one of your items) for $3.75. The signs posted in front of the various dishes are not usually accurate, so just take a look at everything and point to what looks good.

Here's what looked good to me: Clockwise from left: Fried shrimp, bean curd skin wrapped around cabbage and pork, ma po tofu and stewed beef short ribs.

You can also get dumplings and buns. The steamed roast pork buns are only $.70, but are pretty ordinary. Not so the pork and chive dumplings (below), which are pan-fried and crispy on the bottom; the filling is completely delicious. They are also gigantic; each one is about half the size of my fist. $1.50 for four.

Then there's the roast pig, duck and lacquered racks of ribs that hang in the windows. I got the ribtips with honey glaze, which I thought pretty spectacular, especially if you like sweetish glazes on pork. $2.99/pound ($3.59 for the pack below)

79 Elizabeth St
New York, NY 10013
(212) 925-5766