Say you’ve just gotten your tickets at the TKTS booth in midtown and you have a couple of hours before curtain.  Your first impulse might be to go to a deli, but delis in midtown have absurdly large portions and prices to match.  I say go west towards Hell’s Kitchen. A nice street is 46^th where you’ll pass Restaurant Row, a stimulating stretch that is a little like the back end of a carnival midway. Pretty hostesses and handsome hosts are on the curb to entice you into their establishments with pre-theater specials. This is prime tourist country, however, and while you can get a good meal there (and sing show tunes at “Don’t Tell Mama” when your show is over) the prices go down as soon as you turn the corner onto Ninth Avenue. So that’s what I do.

There are a couple of “Yum Yum” restaurants very near each other and I enjoy their reasonably priced (for New York, anyway) tasty Thai food. My wife, however, prefers Italian, and on Ninth Avenue between 45^th and 46^th it’s “Cara Mia.”  Any of these places will do if you want to sit down and chow with some civility.  More often, however, we’re looking for less formal.  These days, we have two Ninth Avenue favorites.

“Gazala Place” is a tiny joint with wonderful, freshly made Middle Eastern cuisine. Start with an appetizer platter, on which you get to pick four choices from several options.  Make sure you get extra hummus, which is creamy (though it has no cream), and is the perfect complement to the outsized wad of pita that sits bunched up like a sexy, silky pillowcase (albeit one with a low thread count). Enjoy it wrapped around not only the appetizers but the piquant Israeli salad. You need the salad to feel virtuous because you are about to tear into the spinach and feta bureka, a cross between a gargantuan knish and a spinach pie, except that the leaden knish shell is replaced by a flaky and still warm pastry crust that disintegrates in your mouth and flutters down the front of your shirt.

Before a matinee you’re looking for a brunchy place, and if you can walk a few blocks uptown there’s “VYNL.” This is pretty good diner food, but what really sets it apart is the kitschy, rock and roll atmosphere. The long, narrow space is filled with vinyl records, mirrors and mirror balls, colorful plastic discs, menus mounted in album covers, and dioramas made from the toys of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. The absolute delight of this place, however, has to be the four themed bathrooms. You have your choice of doing your business with a Nelly, Dolly, Cher, or Elvis mosaic and diorama, while listening to their hit songs. When you get out of your themed bathroom you can order my favorite, the grilled jack cheese on rye with homemade potato chips and sweet, thinly sliced pickle chips, or my wife’s favorite, the caramel apple French toast and big coffee. They won’t refill your iced tea for free, however, so here is how I stick it to the man: get extra lemon, and when you’re finished with the iced tea squeeze the lemon into the glass, pour in water and Nutrasweet, and enjoy your hobo lemonade.

Of course, Broadway Fred doesn’t always stay in midtown and neither should you. When catching a show in the East Village, go to “Veselka” on Second Avenue for Eastern European and American diner food. Get any hot soup with a handful of challah, assorted pierogi, and finish up with a rotund, concupiscent blintz. For a sweet treat before bedtime, walk to First Avenue to “DeRobertis’,” where you marvel at the éclairs, almond horns, black and whites, marzipans, lobster tails, linzer tarts, tartufis, pies and slices. If it’s summer, have an Italian ice, half chocolate/half cremolata.

My wife and I are planning a theater trip soon.  What do you recommend for eating near theaters in NYC?

“Broadway Fred” appears every Wednesday.

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