State Platters

My review is the for the felafel only. It sucks. End of story. Felafels aren’t fresh and the sauces aren’t good. Plus they put cherry tomatoes instead of normal tomatoes which tastes really weird with the felafel. I’ve come a couple times and even when I’m drunk, it still doesn’t taste good.
My friend got the gyro once and hated it too.

Cheapest gyro platter downtown ($ 6 vs $ 8.50 vs $ 12).
Basmati rice that works much better with the chopped gyro they use.
Just enough hot sauce for a bit of tang and and white for the cool.
That and the guy reopened at the last second so I could grab a last second platter before heading home and giving me double meat on top of it. Really, you can’t beat that for any kind of platter downtown. They have excellent flavor, are filling, cheap, and they run a decent crew. Other than the whole closing in the winter thing, I love the place to death. It’s my stop for anything gyro or falafel related until I leave State College.

Being a huge fan of the new york chicken and rice platter carts, the arrival of something similar to my campus was great news and I made it a point to hit up state platters 1 – 2 times a week buying several s/​wiches and platters at the same time. I consider myself a loyal customer and a very good tipper and a huge fan of the two penn state alums who started this cart.
However, last week i walked in ordered 3 sandwiches, while i was waiting for them to be made. there walks in three females who maybe friends of one of the owner who was present at the time or maybe he was just attracted to them, tells the chef to work on their order 1^st and then mine even though i have been waiting for a while. I understand the concept of ladies 1^st but WTH not when i’m standing in the cold, way before you and being a regular customer. Annoyed and quite shocked, i asked for the s. wiches to be made so that i can come pick it up in a few and when i came back after a few minutes i find the food was still not made and they didn’t even cater to what i wanted in my sandwich. But hey anyways who cares right? as far as you make a few girls happy !!! Congrats you lost a very loyal customer and clearly despite having a Finance Degree from Penn State you NO nothing about treating your customers. Good Job ! I hope this works out well for you sir !

As an ardent fan of the famous cart at 53^rd and 6^th in New York, I was thrilled to learn of a similar cart in State College. Comparisons to that legendary cart, which has been operational for years, are bound to be unfavorable to a new cart started by spunky 22 year olds. But the food at State Platters still holds its own pretty well.
We ordered the gyro platter first and was skeptical because they didn’t have a spit roast, but a different kind of grill for the meat. But it was was yummy, especially the meat. Juicy, flavorful, succulent, and perfectly cooked. The rice was tasty too, and the tzatziki sauce and hot sauce were decent. One suggestion I have is to work a bit more on the tzatziki sauce.
Next we ordered the falafel sandwich. The falafel and other stuff was good. But I was a little bummed to bite into a huge olive. You either love or hate olives and I fall into the latter category. If I had been asked my choice of toppings, I could have told them not to put the olives in. But once I picked out the olives, the sandwich was good. The pita could have been better. I found it a tad dry. But overall, good stuff, especially by State College standards.
The sandwiches are 5.50 and the platters are 6.00, decent prices for the portions. The boys running the stand are friendly, amicable, and hard working, and you can’t help but root for them to succeed. For 22 year old college grads to run the cart is a great example in entrepreneurship.
So I give it a solid 4 stars, and encourage everyone in State College to give it a try.

Basically I am a gyros enthusiast. I have been driving to NYC from state college to get gyros many times (the best gyros in front of Hilton Hotel on 53^rd st and 6^th ave). I usually brought back 8 — 10 gyros platters to go for me to enjoy within a week.
State Platters has rooms for many improvements. I love the idea of street cart and I have been praying to God so that there would be gyros served in State College so I won’t have to submit to my impulsive instinct to specifically drive to NYC to get gyros that I love so much. And there where State Platters offers a spark of hope when my friends told me about it and Collegian made an article about this place.
Enough about myself, now I am going to talk about the food, the gyros, itself. The lamb is too soft and too moist. When I ate it, I couldn’t really taste the lamb. It’s been cut/​grounded too much in tiny pieces which doesn’t make it better. It doesn’t have the texture of gyros that is supposed to be there. Maybe a better quality lamb meat would help in this case. Bigger pieces would also help in this matter so we can actually taste the lamb.
The rice… It’s alright. Nothing particularly bad about it, but it is also not something that would help the gyros taste better. It’s plain tasting, but the texture is OK. Yellow rice (orange rice) that is usually used for gyros might be better for this menu.
The white sauce is nothing special neither. It kinda tastes like a mayonnaise instead of Tzatziki sauce. The red hot sauce is not spicy at all which doesn’t add any biting excitement when eating the food.
Portion-​wise, it’s TOO SMALL. For 6 $ gyros platter in NYC (which I believe the owner pays a lot of money opening a food cart in Manhattan), you will get 2 times bigger platter. Twice the meat, twice the rice, salads + slices of pita bread. You will have to sell your soul (and your body) to the devil when you eat the gyros in NYC, because it’s that fulfilling. The law of diminishing marginal utility is implied correctly when eating this gyros. When I ate State Platters gyros, the lamb was gone before I knew it and much of the rice was still there. It’s also a minus here.
If improvement is attempted later in the future, I will come back and try it again. I would leave a review accordingly after that. For any of you curious about the gyros I mentioned in NYC, here is the link:
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I am using this as the base of my review.