NY Food Truck Lunch: Chicken Biryani from Biryani Cart

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Biryani Cart has been on the SW corner of 46th St and 6th Ave for many years. They were the People's Choice Award winner at both the 2009 and 2008 Vendy Awards, and they have a large and loyal following. The owner, Meru Sikder, recently opened a brick-and-mortar place in Jamaica, Queens called Vooter Adda that serves "Bangladeshi, Indian & Pakistani Chinese Cuisine." Sounds intriguing.

One of the rules we try to follow is that if the name of a dish is in the name of a restaurant, try that dish. We don't always follow it, but this is a good rule of thumb. On that note, we ordered the chicken biryani for$6.  They also have a vegetable biryani available.

The first thing you notice when opening the container is the aroma.  Indian food is always so fragrant, and this was no exception.  The other really noticeable thing was the hard-boiled egg in the center of the biryani.

Once I started digging in, there was a lot of chicken mixed in with basmati rice, the hard-boiled egg in the middle that had the tandoori orange color on the outside, and some white and hot sauce on top.

There were a lot of flavors going on in this dish, including clove, which came to the front towards the end of lunch.  I'm not great at picking out individual flavors in a dish, but there was a lot going on here.  There was plenty of delicious basmati rice, chicken, and the piece-de-resistance, the hard-boiled egg, which is always a favorite.

There was a small salad on the side of mainly lettuce and a little arugula, with a decent white sauce on it as dressing.  Not amazing, but the point of this lunch is not the salad.

We don't think you could get anything bad from Biryani Cart, but our personal preference is for the kati rolls.  Everything here is at the quality level where it's more a matter of personal preference than which dish is better.  The biryani is more of a comfort food, whereas the kati rolls are a little more adventurous (and spicy).  Today we wanted comfort food.  Other days we want hot and spicy.

Biryani Cart has a website, but no Twitter or Facebook that we can find. There's really no need. They are on the SW corner of 46th St & 6th Ave from 11am to midnight, so you can go there for lunch, dinner, or for a snack after a show at a Broadway theater or Radio City Music Hall.