The Little Owl

After hearing great reviews about the Little Owl, a small restaurant in the West Village that sits below the apartment used in Friends, Chris and I decided to check it out. Does this place look familiar?:

I read that you can have the perfect meal at The Little Owl; the host is attentive and gracious, the chefs pay attention to detail, and the menu options are creative and delicious (what’s not to love?). I also read that getting a table at the restaurant is hard to do – the restaurant only seats 28 people and online reservation systems like opentable.com don’t always have availability. Chris and I decided to try The Little Owl for brunch one Sunday afternoon and were surprised that the restaurant was practically empty – around 12PM – PRIME Sunday brunch time! We were seated right away (there were only 3 or 4 couples in the restaurant) and were able to get a look at the menu right away.

After glancing at the menu, we realized that there weren’t that many options for brunch. Maybe everything on the menu was so great that they only needed a couple things anyway, right? I decided to order the corn pancakes with berries and clear syrup and Chris opted for the hamburger. After the waitress painstakingly asked how Chris wanted the burger to be prepared, she went off to the kitchen and put in our orders. Five minutes later, she came back and declared that she forgot the kitchen had run out of beef. Seriously?! Did the restaurant really run out of one of the FIVE options for brunch? We were taken by surprise but looked at the menu again and decided to go for the eggs Benedict with greens.

My corn pancakes:

The corn pancakes tasted nothing more than corn bread with some syrup. It wasn’t even MOIST cornbread – it was dry and the corn bits in the pancake were too sweet. I read online comments on how great the clear syrup was, but there was a dead fly in my syrup, so…I don’t see what’s so special about clear syrup. The consistency of the pancakes was too grainy because there wasn’t enough milk or egg whites in the pancake mix, leaving much to be desired.

Chris ordered the eggs Benedict with greens:

After one initial bite of the greens, we knew that we shouldn’t have ordered the dish. When greens are cooked, it’s understandable that they should change color….but these greens were brown! We ended up sending the dish back because the greens tasted like they were a week old!

To top off our disastrous meal at The Little Owl, the air conditioners were loud (there were THREE of them) and it was still uncomfortably warm in the restaurant. When leaving the restaurant to grab burgers at the Corner Bistro, we overheard a girl ordering iced tea, only to be turned down because the restaurant ran out of iced tea.