Saki Knafo has a short piece in the NYT about Figaro Pizza on 2nd Avenue at 77th Street … my kind of place for a $5 lunch, inexpensive, no tipping, delicious ethnic food … walking distance from my apartment, too! Care to join me for lunch?

[I]ts workers serve lots of pizza in the front of the tiny shop. But follow a Spanish-speaking customer to the back and you’ll find Hispanic servers dishing out heaps of rice, beans, plantains and pollo guisado (chicken stew).

“It’s very hard to find Spanish food around here,” said Wilson Casue, a 29-year-old construction worker from Ecuador. He sat before the last specks of a hearty meal of fried fish and rice and beans, which, at $5, had cost just a nickel more than the dainty goat-cheese-and-cucumber sandwich at a gourmet deli in the neighborhood.

“The Pizza Joint Con Carne (and Salsa),” by Saki Knafo, The New York Times, August 6, 2006
Figaro Pizza, 1469 2nd Avenue, between 76th and 77th Streets, 212-472-2220 [Menupages]
Post by Peter