Herald Square Market

I was assaulted when I walked in! They are rude! Horrible place ever!!! I went to the market from 10:45 to 11:05.
I took my service French bull dog in the market. An Asian guy told me dog is not allowed. Then I showed him my dog’s identification, he said even a service dog is not allowed. When I was trying to walk a little bit further, he grabbed my arm and dragged me back with the arm that holding the dog! How rude it is!!!
I have never seen someone did this to me and my dog. This is totally unacceptable and disrespectable!!!

I work nearby and I go here for bagels and pre-​packaged foods. I would NOT get much else to be honest, the display food has been there for quite a while. It’s pretty cheap but they have a 10 dollar card minimum! so it’s really hard to get there and it’s a total waste of money if you don’t have cash.
My bagel always somehow gets flattened (??), but it’s hot, there’s a lot of cream cheese and it’s fast. I tried the bagels at PAX and I really prefer the ones from here!
My coworkers have gone here for omelettes and it looks like it’s worked out for them.

I came here for lunch when I was working off-​site. To be honest, I first wandered into PAX and then looked at the menu and the prices and my wallet and was like «Nah.» After leaving PAX, I saw that this was right next door and so I decided to go in and see what was there.
The first thing that caught my attention was that they had both a hot and a cold buffet (i.e. salad bar). My graduate school experience has really turned me on to places with hot buffets so my first thought was «Oh, hello.» The hot buffet has a wide array of choices, but I think the way that some of the options are laid out makes it difficult for short folks like me to reach. Also, the food is hot and steaming, so if you wear glasses like I do, prepare to have foggy glasses. Extremely. Foggy. Glasses.
After getting a whole hodgepodge of stuff, I paid for my food and went to find a seat upstairs. I mean, compared to other places I’ve been to with a hot buffet/​salad selection, it was a little pricey (but I mean, hey, Herald Square, amirite?) and the food was okay. But I wasn’t looking for a Michelin-​star experience, just a lot of somethings to eat very quickly on my lunch break.
I mean, I might come here again if I’m ever in the area, but I don’t know. If the weather was nicer, I probably would have ventured a little farther than a one-​block radius.
Come here at your own discretion, I suppose.

Worst udon I’ve ever had! I almost threw up after one bite. Salad was good but the split pea soup was also bad. I had a deli sandwich buffalo chicken which was also ok. Expensive prices for such terrible food!

Pros:
pretty tasty buffet;
lots of options (although meat is mostly chicken cooked many different ways — mashed, fried, cooked, with salad, meatballs you name it chicken is cheap to cook i suppose)
Cons:
pricey — ordered a box with coffee bill came out $ 19. I might as well go sit in a nice bar.
Worst (iced, black) cup of coffee Ive ever ordered, bar none. Do not order coffee. Absolutely vile even a two packets of salt does nothing to how bitter-​pissy it tastes. And this is coming from a regular Starbucks customer not a picky coffee expert.
Owners are nice. I noticed other reviews mentioning rude service but it might be more of a case of language barrier.

A two star café with upstairs seating and a bathroom. Once came here for lunch and there were a decent amount of selections. The food was okay, and I got a cup of coffee but it was weak and limited in taste. Service was disappointing. I asked for a refund once I found out that the coffee was luke warm and tasteless. For the food part, I had turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy. Turkey was fine, mashed potatoes looked old and liquidly, which completely spoiled my appetite. The gravy was old, and rotten and barely even tasted like anything. It ended up being tossed in the garbage.

Bad food, not clean, they failed a few inspections.
The service is not good either, they are rude.

I was looking for a place to have a drink and sit down on my lunch break as I work in one of the office buildings near by. The downstairs has a fairly standard selection of fresh fruits, salad bar, etc – standard midtown deli fare. As I wasn’t hungry, I grabbed a Pellegrino and headed upstairs where the café has tables and chairs. The upstairs seemed a little dingy and the décor was much like that of a mall cafeteria, but it was quiet and cool. I was able to find a nice corner table to sit at while on my laptop. Fast forward to 20 minutes later and an older Asian man (who I assume was either the owner or the manager) makes a beeline to me and rudely tells me I’ve been sitting at the table for 40 minutes and since all I bought was water I need to leave to accommodate lunch rush hour. Ok, no big deal… Except the rest of the dining room was half empty. I will not be back.

Night cook has a poor attitude, doesn’t listen to the customer and delivered a sandwich with stale bread. Management should take notice as he’ll drive business away. Otherwise a nice local place.

Avoid this place at all costs! After walking around all day my mom and sister wanted to get some coffee and dessert. We came in here and got some coffee and cappuccinos and saw a display with various desserts. We picked out a safe looking lemon bar and a cheesecake brownie to share.
Whenever I’ve gotten a lemon bar it’s always tastes very lemony fresh and delicious. This was disgusting to the point that I gagged (and it takes a lot to make me gag). It tasted like it had been in a case with meat?! Horrrrrrible! Nothing about it was lemony.
The cheesecake brownie didn’t taste like a cheesecake OR brownie. The «cheesecake» topping was not creamy it was hard and chewy (wtf) and the brownie part didn’t taste like chocolate. Both items tasted like they had been sitting around for months.
My mom tried to complain about how the desserts tasted old and the Asian man behind the counter rudely told her that it was NOT old and tried to blame her for picking something she didn’t like. My mom said ok then can you just throw it away. He again in a very rude way told my mom why doesn’t she throw it away. Overall terrible experience. The coffee was OK. Not worth the rude customer service. Go somewhere else.

I just bought some pre-​packaged friendship cottage cheese and it had mold in it. MOLD! and their fruit selection is always on it’s last day before having to be officially thrown out for full blown rotting. And on 2 occasions i have been given fake bills back with my change. Other than convenience when coming off the train I’m not sure why people come here. I’m not sure why I come here.

You’ll have no problem with this place as long as you realize it’s a big buffet where you buy food by the pound. I had a nice lunch for under $ 6. But if you can’t restrain yourself, you’ll come away spending more. If your expectations are in line with what it is you’ll be more than satisfied. I also was able to sit down in the upstairs dining room no problem. You can’t say that for a lot of NYC lunch counters.

Normally, I avoid the typical, oversized, crowded Midtown delis. But after a late night (morning?) and severe hunger pangs, I stopped in for some sustenance.
There are numerous stalls serving everything from sandwiches to noodle bowls. There is an ample buffet in the back, with sesame chicken, salad, eggplant parmigiana, and a variety of other foods from all cuisines. It was teeming with people, as I was there around lunchtime.
I settled on a sandwich, which at $ 6.50 I found to be a decent deal and surprisingly not overpriced. It came with honey mustard, roasted red peppers, brie, and turkey on a hero. It was a nice-​sized hero and had plenty of stuffing. This, combined with a bag of chips and a can of soda, was about $ 10, and they accepted my debit card with no problem.
The sandwich, though well put-​together, was not as good as I’d hoped. The brie was cold and so it didn’t really mesh well with the rest of the sandwich. The honey mustard dressing was a bit bland. The turkey was on the dry side. The bread was good.
Overall, this is place is nothing special, yet nothing awful. I’m sure there are better places to get sandwiches but if you’re in a pinch, this place will do. If half ratings were an option, this place would likely be a 2.5.

Today, Saturday, was maybe my 6^th visit here, and will probably be my last. Ill get to that at the bottom.
First, this is a big store. Has premade sandwiches, yogurt, beverages, a cake/​pasrty display, very small soup table (4 pots), hot grill and small Japanese-​Korean counter, HUGE hot and cold salad bar (maybe 50% of the space). Wire display and shelving for the expensive and small packages of ‘healthy’ chips and snacks. There’s a mystery refrigeration unit with opaque glass, you can’t see into it adjacent to the salad bar and there’s also seating on the 2^nd floor.
While the salad bar is huge I think it could use some changes. There appears to be only one sized plastic box: large. If your short-​armed you cant reach the center stainless steel bins. Could have a little more pasta, without shrimp added, a bin for micro greens, and some more salad friendly veges (peppers, cuke, beans, julienned veges) unless I missed them. This place has NO salad dressing or packets of condiments (mustard, ketchup, mayo) for sandwiches.
Got Chicken salad wrap and potato salad there last week. Wrap was good, potato salad had water in the container, a couple of raw potato slices and the mayo or whatever dressing they used, was off — tossed it in trash.
Yesterday got chicken cutlet, swiss, lettuce tomato mayo on a roll. Asked them to heat it up, glad I did. While it was in the microwave a bit over 2 minutes, a small piece of the chicken was still frozen. Otherwise it was good. Imagine what it would have been like cold?
The counter people barely speak to customers, except to take orders, but yack it up amongst themselves. One guy is CONSTANTLY stirring and re-​arranging the food in the salad bins, so much so, you have trouble getting what you want at times. Two others stand around like they’re waiting for a wind to carry them off. The cashiers all seems to be having bad days and don’t say much, and sometimes look as if they’re being secretly tortured.
TODAY (Saturday) was the kicker. The usual place I get breakfast doesn’t make breakfast on Saturday, so I had to go elsewhere. I went into HS Market around 9AM. Went and got a juice and walked up to the breakfast counter. There, I was blatantly ignored by the 2 guys behind the counter. People ahead of me, and those who came in after me were attended to, but not me. Was it because I had a cane? Perhaps they didn’t like the Perry Ellis coat I was wearing? There’s another possibility, but I’m not going to go there because I don’t like playing that card. After a few minutes, the grill man, ignoring me again, told another customer there were no more potatoes (there were, in a small bin on the grill). I left, probably for good.

The «we-​do-​everything» model is a popular one in midtown Manhattan. We’ve all stopped in one of these places at least once.
In most places other than New York City it’d be fairly impressive that there was a restaurant offering sandwiches, burritos and bibimbap all in one place. Unfortunately this is New York City and Herald Square Market doesn’t do anything especially well. The sandwiches are decent, but if you can’t put together some pre-​cooked deli meats on a slab of bread, you might as well give up on ever preparing any sort of food.
Their prices are a little lower than some of the similar places in the neighborhood, but the thrill of a bargain disappears after the third or fourth unsatisfying mouthful.

While waiting for Starbucks to open one Sunday morning, I went here to get a snack since I was hungry.
I saw a lineup of buffet style items that you could put in plastic trays. The watermelon looked so inviting. I took a few slices of that and a couple strawberries. I saw big fat lazy fruit flies lounging around in the melons, though. That stressed me out. I was hungry though… So I made sure to dig a bit in the fruit pile and select the ones that were near the bottom, hopefully untouched by the dirty legs of the insects.
I then stocked up on protein bars for the week.
Okay, for 3 small slices of watermelon and literally 2 strawberries, it was $ 6. Yes, I know watermelon is heavy because it is watery. But still. That is too much.
The protein bars were also jacked up in price.
I didn’t notice the worker there being unfriendly. I guess I was too busy thinking about what a rip off the dirty fruit was.
Not coming back to this fly-​trap.

It’s quick and efficient. It’s your typical build-​your-​own meal or go-​to-​a-​counter-​and-​order-​something place.
If you want the saltiest burrito on the planet, you can get one here for $ 6.50 (plus tax, it’s $ 7.08). The only saving grace is that all the extras (guac, cheese, etc.) are included in the price.
Salad bar looks decent.
There’s seating upstairs, but it doesn’t really look like anybody comes up and cleans during the lunch rush.

I don’t believe I have had a more horrible and wretched dining experience in recent memory.
I was in Herald Square, planning on brunching this past Sunday before a Yankee Game. I was informed brunch wasn’t happening and I had to find a quick place to eat. Enter the trap called Herald Square Market.
As it was before 11am, most eateries were closed. HSM was open and was serving breakfast so I went in. It is a deli payperpound-​buffett convenience store hybrid. I usually stay away from the buffett due to being ripped off but the egg avocado salad and caprese salads looked appetizing. I also wanted some fruit. I literally in a few slices of melon, two egg whites with two avocado slices, and two tomatoes with mozz. I had trouble closing the plastic container as the holes and the tabs did not align correctly. The containers were also very slippery and unwieldy… more cube like then rectangular.
I went to order an accompanying protein. Some other customers were attempting to order some breakfast food, but the one man behind the counter rarely acknowledged them. Sometimes he would take an order, but I never actually saw any hot food (pancakes, eggs, etc.) leave the «kitchen.» Because of this, I felt like I could not order any brunch items for fear that they would never come. And of course they were the cheapest items on the posted menu.
The man also had trouble acknowledging my existence. Eventually I asked for a chipotle chicken sandwich but he was apparently out. I ended up choosing a wrap with chicken, avocado, ranch, and some other stuff that had no price and was behind the counter. He hands it to me ice cold after he puts it in another plastic container and writes the price on the outside: $ 6.25. And it was a small wrap… I ended up just accepting it and assumed that the stuff from the buffett wasn’t too pricey. I went to turn toward where you are supposed to pay for this stuff when the buffett food slipped out of my hand and fell to the floor. I apologized and went to grab some more food. This time I grabbed three slices of tomato, two slices of mozz, two pieces of avocado, and three egg whites. That was all.
When I went to pay, an angry middle aged asian women, sour face and all, grabbed the buffett box from my hand and put it on her scale. She then asks me to pay the following amount for this meal… $ 17.95. I was shocked… over 11 dollars for that buffett stuff? I told her I did not realize that such meager food would total that much money and told her I did not want the buffett food anymore, but would keep the (overpriced) wrap. She started yelling at me saying it was 8 dollar a pound and I had more than a pound. I told he rI did not care, as the contents were too meager to justify the price. Then she brought up the fact that she did not charge me for THE FOOD I DROPPED. SERIOUSLY??? I have never heard of such crap. I stood my ground. She then offered to reduce the meal to $ 15…prices are negotiable apparently here. Like I’m at a flea market or something. I was hungry and not familiar with any other food options which were open, so I just gave her my money and went upstairs to eat, pissed and disgusted.
The only thing nastier than this woman was the food… the wrap had the driest oldest tasting grilled chicken I had ever had. It was mostly inedible. The ranch dressing was mayo. The avocados was guac spread with some tiny pieces of avocados put in for laughs. The buffett food was too vinegary and the eggs tasted funny. I ended up getting a nasty tummyache from eating whatever «food» this was. And all for the low low price of $ 15.
I might have complained and asked for a refund if I was not alone and not being watched like a hawk by the nasty woman as I left that hellhole, her nose wrinkled as she frowned at me.
I would give zero stars, but Unilocal won’t let me.
Please only come here if you hate yourself. Seriously.

Dear Two Ladies At The Register,
If your lives are really miserable, why don’t you do yourselves a favor by getting a new job or just pretend a little that you love this shitty job? Fake it Beyoncé style! You guys are so lifeless. No greetings whatsoever. It is so easy just to smile, say hi and thank you. I guess you just don’t like servicing people in general, and there’s nothing I can do about that.
The food at the buffet bar looks fresh and edible. Perhaps it just got replenished. Despite the tastiness (surprisingly!), the food is still pretty pricey. Two containers of lightweight buffet food should never cost you nearly $ 20. I’m pretty sure there’s something going on with the scale or the way they calculate the total.
I’d definitely go back if I came from outside the States.

PERFECT tourist trap eatery for DUMB European and Out of State tourists that roam the streets near Herald Square that have no idea how quickly prices add up on food items from the buffet. (I overhear tourists complaining about why her purchase ends up being $ 25 when she only got 5 slices of watermelon, a few cubes of pineapple and honeydew melon and some grapes) Well bitches, welcome to tourist trap and by the pound buffett! This is NOT Golden Dragon Chinese AYCE buffet like in those strip malls in your suburbia land!!! Get it?
This place has OVERPRICED piece of SHIT food. Yes, the deli is owned and operated by my people: Koreans like most delis in Manhattan and most if not all workers are hispanic. Food at the buffet is so low quality and expensive for what you get. I came here when Sandy hit NYC and there was NO place to eat near my apartment. The food looked like it’s been sitting out there for like 12 hours or so and didn’t look fresh nor well-​maintained. The Korean cashier lady is a snobby bitch… yeah the one with the glasses… next time you see or run into me at this deli, please DO tell me to delete this review on Unilocal I sooo beg of you money hungry crazy lady