The TikTok from @1hourlunchbreak is a 72 second lunch break in a parked car, and it starts with the rules of a game. “Trying the lunch in my city trend, where you type lunch in my city and eat at the first small business you see,” he says. A phone screen with a search keyboard flashes at the top of the frame, and the caption ties the clip to Glendale, California. “Working in Glendale, you know it’s going to be a Middle Eastern spot,” he adds.
He sits in the driver’s seat in a blue button down shirt, with two black bowls and a foil tray balanced in front of him. The first dish is an eggplant dish he calls “kashk e badem,” a plate of golden fried onions and white yogurt sauce piled on top. His description comes in a list. “A saltiness from the yogurt, a mintiness and perfectly golden onions,” he says, and later, “I’m not even an eggplant fan, and that was good.”
Next is a tray of small baked dumplings that the auto captions spell as “Monty dough.” “Filled with ground beef mixed with tomato sauce and yogurt,” he says, and calls them “like Middle Eastern popcorn.” The frames show him dipping the dumplings into red sauce and white yogurt sauce, and he says the edges are crispy and “you really just can’t stop eating it.”
The third dish is a dark green stew. “This is a famous Middle Eastern stew,” he says. “You see the chunks of meat? It’s got, like, 20 types of greens. They serve it on fried rice,” and he adds a word the captions render as “tadik.” The finale is the kebab, a long, charred skewer of ground chicken and ground beef that he wraps in flatbread with onion and a shake of sumac. “Talk about comfort food,” he says. He gets “fresh bread to eat it with,” and he calls the char “nicely, not burnt.”
His rule for the meal is a simple one. “With Middle Eastern food, there’s no rules against mixing,” he says, and he demonstrates by putting the eggplant, the yogurt and the fried onions into one bite. The score comes at the very end, “8.6,” given for the whole meal, and the video does not say what the scale tops out at.
The skewers are made from ground chicken and ground beef, and ground meat has its own safety rules. In its grilling guidance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service says to cook ground beef to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, and its general poultry guideline is 165 degrees, both measured with a food thermometer. The same page says food left out for more than two hours, or more than one hour when the outside temperature is above 90 degrees, should be discarded. That applies to a takeout lunch eaten in a car as much as to a backyard grill.
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