Southern NYC Lunch Tour

Friday, October 20, 2006

Day 7
Au Mandarin
2 World Financial Center (200 Vesey St.)
Oct. 20, 2006


I was unprepared for the fact that Au Mandarin is an actual restaurant. The kind you sit down and tip the waiter in. I realized that the Homestyle Bean Curd I had been fantasizing about all morning would, with waiter-tip, exceed my $10 lunch tour limit, and this didn't seem to be the sort of restaurant one would want to eat at alone, anyways. Perfect place for a lunch date, though. It was extremely well-decorated and elegant, at least from the outside. And the fact that it was set in the majestic World Financial Center building certainly added to it's sense of gleaming opulence.

The take-out room resembled an extremely elegant and well-decorated...laundry room? Something about it's windowless cubbyhole existence made me think of an exquisite china-themed laundry room in the super posh basement of a building I could never afford to live in. Although I did wait 10 minutes for my order, it was completely understandable considering that the restaurant was slammed, and most people were smart enough to phone in their orders.

Because it was raining, this ended up being one of two lunch-tour lunches so far where the actual consumption took place back at my desk rather than in a park or on a pier. The homestyle bean curd, at a total of $9.70 including tax, was superb and plentiful. The topper: inside the take-out bag was an industrial sized hot/cold moist towel. Not a measly towellete or wash'n'dry in a 1 1/2 inch square packet, but rather a generously sized, elegantly branded, utterly handy, hot/cold, moist to perfection, disposable hand-towel.

Now that's class.


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