Amish Market

Amish Market - Not Recommended
240 E 45th St
New York, NY‎ 10017
(212) 370-1761‎

There's a handful of Amish Market's in Manhattan that do a ton of business during lunch. The Amish Market is a supermarket that works you in by selling you the promise it's like an Amish food station, that things are clean, and all natural.
During lunch hours, you'll mostly find office workers stepping away from their cubicles to head either to the salad bar or hot food station and pack the plastic containers full of goodies to take back to their desks.
And at $6.99 a pound... one can work that comfortably into the budget.
Everything looks really good and people line up efficiently, waiting their turn to pick up their food.


Well just yesterday, I walked by an Amish Market and decided to give it a shot. I picked from the hot and cold bar and was rung up at the cashier... $9.00 flat.
Not great but not terrible I thought. That and a Diet Coke would run an even 10 bucks. I can live with that... or so I thought.

I double timed it back to my desk a block away and sat down to chow.
Low and behold the first bite.
I shit you not... there was absolutely no flavor.
I took another bite and the same thing... nothing.

I had just spit my gum out so I thought it was the gum's fault... but no it was the food. I waited a few minutes and took a few sips of my beverage to cleanse the palate.
I wish I took a picture of the morsels of food I picked (wanting to try everything so that I would know what to get next time).

Bite after bite, nothing. Everything was bland and really didn't have much distinct texture as well.
Biting into the beet salad felt like biting into the caesar salad with croutons...
Biting into the marinaded roasted chicken tasted and felt like biting into the tofu burger patties in the orzo salad.
I was sad(at my choice), but probably a bit more annoyed knowing that hundreds of people ate what I was eating and that Amish Market gets away with it. They make money by selling people crap. That just doesn't sit well with me.
Bad companies / restaurants should not survive. Ironically, they not only survive but are rewarded as well.
This is a typical case where our economic (capitalism) model has gone wrong.
A chain like Amish Market is able to rent out the large space and therefore create a business based on turn overs and numbers. In order to do so, they emphasize on cutting cost, whether it be labor or raw ingredients, and ultimately make up the difference by marketing and dumbing down the general population.
This place is no better than Applebee's but just packaged a little different. Thanks to really good marketing, the trip to Amish Market is highly habit forming, and they end up having repeat zombies coming in day after day filling on the same old slop.
The strong stay strong and the newbies never have a shot to climb the ladder of success.

If only more people woke up and demanded better.
At the end of the day, I guess it starts at home. If you don't eat well at home, you'll never know and/or demand better at restaurants.

Tough day for this dude. Amish Market, shame on you.