NYC Food Truck Lunch: Eggplant Calzone From Li-Sal's Italian Kitchen

Perry, the founder of New York Street Food, brings you his latest review on New York City street food.

Since it's technically illegal to sell food from a truck in NYC, we've been seeing a dramatic rise in the number of higher-end food carts. Well, at least higher quality than the standard halal or hot dog cart. Food carts are legal in NYC, as long as you have the right permits and licenses.

One of the newer food carts is Li-Sal's Italian Kitchen, an import that hails from Arthur Ave in the Bronx. If you're not familiar with Arthur Ave, it's nickname is "The Real Little Italy", since the Little Italy on Mulberry St mostly consists of tourist traps.

Li-Sal's is on 50th St between 6th & 7th Ave, where about 7-8 food carts park daily. The menu isn't large, but they offer several types of heros and calzones, such as chicken or eggplant parmigiana, sausage & peppers, stromboli, and a few calzones. One thing they have that we haven't seen before are several dessert calzones. They also have regular cannolis and cannolis filled with nutella! If you're craving dessert, Li-Sal's is a good option.

When we ordered the eggplant parmigiana calzone ($6), they said it would take about 4 minutes. We said "no problem". After about 2 minutes, they gave us a garlic roll to eat while we waited. After about 4 minutes, they gave us half a dessert calzone and again apologized for the wait. Heck, we weren't even complaining, but they still kept giving us free food for the "inconvenience of waiting". We never met them before, so it wasn't because they knew we were reviewing the cart.

The garlic roll was piping hot and delicious. It was pretty garlicky, but even better was the liberal amount of parmesan cheese sprinkled on both the top and bottom of the roll. And it was free! And they tossed another one into our bag with the calzone, too.

The eggplant parm calzone was not what we expected, but it was still pretty good. Our experience with calzones is they are usually a baked semi-circle of dough stuffed with ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese and sometimes ham or another meat.

This calzone was cylinder-shaped and deep-fried, with eggplant, breading, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese inside, but no ricotta. It was more like an inside-out fried hero. They also gave us a small container of sauce on the side.

The eggplant inside was a large, thin slice of eggplant, but it was tough to bite into pieces. We would have preferred if the eggplant was pre-sliced to make it easier to eat. The flavor was good, with gooey cheese, light tomato sauce and a deep-fried coating. The tomato sauce on the side was very good, with chunks of onion and plenty of seasoning, most notably fennel. We ended up putting more tomato sauce on the hero because it was so good.

Everything was good so far, but the dessert calzone blew us away. The outside breading was light, like a zeppole, and it was dusted with cinnamon sugar. Inside were pieces of apple and a creamy sauce, with cinnamon notes in the apple sauce. An entire dessert calzone is $5, and they are easily big enough to share with lunch.

We cannot find a Li-Sal Twitter account, but their Facebook is here. You can find them on 50th St between 6th & 7th Ave every weekday for lunch.

We will definitely be going back to Li-Sal's Italian Kitchen, with sausage & peppers probably next on the list, or maybe a stromboli. Either way, we'll have to try a cannoli or nutella cannoli for dessert.