The Breslin Visited 1/27/2012 4 Forks

The Breslin Ace Hotel, 20 W 29th St., New York, NY 10001

I know I'm a bit behind the eight ball when it comes to reviewing The Breslin.  It was the "hot" restaurant a few years back when April Bloomfield was all the rage.  So I finally made my way here on a Friday night and I was actually pleasantly happy with my meal.  I will say that if you are a vegetarian, I would not recommend it here as it is pretty meat focused, although you piece together a meal of a few side dishes if you really wanted to.  But the focus here is really on the more unique meat dishes: pigs feet, bone marrow, blood sausage, headcheese, and they even had peanuts that have been fried in pork fat.

Holly and I both opted to go more safe and we both got the lamb burger (I got it medium rare) which comes with feta, red onions and a cumin mayo ($21) plus a side of fries.  The burger is a pretty hefty size meal and I'm glad we ended up not getting any appetizers.  The meat was incredibly juicy and dare I say mine was cooked much closer to the rare side (it was quite dark in the restaurant but the meat did look pretty pink from what I could tell).  The combination of the lamb, feta and red onion gave it a very Mediterranean feel although usually when I eat Greek food I feel healthy...I only felt like my heart was clogging up (in a good way) here.  The bread was pretty hard and toasted on the outside but the inside was nice and soft and despite there being a lot of juice from the burger, the bread never really got soggy which I appreciate.  There's nothing worse than eating a burger and your bread ends up falling apart in your hands.  The burger also come with thrice cooked fries which I heard was fried in duck fat.  They were crispy, delicious and  surprisingly not greasy but together with the burger I knew I was going to get myself into lots of cholesterol trouble so I only had 3 or 4 of them.

The decor is kind of like this old dark pub with lots of wood finishes.  The waitstaff was nice but they did seem a bit like they wanted to rush us out of our seats.  One of my pet peeves is when you get the check without asking for it.  But in a way I do understand if there is a long wait of people but it would be nice to give people some breathing room.  All in all, the burger was great and different and I would come back to try more adventurous things like the bone marrow and just yummy sounding dishes like curried mussels with cilantro. Total bill with drinks before tip $46/pp.

Photo Credit: Yelp