Skip to main content
Lovely Rita, the first-floor restaurant anchoring Old Town’s Hoxton hotel, is inviting a few more cooks into the kitchen.
This month, the property will kick off a food cart series, allowing mobile chefs access to its ground-floor space for a few days every month.
Fried Egg I’m in Love is the first truck on the schedule. From 10 am to 2 pm Wednesday through Friday, Feb. 22-24, you can get the cart’s classics—like the Yolko Ono sandwich with a hand-pressed, housemade sausage patty and pesto—and enjoy them inside Lovely Rita’s lobby-adjacent space.
In March, Kee’s #Loaded Kitchen, will cook inside Hoxton for three days. Chef Kiauna Nelson’s heaping plates of soul food—smoked brisket, mac and cheese, fried chicken and much more—have for years drawn crowds and won WW’s Food Cart of the Year honors in 2018.
The last restaurant on the current visitation schedule—there’s no word yet on whether Lovely Rita will keep the series going long term—Is Sorbu Paninoteca. The menu here changes every two weeks, but all of the dishes are rooted in traditional Italian family recipes, and the bread is baked fresh daily.
Lovely Rita promises that each pop-up will feature at least one item exclusive to the series. You can already book your table online to any of the listed food carts’ appearances. And if you happen to be staying overnight, yes, they’ll deliver your order straight to your room.
This isn’t the first time the Hoxton has shaken things up in the Lovely Rita space. After originally opening in 2018 with Mexican cuisine as La Neta, the restaurant was rebranded a year later. That’s when then-executive chef Johnny Leach revamped the menu, stocking it with bistro classics and vegetable-heavy dishes. Brunch service also began in late 2019, with the Latin fare finding a home upstairs in Tope.
In October 2021, when the business began welcoming back customers following a pandemic closure, chef Joel Lui-Kwan took the helm in the kitchen following a split from Joshua McFadden’s Submarine Hospitality restaurant group. However, as of last update, chef Liu-Kwan is no longer at The Hoxton.