I nearly starved to death on Friday. At 11:03, I placed my UberEats order for a mixed gyro plate from The Halal Guys, set to open January 30 at 3821 Farnham (near the original 59 Diner) and featured as a special preview on that day’s UberEats menu. My order failed. I tried again 15 minutes later. And 15 minutes after that. And 15 minutes after that. At 1:25, my Uber driver handed me a couple of bright yellow and red bags through the window of her car and sped off, presumably to another frustrated and hungry customer jonesing for some of that special sauce.
Long a fixture of the NYC street-food circuit, The Halal Guys have been slinging “white sauce”-covered meat and rice on the streets of Manhattan since 1990. I’ve heard people wax rhapsodic about that white sauce, often going so far as describing the brightly colored carts as mandatory NYC dining experiences. It’s never made my NYC lists, but the opportunity to try it for myself from the relative comfort of my Houston downtown office (or in their storefront, a few blocks from my house) is certainly appealing. In the end, my experience was a bit of a mixed bag, depending on how I, well, mixed the bags.
My package contained the following:
• 1 round foil container filled with rice, gyro meat and chicken, along with a few triangles of depressingly bland, doughy pita bread
• 1 small deli container of chopped iceberg lettuce and diced tomato
• 2 large sauce packets filled with “White Sauce”
• 1 smaller sauce packet labeled “Hot Sauce: Very Spicy!”
In order to get the lay of the land, I first tried all of the components on their own. You can do this if you really dig the (pseudo)scientific method, but it’s far from the best way to eat this stuff.
On its own, the chicken tastes like supermarket rotisserie chicken, coming in a bit on the dry side. The gyro meat, meanwhile, is a jumble of rubbly bits, chopped into tiny submission. It has a firm sausage-y spring to it and is almost egregiously salty. The rice underneath is bright orange, as if dusted with the crumbled contents of a bag of Cheetos. It’s still firm, though, with a pleasant nutty, buttery taste. The salad looks and tastes a bit like it might have been gathered from the top of a fast-food tostada.
The world famous white sauce seems to be mayonnaise thinned with vinegar and jigged with stale black pepper, almost like a slightly tweaked version of Kewpie Mayo. It’s not bad, but it’s not great. The hot sauce is thick, almost paste-like, and it isn’t messing around. “Very Hot!” always seems like a hollow brag. It isn’t here. It’s dusky and aggressive, with a faint tartness and a background layer of chile fruitiness. It’s good stuff, but you’ll want to use it sparingly.
An odd thing happens when you combine a little bit of everything, though. The flavors seem to cancel each other out. The tart, creamy white sauce dampens the taste of the hot sauce, leaving only a (mildly) reduced burn. The heat of the red sauce nullifies any zip the white stuff once had.
It’s an odd thing, really. If that were the end of the story, I’d be ready to write The Halal Guys off as all talk and no action. Fortunately, that’s not quite the case.
This is grub-food, designed to deliver targeted doses of intense flavors. It’s a shock and awe campaign aimed directly at the pleasure center of the brain. There’s not much in the way of complexity or subtlety, but there is a pretty deft understanding of the way fat, salt, spice and acid can be tweaked to light up the amygdala like a lab rat with an electrode-skullcap.
For a little over $8, a large container of near-perfect drunk-food (you know what I’m talking about) isn’t a bad thing, as long as you know what you’re getting into and how to get into it properly. I’m not fully a convert, subject to intense white sauce cravings. I get it, though. It scratches an itch pretty well, and it’s always nice to have another back scratcher.
The Halal Guys, 3821 Farnham, thehalalguys.com