10 Downing

I would like to start by giving a shout out to my girl Famke Janssen who lovingly stole my table. On the other hand, maybe I should thank the hostess, whose idea of “just a sec” is a little skewed. Enough with the disgruntled New Yorker-style writing…

Even though this place was crushed in reviews (by actual restaurant critics and my own slew of restaurant obsessed friends), I had to check it out. I have this burning desire to try all the new places in the city….which I guess is why I started the blog in the first place. 10 Downing is located on a great corner in the west village, Downing and 6th Ave. across from the fab spot Bar Pitti. Maybe that is why it is so popular? Location. Location. Location. Granted, Thursday nights are a big night out in NYC, but this place was crowded.

The restaurant itself is small and bright, with a slim bar area. I don’t totally understand why people would gather at the bar. The restaurant is too bright to find your special someone in a dimly lit corner (a girl can dream) and WAY too loud to have an actual conversation. Actually, thanks for bringing it up, the acoustics in this place were atrocious. I sat at a two top near the bar and couldn’t even hear the waiter speak, let alone my date. I would just nod and smile and hoped no one noticed…

As usual, we ordered for 4 people, even though we are only two (which I guess benefits the reader slightly more than my waistline). We started with the Ocean Trout Tartar and Duck Meatball Cassoulet (because I am a semi-meat eater now). Maybe it is just me, but when I order a tartar, I am expecting a certain texture and saltiness. This was a tartar of a different colour (not in actual color since it was red, so I used the English version of color). The tartar (with mustard seeds, chorizo oil, pine nuts & quail egg) itself was not bad, it was the pine nuts that threw me off. Their nutty taste slightly overpowered the relatively bland fish flavor, while adding a crunchy texture to a usually smooth (slimey?) dish. However, have to chock one up to the chef for introducing me to an interesting way of serving this normally uniform dish. The Duck Cassoulet was also decent. I’m not expert on meatballs, so I ate one and thought it was dry. I was then promptly told that they were in fact very juicy for meatballs. The dish was filled with pimento beans, which were soft and very flavorful, as generally this dish was spiced nicely. For my entrée, I ordered the Striped Bass. NYC restaurants are overloaded with Artic Char and Stripped Bass. I don’t think I have been to one recently without those fish on the menu. I chose the bass for the black trumpet mushrooms. They were delicious. They looked like cooked Kale, but tasted like the wondrous fungi of the forest that they are, salty and tough (not in a bad way). The fish was cooked nicely, although I will never figure out why restaurants cannot actually spice the fish itself, as most of the flavor tends to lie in the crusty skin. For those of you that do not like mint (I know there are a few weirdos out there), the mint pesto had no resemblance to anything minty. As a side, we shared the brussel sprouts, which is a dish I have just recently learned to love. They were fine. Nothing more to say about that.

My date decided to order the appetizer size of two pasta dishes. The Squid Ink Agnolotti (with peekytoe crab, piquillo peppers & lemon butter) was dark and mysterious. Not really, but it was tasty. The Gnocchi (with wild mushrooms butternut squash, cavolo nero & sardinian sheep cheese) was a bigger hit. It was probably the softest gnocchi I have ever had, although I’m not 100% sure that it wasn’t just mashed potato disguised as gnocchi, which is totally fine with me!

Overall, I did not dislike this restaurant as much as I was told I would. Yet, I will not be going back. Coming from a weekend away in the Bahamas where we were the only people in the restaurant on a Saturday night at 9:30pm and could talk to each other in a light whisper and still understand, it is tough to want to go back to a place where I couldn’t hear myself think.