The secret charm of this East Village resto isn’t what common words appear in its name but which one doesn’t
We who are meat eaters need not eat meat like mouth-breathing bottom-feeders. We who eat meat seek meat but need not timorously seek it. We are not mice, nor must we be lions, puffed with pride, who try to hide the mouse inside through smoke and char and crass charade and tales of getting laid. Men we are, no more no less, not abashed sinners, and as men we deserve a fitting house to eat our dinners.
Could that happy home be the Bowery Meat Company, the new restaurant from chef Josh Capon and restaurateur John McDonald? Perhaps, though at first the odds appear long. There is the name, for instance. Each of the three words—Bowery, Meat and Company—seem pulled at random from the lexicon of trendy restaurant buzzwords. The location, the soulless glass poop of the Avalon Bowery, had already chewed up and spit out a classy Veselka offshoot and is generally a gleaming blight in the East Village.
Plus, a meat company seems like the very last sort of company we need, especially in that neighborhood where DBGB does brisk trade in saucisson and speck. And when the vegetable is purportedly ascendant, every other recent opening seems to be a steakhouse. It’s a very bad time to be a cow.
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