What! Pick your own mussel sauce?!!!

Yes, it’s true. Ditch Plains, a brilliant restaurant down in Greenwich Village, was given a name I can never remember so now I carry the business card around in my wallet.

29 bedford street follow the button down shirts and bohemian camisoles getting crafty drinks at the bar like the “Drunken Preppy.” Yum.
Then see the menu. It is basically a summer field of paradise. Lobster roll, clam strips, fish and chips…. and the mussels… fours sauces to choose your own adventure from. Served in a large metal pot… and a basket of fries you will eat and eat and it will seem to refill from the bottom in crispy bistro fry wonder. Now go stop wasting time. You will want to go to there.

www.ditch-plains.com/

Cozy country cabin in the middle of the lower east side NYC…

I just went to a quaint storybook restaurant straight from a time when eating with a dead animal head above you spoke for fresh meat. Freemans is found at the end of a tiny alley (as they describe on their website, which I took as filled with lurking sinister figures waiting with cockney accents to pick my pockets, but is actually a sunshine filled wide walkway between two buildings, where those on the waiting list chat while adjusting flouncey hipster sunglasses).

Since I went for brunch I cannot give the full lay down of the menu, except to say that everything we had was good. The “Roast pork sandwich, pickled zucchini, and garlic mayonnaise with green salad” -amazing! Why has no one fed me pickled zucchini before? Shame on you. Thin, maintaining flush positioning next to other sandwich parts and not falling out. Brilliant. Their cocktails came in squeal worthy early century champagne glasses. Squat and cradling the bubbles that spurted up from just above the stem. Even the vegetarian could not speak poorly about the plentiful taxidermy that hangs above on the surrounding wood walls. It really just completes the log inn/restaurant by the side of the road feel frequented by adventurers and those who haven’t died of diphtheria yet on the Oregon Trail. (Though we gave thanks for not sitting at the table that had an ooh to realistic looking wasp hive dangling precariously over head). We left full and lighthearted with a fantasy mini getaway feeling as we adjusted our hipster sunglasses and ran from this constant drizzle.

www.freemansrestaurant.com