If You Wanna Ride, Ride the Pink Pony
Despite a judgmentally-hip vibe and a reputation for patchy service, the Pink Pony is the truest, most genuine place in the Lower East Side. It's what Red Lobster is to Time Square: A manifestation of everything loathsome about a neighborhood, yet also a concentration of its soul, and, however uneasily, a perfect attraction.
Lucien Bahaj (of the eponymous French bistro at First and First) invited this fate upon the Pony when he took over in 2002. He had visions of a classic café where fine-minded literati could have a chat and a smile over cherished dishes of roasted chicken and lasagna. And if someone wanted solitude, that was fine too. The London Review of Books would beckon at the end of the bar. Classic literature would hold up the walls. The idea was that looking backwards with a nod to the best of Old World literary salons would make the future righteous. If someone didn't think so, the podium in the back would be unrestricted.
So Lucien overhauled the Pony with all the above, plus strong coffee, dependable wine, international beers and a jukebox stocked with familiar (but not too familiar) songs for a vaguely aspirational, yet flattering-"Oh, of course I know this. His best work"-democratic sound. He even tickled the walls with tame poetry. Sample: "Please hold me in the forgotten way."
The menu is serious without being somber. Escargot can be had with a salami panini. Entrée prices range from $10 to $18, or roughly the cost of a paperback bestseller to a new moleskin sketchbook. Salad nicoise, with neat slices of fresh rare tuna, is the best of the lower-cost dishes. On the high end of taste, roasted salmon and green parsley risotto is second only to the hanger steak ladled with Lucien's elaborate (and secret) pepper sauce.
Daily specials are well-worth hearing about as well, since a flat $16 buys blanquette de veau, lamb with soft polenta, or, depending on the night, five additional choices of haute-cuisine that are also French family food. Portions are small but intense and delectable, as befits a place built to serve creative-types with tongues ruined by too much coffee and too many cigarettes.
But instead of starving artists, the original gesture at pre-war, Parisian gentility brought dressed-down aristocrats, later called hipsters, to assert their unpretentiousness-call it "proletentiousness"-by wearing Van Halen tour shirts and Lee jeans with sparkly red shoes from a Broadway production of the Wizard of Oz.
Some people resent this kind of style. But while hipness can make an otherwise good server indifferent toward the culinary needs of the uncool multitude, indifference is part of the experience. Make time for it. Come in before noon and linger. Slow service compliments a slow meal, a lazy read (ask the bartender for Fermata by Nicholson Baker), and stacked hours of good culture-watching-both inside and through two street side bay windows. But be advised: Unless you look like a surfboard in profile, you'll want a seat along the wall up front, to avoid being buffeted by customers and servers moving through the crowded center aisle.
Jim Jarmusch and Mos Def are rumored to stop in for brunch, definitely the best meal here. The eggs Florentine has the proper bounce of an inflatable cushion coated with cheese. But for the aesthetic best-of-the-best, have the peanut butter, banana and honey sandwich on toasted seven-grain bread ($6.75) while watching the namesake pink pony signage in the front window slowly oxidize into states of frescoesque, unsaturated beauty-like M&Ms sucked for a minute and spit back out into the palm for study. So cool.