Rachel Maddow’s Favorite $2.50 Midtown Lunch

When you’re working on The Rachel Maddow Show, you don’t always have time to go out for lunch. (You might be covering anything from Supreme Court nominees to the Iraqi baseball team’s new uniforms.) So the staff at the RM show have a favorite, and exceptionally cheap, go-to delivery place. La Rosita Grocery & Taqueria in Manhattan’s Hells Kitchen has a small take-out window in the back, where they produce very good tacos and exceptional sopes, huge, thick rounds of fried masa dough topped with shredded lettuce, onion, radish and tangy cojita cheese. There’s a choice of meat—the Maddow team prefers the savory shredded chicken. Maddow’s segment producer, Vanessa Silverton-Peel, discovered La Rosita and calls the sopes “national treasures.” (Vanessa’s mother is famed baker/restaurateur Nancy Silverton, and her father is noted chef Mark Peel. She grew up in Los Angeles, so she’s very familiar with terrific food, Mexican and otherwise.) Maddow herself goes even further in her praise: “I not only ‘like’ those chicken sopes, if those chicken sopes ran for Congress, I would quit my job on TV to go door-to-door campaigning for them,” she says.