The word of the day is "Gluttony"...

...let's go spread the word. fn1.

Lunch today was at Union Square Cafe. I ate entirely too much food. Given that I came back on a red-eye this morning and went straight to work, then consumed about 5000 calories at lunch, I really just want to shut my office door, put my head down on the desk and sleep.

Overall, the food was excellent, the dining setting was great, and the service was superb, which lead to an overall excellent dining experience. We started out by eating a ton of bread. Our waitress kept bringing fresh bread baskets whenever ours was mostly empty. So my cow-orker and I just kept stuffing our faces with bread. The highlight of the bread basket was a thin, crisp soda cracker, which tasted conventional when you first put it in your mouth, but then the taste seemed to grow as it was chewed. An additional nice touch was that the butter was served at close to room temperature, rather than in a frozen block. fn2.

For appetizer, I got the Raviolini, with ricotta, mint, snow peas, braised bibb lettuce, and sauteed morels. It was extremely good, but it was a bit too heavy. By the time I got to the last couple raviolis, I was very glad I hadn't ordered that for my entree. The tastes were great, it was just slightly too much cheese.

For the main course, I ordered the Indian Spiced Vegetables, which featured eggplant, chickpeas, and spinach served with basmati and potato bread. The chickpeas were good, although somewhat underspiced. The eggplant was excellent, with nice subtle flavors. The spinach, unfortunately, was completely forgettable.

Desert, however, was where the restaurant really moved into the spectacular category. We ordered blueberry pie with blueberry ice cream, a raspberry/cherry cobbler with lemon sorbet, and some kind of berry tart that was the special. All three selections were so incredibly good. The pastry melted in your mouth, and the crisp berries blended the perfect mix of tart and sweet. The desert alone makes the trip to the restaurant worthwhile.

So Union Square Cafe gets the big four thumbs up from my lunch party. The dining experience is so enjoyable because of the friendly, attentive waitstaff that some deficiencies in the food could be ignored. However, such deficiencies are almost non-existent, making U.S.C. a great dining choice.

1. The title references one of the all time great "pick-up lines": "The word of the day is legs. Let's go spread the word!" ("Pick-up lines" is in quotes because I don't think this line is has every been successfully used to pick up anyone.)

2. Apparently, this constitutes a health code violation. However, it's one that I'm happy to accept, as I'd much rather have butter that I can actually spread on my bread with crushing the bread into a stiff, doughy mass that is hardly recognizable. Besides, my grandma would leave butter out for hours at a time before putting it back in the fridge, and none of us died from that (how's that for using an almost completely irrelevant anecdote as evidence?).