12.04.07
Review of Peasant, Friday November 2007
194 Elizabeth St and Spring/Prince, 212-965-9511
Great for: bocconcini and gnocchi, haphazard and incompetent service, cold food
The Boyfriend and I organized this dinner with one of my closest friends, E, and her boyfriend S. She’d suggested it as a place she always wanted to try but never had a chance to. I’d heard good reports from several people as well and was eager to cross it off my list. The four of us managed to snag a 9pm reservation and were seated as soon as we arrived.
We started with confusion. The menu is entirely in Italian, and they seem to have picked all the words people are least likely to know. The poor waiters are forced to come around and translate the whole page at the beginning. Not only is it an unnecessary burden on them, how do you expect guests to remember all that after hearing it once in a noisy setting? It is absolutely a waste of time and a huge annoyance. E is a trained chef, I speak some Italian, and we still had to ask the waitress what half the things were again. They could have put English explanations in lighter type under the names and saved everyone a lot of aggravation. For a place called Peasant, the Italian-only rule sounds pretty elitist to me.
We emerged from the ordeal with two appetizers of tuna carpaccio on arugula for me and S, carciofi (artichokes) and bresaola (cured beef) for E, and bocconcini for the Boyfriend (little mozzarella balls with something like prosciutto). We were ready to love them, but only the bocconcini was stellar. Our other appetizers were kind of eh. Not bad, just not the festival of taste Peasant’s reputation had led us to expect. The bocconcini, on the other hand, were chewy & almost crunchy balls of goodness. We all should have ordered them.
S and I got the same entree, linguini alla vongole (clams), while E got the porchetta arrosto (roast pork chop) over mashed potatoes and the Boyfriend got the gnocchi e coniglio (rabbit). This was when we got really annoyed. E’s dish arrived cold! It took 10 minutes to flag down the waitress and send it back. This, after we’d waited an inordinately long time for the entrees in the first place. To add insult to injury, the dish came back in about 3 minutes and had clearly been microwaved. A thin outer layer was steaming while the interior was only slightly more lukewarm. To be fair, it tasted all right otherwise. The linguini was pretty good, though nothing special. Boyfriend’s gnocchi was the best of an ordinary lot. His sauce was tasty and the gnocchi were the perfect small size, so they didn’t overwhelm with starchiness (gnocchi is a potato dumpling).
The decor and ambience of the restaurant itself were better than the food. It has a nice rustic atmosphere, with a good amount of space between tables. The music was at a nice level and we sat near a bustling kitchen-type space. All this was a lovely backdrop wasted on mediocre food and service. Our waitress was either new, stupid or badly trained. She couldn’t pronounce orecchiette, which is not an uncommon pasta name, while translating the menu for us initially. “Ora – orachit? Um, orachet, anyway…” We didn’t know what to make of it. More importantly, every time we tried to get her attention it took several trips past us before she noticed. Sometimes she seemed overworked but much of the time she seemed just oblivious. It took about 15 minutes of waving for us to get our check. And now that we’ve escaped, we’re never going back.
Rating: 4 / 10
Our cost: $240 for 4 people (about 2 cocktails each)
Noise Level: good
Chance of walking in: medium, it was full on a Friday night but not many people were waiting at the bar.
