NYC Food Truck Lunch: Kafta Platter From Toum

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

The best food trucks are the ones that are the most consistent. You can go there any day and have a good to very good lunch. Toum, the 2013 Vendy Award Finalist, fits nicely into this category.

Toum serves Lebanese food, and was a Vendy Award Finalist in 2013. Their go-to dish is probably chicken shawarma, with juicy layers of meat roasting on a spit, but we've already written about that. This time we decided to order the kafta platter for $12. You can also get a kafta sandwich (on pita) for $9.

Have you ever had a Lebanese hamburger? That's essentially what kafta is at Toum, although at other vendors, we've had kafta that was shaped like cigars and meatballs.

The minced beef is mixed with parsley, onions and Lebanese spices, then grilled. The kafta platter at Toum comes with 2 hamburger-sized patties, tabbouleh salad, hummus or babaghanouj, and rice or french fries.

The kafta was good, being a more spiced version of a hamburger, but not in the spicy sense. With two patties, there was more than enough for lunch, especially with rice, two sides and pita bread included in the platter. Toum also included a small container of tahini sauce, which we poured over the kafta patties. Adding tahini sauce made them into sesame-flavored burgers.

The hummus and tabbouleh salad were both fresh and recommended. The rice was a little different, with small pieces of vermicelli mixed into the rice ("the pasta, not the worm" to reverse a quote from Young Frankenstein).

Lunch at Toum is consistently good, no matter what you get. They park in different business areas during the week, so it's best to find Toum on Twitter here, on Facebook here, and their website is here.

As we said, their chicken shawarma is excellent too. Here's a photo of the chicken roasting on a spit to whet your appetite.