Time, perhaps, to rethink that garden-variety food-cart fish taco. Not to mention the clichéd mobile-vendor lobster roll. How about, instead, a Teton Waters Ranch grass-fed beefburger with avocado mayonnaise and salsa verde ($7)? Or a Fossil Farms grass-fed buffalo burger with spring onion jam, wild arugula, horseradish yogurt and pickled ramp? (Also $7).
On Monday the New York food cart will step up to a new level of haute when Rouge Tomate, the high-end, Belgian-owned restaurant on East 60th Street, relaunches its bright red, $30,000 food cart at the Central Park Zoo on Fifth Avenue and East 64th Street with a new menu that is intended to kick things up a notch.
Among the offerings: Amish Country chicken with North African spices, harissa, sweet peppers and onion, and minted yogurt ($8). And marinated portobello mushroom with Goodale Farms feta cheese, cucumber tzatziki and black olive tapenade. There’s also the chilled English pea soup with Meyer Lemon yogurt and the chilled spring garlic, leek and potato soup (both $5).
Oh yes, the whole wheat buns are baked for the cart by Amy’s Bread, and menu items are served with pickled Greenmarket vegetables on the side.
“We don’t think of this as haute, but it has to be special,” said Jeremy Bearman, 37, the chef of Rouge Tomate, who created the new menu. “People have so many choices now, they need something unusual.”
Last year, its first in the park, the cart offered two sandwiches — grilled-cheese and bacon, lettuce and tomato — as well as a curried chicken salad, “and this year we wanted to step up to another level,” Mr. Bearman said. “Our food cost is high, given the kind of product we’re working with, but we have great relationships with our suppliers.’
Only two employees staff the 5-foot-by-8-foot cart, assembling the complex fare, much of which is prepared beforehand in the restaurant, four blocks to the south.
And desserts? Well, among others: semolina lemon shortcake, and rhubarb-strawberry yogurt — and that Valrhona chocolate cookie with fresh mint ice cream. Both are $4.