NYCReview
photo credit: Emily Schindler
Lord's
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It used to be hard to find classic British food in Greenwich Village, but now there’s Lord’s. At this modern pub by the folks from Dame, they’ve managed to pull off an Anglophile’s fantasy restaurant that serves some of our favorite meat pies and scotch eggs this side of the Atlantic. It’s a great spot for a casual date, catch-up with friends, or a solo comfort meal at the bar.
Lord’s is dark, crowded, and a little chaotic. The space feels like a cross between a Hogwarts professor’s office and a trendy bar, making it the perfect choice for cold-weather date nights. Everything here is for sharing, and the food is served on mismatched china that looks like it came straight out of Dolores Umbridge’s breakfront. Start with small snacks like welsh rarebit and oysters kilpatrick, then move on to meat pies and “proper English chips.” If you feel like you need a vegetable, go for the bitter leaf salad.
Most of the menu is meat-forward, laced with rich brown gravies and the occasional deep fried moment. A scotch egg made with curried lamb and a golden, gooey yolk in the middle is one of the best things on the menu. If you see something with “pig’s head” in the description, get that, along with whatever meat pie is on rotation and an order of chips. This is why you’ll want that salad.
All of Lord’s dishes tend to strike a single, though satisfying, note. Their take on steak frites and the duck-stuffed cabbage taste extremely similar, even though they contain almost none of the same ingredients. We wish they made use of bright, tangy flavors more often, particularly in their vegetable dishes, which oven arrive with a pallor that reminds us of an Englishman separated too long from the sea. But what Lord's does well, they do very well, so it balances out.
In addition to meat-y things, drinks and desserts here are great. Almost all of the cocktails make use of the kind of fruits you’d expect to see in an oil painting (damson negronis, a bartlett pear manhattan), and the expansive spirits menu includes no less than 20 amaros and an entire section devoted to non-alcoholic aperitifs. End your meal with an ultra-creamy vanilla ice cream studded with crumbly bits of brown bread and topped with a dab of orange marmalade. It sounds weird, but it works.