e a t e r y R O W

PENNSYLVANIA 6

132 West 31st Street

New York, NY 10001

(212) 727-3666

The oldest phone number in New York is, they say, the Hotel Pennsylvania's PE6-5000 or PEnnsylvania 6-5000, like the big band tune that you're bound to have heard at least a thousand times in the late 90s unless you were living under a rock, dead, or buried in a womb somewhere. If you were to blend a prewar-era restaurant with a sports bar, you'd come up with the phone number's namesake, Pennsylvania 6.

Bright red leather, dark woods, and a ceiling so high you could successfully lob tennis balls compliment the upscale menu and cocktail list. The dozen flat screen televisions (including one over the urinals) do their damndest to ruin the mood and shit all over the effort that went into the place, but Speeds and I were able to get beyond this and ignore the bridge and tunnel suits that swamp the place. Pennsylvania 6 is very much the type of restaurant that you might take a business associate or a prospective client to. Fauxcializing with people you're not particularly close to means that having a game on can give you something to talk about other than work. So, while I understand having all of the TVs, I'd still prefer them gone. With such energy going into recreating the kind of 1930s atmosphere you can imagine seeing the Thin Man eating at, flooding the place with NCAA stats is a disappointment. But I've beaten this horse, so let's move on. Pennsylvania 6 is lively. Loud. Very loud. Not scream across the table loud, but it's far from quiet, and not from blasting music either. Unlike trendy spots like Stanton Social that feel obliged to crank their iPod playlist at full volume and drown out all possible conversation, the volume at Pennsylvania 6 is nothing but conversation. It was a little empty when we arrived at 6. It was anything but empty when we left.

The staff that Speeds and I interacted with were all super friendly and super attentive and we never felt rushed in spite of having spent somewhere near four hours nursing drinks and eating slowly. Every slowly. Having a raw bar allows you to take time with your meal. Though at three to five dollars per,  there's certainly a meter running at the table. Pennsylvania 6 has a $1 oyster happy hour on weekdays and you'd do yourself a great service by taking advantage of it. Of course, we ordered Oysters. Speeds, with her small and easily filled tummy, skipped any further pre-dinner chow, but I saw something on the menu and needed to give it a go. Roasted Bone Marrow with gremolata (a parsley pesto). My most recent ex and I tried roasting bone marrow one night and it didn't go so well and we wound up with a tasteless plate of grease. Pennsylvania 6 did a far better job. It was excellent. My one complaint was that you get virtually no marrow. In the picture, it looks like there's a lot on the plate, but in reality, it was maybe two and a half bites. There wasn't enough to smear on the three crostini you see. Still, it was good and even Speeds, who was mildly revolted at the thought of eating it, didn't think it was too bad.

Thus far, we'd enjoyed some light, small plates and some decent cocktails. I was pleasantly surprised. I feared that Pennsylvania 6 would be a crowded, douchey, overpriced sports bar, but it was in fact proving itself to be an actual restaurant that merely had an unfortunate ESPN fetish. I said a small prayer that the entrees wouldn't prove this all wrong and lo and behold, they did not. Speeds ordered the Monkfish Osso Bucco. Monkfish is a dense, meaty, not oily fish. It's the kind of fish you might get at a steakhouse, if you follow me. The monkfish was served over a bed of mushroom, squash, and asparagus and I sincerely recommend it. You will like this entree. I chose the Grilled Skirt Steak with yucca fries, scallions, and caramelized onion. Like most skirt steaks that haven been beaten with a hammer for a week straight, it was a bit tough. Speeds, while liking the taste, was disappointed in the toughness. Personally, I find that the trick is the way you cut it. Thin and with the grain and I've had far, far tougher. So, since it wasn't like trying to chew through a Goodyear radial, I'm going to recommend it. 

For the first time in living memory, Speeds and I ordered dessert without also ordering coffee. I silently questioned whether I was feeling well... then I sipped my beer and everything was okay again. We decided to split a Drunken Donuts and a S'mores. Desserts were the weakest part of dinner. The drunken donuts are a handful of large cinnamon-sugar doughnut holes filled with a sort of cheesy cream and accompanied by two dipping glazes. One was dulce de leche, which was good, and something else, which wasn't. The filling was weird and initially I just thought that the doughnut holes weren't cooked properly. Neither of us cared much for them. The s'mores wasn't much of an improvement. The dessert is a very dense chocolate cake (it's almost like eating a candy bar) with a graham cracker bottom topped by marshmallows and a small ball of vanilla ice cream. Our server then doused the cake with 151 rum and lit 'er up. If you like charred marshmallow and heavy bittersweet chocolate, then please go ahead and get this. If you're like me, you'll order an apple pie or something next time.

THE GASTRO BAR

345 West 35th Street

New York, NY 10018

(646) 200-8857

Looking for an interesting place to get dinner that wasn't too far from a birthday party at what would be one of New York's creepiest karaoke bars, Bro and I had relatively little to choose from. Midtown on a Saturday night tends isn't the least crowded neighborhood you can come up with. But then we found The Gastro Bar, a small plates place inside the Tryp Hotel. Tryp is Wyndham's answer to W's Aloft. Trendy, younger, and less expensive than it's big brother. The Gastro Bar is their restaurant and it was deserted. 

Part of the reason that The Gastro bar was virtually empty is because there's no sign telling anyone that it's there. Bro and I walked past it three times. If I hadn't found it on Opentable, I'd never have known that it existed. The restaurant itself sits in the lobby and basically shares space with check-in. It's well lit in a large, comfortable space. This is very similar to the Aloft experiences that I've had and it does mean that the atmosphere and experience will be different from a normal restaurant. There are few other restaurants, for example, where you might see people reading a newspaper on a sofa.

The Gastro Bar calls itself a tapas place, but that's not really true. There are some tapas standards, but the menu is pretty small with only fifteen items, almost all priced between $10 and $15, and it's basically bar food. Caesar salad, mac and cheese, sliders. That said, it was very very good bar food. Bro and I ordered a round of drinks and decided what to get. First up, the Pintxos Morunos, lamb skewers marinated in cumin and lemon with parsley.They were absolutely the most tender meat you can imagine. Any more tender and it would have been jello. I was honestly shocked by how good they were. The next thing to try were the deceptively-named Chicken Lollipops which were standard buffalo wings in hot sauce with blue cheese. The buffalo wings were large, very good, and they did a nice job plating them, but at the end of the day they were buffalo wings. Honestly, since you only get four, a more accurate description would be large, good, well-plated, overpriced buffalo wings.

Part of me wants to call The Gastro Bar a hidden gem because the food really was very good. Far better than I was expecting. But you do have understand that this is basically very well made bar food. I would certainly return if I was in the area and wanted something quick, well made, and didn't want to wait for a table. On the other hand, if I was looking for real Spanish tapas, then The Gastro Bar wouldn't be on the list.

ORIENT EXPRESS COCKTAIL BAR

325 West 10th Street

New York, NY 10014

(212) 691-8845

This past Friday, when my date rain-checked me for her second and final time, I decided not to lose the reservations that I had made at Orient Express and immediately called up Speeds and her beau, Burns. I was lucky enough to catch them before they hopped a flight to Miami Beach or to Hollywood the next day. Arriving there a little bit early, I checked in and nursed a drink at the bar, inhaled the vintage aura of the place, and relaxed.

I love cocktail bars. I love 'em. And walking into Orient Express (so named for the luxury train that chugged across Europe from Paris to Istanbul in the bohemian days before WWII), I had very high hopes. The owners run Turks & Frogs, the wine bar next door and I love Turks & Frogs. The interior invoked the past almost better than any other retro establishment that I've had the pleasure to check out in recent memory. The music, the art, the tile flooring, the heavy wood bar, the ceiling fans, the names of the drinks all took me to a 1930s Paris-in-my-head. Unfortunately, while Orient Express's atmosphere was as about as close to perfect as humanly possible, the rest of the evening was hardly so refined.

One ever-present annoyance was that the front door never stayed closed. Be it from a broken spring or a bent hinge, any time that anyone left to go home or have a smoke, the door seemed to want to join them. Nearly every ten minutes, for the entire evening, a gush of cold air would come in, forcing yours truly to get up and close the door. In the summer, no one would care, but I wasn't here in the summer. Our waitress was super nice, but she and the bartender was the entire staff at the front of the house. This meant that getting drinks and ordering food took forever. I found myself ordering a follow up drink with each arrival of the waitress at our table because otherwise who knew how long it would be until we saw the waitress again? You'd think I'd have been plastered by the end of the night. Nope.

The drinks tasted great, but were as weak as a wet tissue. Anywhere else, two drinks would get me nice and buzzed. But I had at least four and Burns had at least three and either one of us could have driven home. If they cost $8 or even $10 then it might be forgivable, but they cost between $12 and $14. Even though the owners also run Turks & Frogs, Orient Express is no wine bar. Still, they do have a small selection of wine and beer which is good for Speeds because she doesn't like wine and she doesn't like beer. She's as picky as a five year old raised on peanut butter and Lucky Charms, so it's good that she liked her Valpolicella enough to have three glasses of the stuff, each glass seemingly filled higher than the last.

Orient Express has a small small-plates menu and we tried to order enough from it to form a would-be dinner. The first things we tried were the Cheese Plate (a selection of feta, mahon, caprosado, manchego, and gruyere) and the Charcuterie Plate (a selection of Bayonne ham, duck mousse, country pate, pastirma, and saucisson sec). They both came with pita bread instead of small French bread toasts, but the pita was flat out addictive. The cheese selection was fine. No complaints there, but the meat plate was hit or miss. The Bayonne ham was delicious, but the duck mousse was revolting. I liked the country pate and the pastirma, but couldn't stand the saucisson sec. Once the wood boards were cleared away, the Hungarian Sausage arrived: four slices of sausage served in a cast iron skillet over sauerkraut, currants, and apple. Burns and I liked the dish, though we found it too timid to be perfect and too small for two people. Speeds didn't like it, but she doesn't like eastern European food anyway. This was shortly followed by the Brie Panini. Speeds and Burns enjoyed it, but I wasn't impressed. This is little bit because they ran out of chicken and I wanted to try the chicken panini, but really it's mostly because I'm 100% sure that there was no brie in the sandwich. Just mango chutney. It was a mango chutney panini. Woop-de-doo.

MEATBALL OBSESSION

510 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10011

(212) 260-8646

I walked past Meatball Obsession the other day and grabbed a menu. They serve one thing. Meatballs with marinara sauce and bread. Did someone really create an entire restaurant based around the greatest hero sandwich ever created? Well, almost. It's not a restaurant. It's a kiosk on 6th Avenue and 14th Street. Like a brick and mortar food truck, which I think Meatball Obsession should do by the way, it has no tables, no chairs, no roof over your head when it rains. And on this particular day, no place to get out of the heavy wind. Nonetheless, I wanted lunch and had made up my mind to try them out. You know what? They were great.

Meatball Obsession calls itself the "Home of the Original Meatball in a Cup", which isn't a stretch since they're the home of the only meatball in a cup. Essentially, you have two options here. Meatballs in a cup with a side of bread, or meatballs in a piece of bread hollowed out to form a cup. I tried both. They offer beef, pork, chicken, or turkey meatballs with a variety of toppings for an additional charge. I tried the Beef and the Turkey and both were fantastic. I was honestly shocked how good it was. I only wish I didn't have to hoof it all the way to Union Square to sit down. Looking at the photo below, where the meatball sits in a veritable soup of marinara sauce, you might think that they went a bit overboard with the sauce. Not so. The sauce was also crazy good and by the end you're wondering why you didn't order extra (they do sell extra by the way).

If you opt for the sandwich, you get a piece of hollowed out ciabatta bread with the meatball and sauce cocooned within. It's an interesting way to get around the age old and near chronic problem of New Yorkers eating meatball subs and getting sauce all over their shirt while crossing the street.

A single meatball is $4.50, two are $7.50, and three are $10. The meatballs themselves aren't small, but they're not large either. I'd go for getting two instead of one, just to avoid feeling hungry ten minutes after lunch. That said, they are open until 11pm, so you can always go back. I plan to.

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