It almost all seemed to good to be true — 70 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, a beautiful weekend to look forward to and an email in my inbox Friday morning granting me access to a free meal prepared by chef of the moment, Momofuku’s David Chang. But this wasn’t just any meal. For one day only, David Chang was taking to the street and working his Momofuku-magic from a  food cart. For close to three weeks, thousands of people clicked their way to NBCNewYork.com at 11am sharp each day to answer a brief series of NYC celebrity chef related questions in hopes of being one of the lucky few granted access to the info on the uber-secret street cart location. We hear only around 160 people were selected out of close to 10,000 contest entries. The Chang street cart event was one of the NBCNewYork.com Locals Only meet-up activities, which include concerts, free meals from local chefs and more, that is part of a new marketing push at NBC to transform their local station websites into online destinations. I arrived at the “secret” address (318 Lafayette St), which turned out to be the parking lot of Win Restaurant Supply Co., gave my codeword and was allowed in. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the mob scene you would have expected. The event coordinators did a great job with crowd control and the line for food at the cart never seemed to be more than 20-25 deep. Even though the secret location was leaked earlier in the day by several websites, the people running the show had a list of all those that had been emailed with access and you had to match your codeword to your name.

Guests were given a menu with 3 choices for the meal: vegetarian (rice fries, a shiitake bun and ginger rice noodles), pork (rice fries, a pork bun and sweet/spicy sriracha rice cakes) and chicken (rice fries, a chicken bun and smoked chicken wings). Or you could go for the wild card ”Dealer’s Choice,” which included duck rillette (pulled duck meat) and lobster and grits with a poached egg, scallions and crispy ham chips. Unfortunately, the “Dealer’s Choice” was no longer by the time I arrived, but they were doing a special lamb shawarma — the epitome of street cart food — which came with beets and a white sauce. Some lucky ones were also getting a jar of foie gras (pork terrine). Two picnic tables seated about a dozen guests and those who couldn’t grab a seat opted to sit on the asphalt. To quell the burning sriracha post-lunch mouth feel, I went for some of pastry chef Christina Tosi’s old fashioned donut soft-serve ice cream made from organic ingredients. It was the real deal.

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