Halal Cart Downtown Street Food | Tasting Table San Francisco

Manhattan's favorite cheap lunch comes to downtown San Francisco

Silvery carts smelling of meat and spice are ubiquitous in Midtown Manhattan. Now they have a San Francisco imitator.

The bright red Halal Cart showed up quietly on Market Street three weeks back. It's definitely a local operation: "The idea's from New York, but the cart is made here," Asad Amimi, the guy taking orders, reassures us.

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Amini and his cousin-co-owner have reproduced the original closely, including the round aluminum plates the signature dish–gyro with rice ($7)–is served in. (We suppose you can get a gyro sandwich or kabob burger, too, but the cart's owners aren't the only nostalgic ones.)

Flip off the lid of the tin and you'll find a massive portion of long-grained rice, a simple salad and a mound of beef, chicken or both.

Halal Cart's menu, short and sweet

We prefer the long-marinated chicken, browned and shredded on the griddle, to the prepackaged beef gyro meat. But really, who are we kidding? On occasion we like that, too.

Tangy yogurt sauce criss-crosses the top, and if you've requested it spicy, dots of red chile sauce, too. It's not haute cuisine. It is hot, cheap, fast and redolent with cumin and coriander.

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And now we don't have to brave Times Square foot traffic to eat it.

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