I cannot say enough how much I love Blackboard Eats. It's a great service and they really pick quality restaurants. I had actually never heard of Mercat but when I saw it on their list I thought What the heck?
I had looked up the reviews on Yelp and everyone had nothing but amazing things to say, so I was pretty excited to go there with my friend Lav, who was in town from London. Luckily, the food there is very veggie friendly, so we had no problems ordering enough food to satisfy both of us.
First off, I must have walked down this street many times before in my life but never have seen this restaurant. The inside is super cute with a sleek modern feel. The style of food is Catalan Spanish Tapas and to be honest I would have had a hard time understanding the menu if it did not have english descriptions below. We started the meal with a nice bottle of Blanco Tempranillo($39)...I had only had red tempranillo and this one pretty good...it wasn't too sweet, which is what I generally think of white wines. We started with some manchengo cheese ($5). Cheese is always a good addition to any meal and the bread that they served with it was perfectly soft and good on its own. Next we ordered the mushrooms with fried egg and truffle oil ($13), which was amazing! The truffle oil was very present but not completely overpowering. Then I got the short noodles with sepia in its own ink ($18)...I have to say it was one of the most amazing dishes I've had all year. Seriously. I can't explain how freakin good it was and it just looks like a basic noodle dish but the ink and the cream fresh like topping was just perfect. Then Lav and I also split the beet salad ($11), which was pretty good considering beets are not my favorite veggie and the special pepper dish of the night (~$13). The peppers are green jalapeno peppers grilled to the point where they are no longer spicy but then they are covered in olive oil and salted with kosher salt. Delicious! I usually am not a fan jalapeno peppers b/c I can't really take the heat but this was just biting into complete saltiness, but in a good way. And of course, no meal with Lav could be complete without dessert. We got the churros with chocolate sauce and like I said in my previous post, anything fried is just hard to get wrong.
I was really surprised by Mercat. I had never heard of it but now I will tell many people about it. It's in a pretty good location and by the time we left dinner at 9pm, it was definitely hoping. The service was also really good there, attentive but not completely overbearing. The total original bill was $110 but with my Blackboard Eats 30% discount it was a very reasonable $77 total. The one thing that was a major bummer was that they don't take AmEx. How does a hip and not super cheap restaurant in NYC not take AmEx?!
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