Now that my sweet NYC memories are safely tucked away (leave it to me to put dessert first, always!), we have quite a bit of savory ground to cover, and I will start with a little batch of midscale/lunch places: ‘Ino, Freemans, Pearl Oyster Bar and Teany (see end of post for coordinates).
‘Ino
On Friday night I stepped out of the plane, a bit dizzy from the voyage but excited and more importantly, hungry — it’s nice of the airline to provide a pre-landing breakfast snack, but um, what was that thing in the cellophane bag exactly? I got to my hotel in the Village, dropped my stuff, freshened up, and went out again for a little reconnaissance walk. On Bedford Street I noticed the tiny ‘Ino, a kitchen-less Italian wine bar that’s equipped with a handy-dandy sandwich press, from which they churn out fresh and tasty panini — on bread from the Blue Ribbon Bakery just across the street — as well as antipasti, bruschetta and tramezzini.
I opted to have half a panino with a side of greens, and chose the one with portobello mushrooms, sundried tomato pesto and grana — an Italian cow’s milk cheese that’s somewhat similar to parmesan. The grilled sandwich was absolutely delicious (if a little salty) and the greens struck me as particularly flavorful, lightly dressed and peppery, just the way I like them.
Freeman’s
The next morning (Maxence having arrived late in the night) we went for a walk through Soho, Nolita and the Lower East Side, and decided to go to Freemans for brunch. This was tricky to find: the address we had said Chrystie Street, but when we got to it the restaurant was nowhere to be seen, so we asked a nearby store keeper, who kindly pointed us — this was probably not the first time she had to redirect would-be brunchers — to a tiny blind alley which we had passed just moments before. The restaurant is hidden at the very end of Freeman Alley, you really have to know it’s there to find it, and that’s probably the whole point: I later learned that it had been recently much buzzed about as a low-profile, best-kept-secret type of place. It was however almost empty when we got there (around 1pm on a Saturday) and we took a seat in the rather dark room, interestingly decorated with patinaed wooden furniture and taxidermist trophies on the walls.
We chose two dishes from the brunch menu and rotated halfway through, as we like to do when eager to try different options: one was an egg, bacon and spinach skillet, which came in its individual cast-iron pan, creamy and golden-topped with gruyère. The other one was a lamb and parsley sausage (in fact two patties of sausage) served with two poached eggs on a watercress salad. We were also served thick and pre-buttered toasts of sourdough bread, which were a little too dry (stale?) for my taste. Both dishes were good and well seasoned, but somewhat heavy on the butter and cream and general saturated fat. And frankly the ambiance was a tad gloomy: the place is probably a better spot at dinnertime when it comes alive and you can fully enjoy the dim lights and the company of wall-mounted dead animals!
as a gift) so I went to check it out on my very first day if only to see the line. But there was none at all, which was sort of a disappointment: it would have been fun to watch, a bit like the line outside 
