Here is the first of a few reports from New York City. The missus and I were there for a whirlwind trip a couple of weekends ago. She is on sabbatical, it was my midterm break and with kind friends willing to supervise the boys in our absence, it was a rare opportunity for the two of us to get away together. We had a packed couple of days, hanging out with friends, visiting museums and, yes, eating. It’s only the eating that I am going to document here. First up, is our first lunch, which featured sushi. Living as we do in the sushi wasteland that is Minnesota, we always look forward to eating sushi when visiting cities with better sushi scenes. That’s not to say we were looking to spend huge amounts of money eating a bromakase meal somewhere. A casual lunch spot with good fish served in the form of lunch special combos was what we were after. Looking around for spots in the general vicinity of where we were going to be that morning and afternoon, I hit upon Gouie at the Market Line, the basement food hall at Essex Market. I made what turned out to be an entirely redundant reservation and we met a friend for lunch there right as they opened. Here’s how it went.

It was our first time at Essex Market and so we wandered a bit before heading down the stairs to the Market Line. Most of the places were only just opening up and it took us a little bit to find Gouie. For some reason, I’d thought it was a restaurant proper down there but it turned out to be an open to the market counter restaurant (which is basically what all the restaurants down there, and upstairs as well, are). After they opened we took three seats at the counter. The reservation, as I say, was completely redundant. No one else showed up by the time we finished our meal. As to whether this was an anomaly or if they do most of their lunch business on weekdays, I don’t know. It was a rainy day but the rest of the market was quite full.

At lunch there’s a small menu of appetizers and daily specials and a small menu of sushi and sashimi. We stuck to the latter. There are various sushi and sashimi combos on offer (assuming you pass, as we did, on the $120 omakase option) as well as a la carte nigiri by the piece. The missus and our friend both picked the basic Nami lunch combo. This featured 8 pieces of nigiri and three pieces of salmon roll (tuna and yellowtail were the other roll options) for $40. I picked the Jo combo at $60, which was the same 8 pieces of nigiri as on the Nami but with a piece each of ikura/salmon roe and Hokkaido uni/sea urchin roe in place of the three pieces of salmon roll. Neither combo came with miso soup or salad or anything else. The 8 pieces of nigiri that were the same in both combos were: tai/snapper, salmon, hamachi/yellowtail, chutoro/medium fatty tuna, tuna, sawara/Spanish mackerel, shrimp and hotate/scallop.

How was the fish? Everything was more than acceptable; nothing went past that. The rice was fine. I don’t know why I expected that the Jo might have more variance from the Nami than just the ikura and uni add-ons but it was a bit disappointing that it didn’t. The pieces were quite small too—as to whether that’s a feature of being on a lunch combo or just their normal sizing, I don’t know.

For a quick look at the spot, the menu and what we ate, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down to see what the total cost was and for my thoughts on the meal as a whole.

The meal as a whole was fine. It was a lot better than anything in Minnesota, which is what we were looking for. But it fell short of places at comparable price points in Los Angeles (for example, Nozomi), and indeed we also liked better the place we ate sushi at the next day on the Upper East Side. But more on that, maybe next week.

Price? With tip, the total came to just about $185. Which is certainly not bad in the abstract for three people eating decent sushi in Manhattan. But I don’t know that I’d do it again. If we were to come back to Essex Market on a future trip I’d be more inclined to eat at one of the counters upstairs or possibly check out Dhamaka (which was completely empty as we were leaving the market—is it not a hot ticket anymore?).

Alright, next up on the food front: another Dublin report. And on the weekend at least one more Italy report.