NYC Food Truck Lunch: Chicken Molé from Antojitos Mexicanos
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- We have only been to Antojitos Mexicanos once before, and that was nearly a year ago. Time for a follow-up visit. All we had to do was brush up on our Spanish because last time we were there, neither the proprietors or the customers spoke any English.
On our previous visit we enjoyed their tacos, so the question was what to get next. We considered getting a torta, but walking up to the cart, there was a sign for chicken molé. That settled it right away. Especially once we smelled the molé sauce!
We've heard it said there are as many recipes for molé as there are mothers in Mexico. Everyone has their own take on it. Let's see how this one was.
Opening up the container, we were greeted by a wonderful aroma. The chicken was a leg and a thigh, not our favorite parts of the chicken, but falling-off-the-bone tender.
Both the smell and taste were rich, deep and complex. The sauce was too complex for us to decipher, but there was an underlying semi-spiciness from the chili peppers.
Some of the most famous molé sauces have cocoa powder in them, and this one seemed to give off the faint scent of unsweetened cocoa powder.
The meat on the chicken wasn't that plentiful. We wish there was more meat, but the bites we had were delicious.
The good thing about molé sauce is after finishing the chicken, you still have sauce-soaked rice underneath. This wasn't great rice and beans, but for the molé sauce, it was more than adequate.
On the side of the cart were large bags of snacks that we hadn't seen before. We asked the proprietor, and he said they were onion rings. That didn't seem to be right, but I guess he didn't know the word for them.
One of the other guys waiting for lunch told us they were chiccarones. Now we've always known chiccarones to be fried pork rinds, but this guy said these were chiccarones made from a pasta-like dough, and had no meat in them.
Someone else said they were kind of like a cross between potato chips and onion rings. After tasting a few, that was an accurate description, except there wasn't much of an onion flavor. For a Mexican snack, they were curiously lacking in spices. A little dusting of chili powder when they came out of the cooking oil would have been perfect.
Antojitos Mexicanos is located on the east side of 6th Ave between 28th & 29th St. Our lunch and snack bag cost $8, although we're not sure of the exact breakdown. They are old-school street vendors, with no website, Facebook or Twitter account.
What we do in that area is get our lunch and walk over to the public park behind the Eventi Hotel. It runs between 29th & 30th St just west of 6th Ave. There's a reflecting pool, seats and tables, and it's a nice place to eat lunch outdoors when the weather is good.
