My spouse and I dined at the
Musket Room for dinner on a Sunday evening in mid-February 2017. The Musket
Room is open daily for dinner only. You can reserve a table 28 days in advance
using the online Open Table reservation system, or by telephone. The Musket
Room has held one Michelin star every year since it opened in May 2013. The Musket Room is operated
by the AvroKO restaurant group, which also owns Public and Saxon and Parole.
The
Musket Room is named for the Musket Wars, a 35-year conflict fought 200 years
ago between the Māori tribes of New Zealand (the chef’s home country). A musket
hangs over the bar, and other images are visible throughout the restaurant.
(What was not visible to us was the origin of the restaurant name, which we
searched high and low for on the internet.) The
restaurant is located in NoLita in the space that previously housed the
restaurant Elizabeth. The two-part dining space that seats about 70 patrons includes
a bustling front bar room (featuring a 20-foot long wood bar), which leads to
the quieter rear dining room that offers a view of the well-lit backyard
garden. White-washed exposed brick walls and brass chandeliers are accented by custom
wood tables, curved armchairs, and aqua banquettes. The restaurant is not
completely handicap accessible: you must step up to enter the restaurant from
the sidewalk. Restrooms are located in the basement (but perhaps there is a
main-level accessible facility). It was a bit cumbersome to enter the
restaurant: because we visited in the wintertime, the Musket Room (like most
restaurants in the city) aims to protect the diners seated near the front door
by using an entry vestibule enclosure, but because of the steps us required to
access the restaurant, and because the enclosure only covers that step and not
the sidewalk, the position of the regular door is aligned with the enclosure
door, so it was not easy to close the door to the vestibule before we opened
the door to the restaurant.
We were seated in the front
bar room, despite making our reservation on the earliest day possible.
Initially we were seated in the far rear corner of the front room, perched next
to the selection of open popular wine bottles, also near the coffee machine and
the service area where staff request drinks from the bar. We were not even
seated for two minutes when the smell and sound of grinding/roasting coffee
beans assaulted us (a smell which we usually find pleasing, but not in
combination with fine dining) and a served bumped my spouse when returning a
wine bottle to the wall shelf directly behind him. Fortunately, the hostess was
able to move us to the same position on the direct opposite wall. We would have
preferred to sit in the rear dining room, but apparently those tables were reserved
for more preferential patrons.
Chef
and co-owner Matt Lambert serves cuisine
inspired by his native Auckland New Zealand and influenced by his New American
resume and French training. Before opening the Musket Room, Chef Lambert worked
at Manhattan’s Public, Double Crown, and Saxon and Parole. The menu features local and
seasonal selections that include ingredients grown in the restaurant’s back
garden. In addition to à la carte offerings, guests can choose one of the two
tasting menus, called “short story” and “long story”.
We
had planned to order one of the tasting menus (although we did not indicate our
preference in advance), but when we saw where we were seated, we decided that
the noisy front bar atmosphere was not really conducive to a lengthy
fine-dining tasting menu. The beverage list features a large number of New
Zealand wines and beers, as well as cocktails that incorporate homemade sodas,
tonics, and freshly squeezed juices. We had heard about the excellent bread
service, so we were disappointed when we did not receive any until we had
finished our first course. When a busser came to remove our starter plates, he
asked if we would like more bread, to which we replied that we actually had not
yet been offered any. He rattled off our choices, and we each chose something
different (one biscuit and one sourdough); the bread (and accompanying
salt-speckled butter) was fantastic, so we would have loved to take him up on
his offer to bring more if we had eaten some earlier in our meal. Our starters,
the scallop and the salmon, were tasty and presented beautifully. My spouse had
been looking forward to trying the red deer (which is sourced from Chef
Lambert’s family farm), but after we ordered our main dishes, our server
returned to our table with the menu so that he could make an alternate choice
because no deer was available. (Interestingly, we watched her perform this same
maneuver with two subsequent tables after we ordered – she took the order for
the deer and walked away, only to return to tell those patrons that they had
just “sold out” of the dish.) Instead, we ordered the chicken and the seabass;
both were excellent. For dessert, we shared the sweet potato/white chocolate
pie. Our last treat was two “fairy cake” macarons that arrived in the box that
contained our bill.
We
enjoyed our dinner in the front bar area at the Musket Room, but we would have
loved to sit in the quieter rear dining room overlooking the garden, where we
would have appreciated experiencing in one of their tasting menus.
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