The National Arts Club

I’ve biked past The National Arts Club many times but have never thought about dining there (in fact, I wasn’t even sure the club served food). Luckily, one of my mom’s friends invited me for lunch last week:

The club overlooks Gramercy park and is a large house that was renovated into an arts club – the rooms are filled with many different types of art:

The main dining room has a formal dress code and is quite stuffy but the food is semi-casual. We started off with a bread basket with an assortment of flatbread and rolls:

Everyone ordered a different type of soup – there’s the New England clam chowder:

It was actually quite watery (nothing like Pearl’s creamy clam chowder that I had the previous night). For main courses, I ordered the duck breast with sour cherry sauce:

Here’s the miso glazed sea bass:

The veal piccata:

And the vegetable quiche with fresh fruits:

My duck breast was cooked well but had way too much cherry sauce. The food was very heavy (except the quiche, which was labeled as “healthy quiche”) and I thought it was too much for lunch. We ordered two desserts as well – blueberry crumble pie:

And a chocolate souffle, that was more like a chocolate lava cake:

Both of the desserts tasted like they were out of a box and the whipped cream didn’t taste right (is it possible for it to taste synthetic?) I enjoyed having lunch in the club but thought it was a bit stuffy and the food was too heavy. It would be great to have a cocktail reception at the club to see more of the art (I didn’t have a chance to walk around because I had to run back to work!)