Bubby’s
- Cuisine: American comfort food
- Vibe: Country chic diner
- Occasion: Late night munchies; neighborhood bites; after-work hangout
- Don’t Miss: Jalapeño Bloody Mary, mac and cheese, blueberry sour cream pancakes; Michigan sour cherry pie
- Price: Appetizers, $8; entrees, $16; dessert; $5.
- Reservations: Accepted
- Phone: (212) 219-0666
- Location: N Moore St & Hudson St, New York, NY 10013, USA
Ron Silver worked the breakfast shift at
Florent 15 years ago. Then he became obsessed with pies. That’s when he
opened Bubby’s, a pie shop – a pie shop that became so popular he
couldn’t resist turning it into a restaurant. But breakfast was still
in his blood, and so was the concept of late-late-night dining, which
is how the current Bubby’s evolved.
I’ve eaten brunch at Bubby’s in Tribeca tons of times. They make a
spicy Bloody Mary, great house-smoked salmon Benedict and even better
blueberry sour cream pancakes. But the real fun of eating at Bubby’s
these days is eating late at night. On a recent Wednesday night, every
bar stool was taken by young, downtown types. One guy sitting at the
bar – done in soda counter-style with swivel stools and a
copper-surfaced top – was having a martini and a meat loaf.
The dining room was more than half full with the kind of crowd you’d
see in any other restaurant. I ordered the Bubby’s Manhattan, a wild
coho- salmon nicoise salad, and sauteed ramps – not your average diner
food. For dessert, I shared a terrifically sour slab of cherry pie and
the mile-high apple pie. You have to order one of the pies – coconut
custard, chocolate meringue, strawberry rhubarb, key lime and chocolate
peanut butter.
Now, there’s a new midnight menu, available from midnight to 6 a.m.,
six days a week. There are two kinds of people: morning people and
night people. Me, I’m the nocturnal type. You’d be surprised by how
hard it is to find good food and good atmosphere in the middle of the
night.
I was disappointed when round-the-clock Florent shut its doors, as
was the rest of the city. Florent’s French onion soup and steak frites
used to taste pretty good at 4 in the morning. So do Bubby’s chocolate
chip pancakes and a blood orange mimosa. And their won
derfully dense mac and cheese, seasoned with nutmeg and crusted in corn-flake crumbs.
A
lot of American diners feature hash on the menu, but Bubby’s hash is
made with Berkshire pork belly. As for the potato chips, the kitchen
slices them thick and sends them out of the kitchen doused in a
homemade blue cheese sauce. Skip the overly garlicky, garlic beef
burger and instead try a surprisingly good veggie burger made with
brown rice,
mushrooms, corn, carrots and peas.
The
bartenders make solid cocktails, which seems strange in a place with
laminated map place mats, menus with a photo of Silver’s bubby on the
front, and a lending library in the corner. Judging from the scene last
Thursday at 3 in the morning, there are a lot of hungry night owls
craving roasted vegetable chili and a jalapeño Bloody Mary. They even
ran out of waffle batter the other night, so they made do with pancake
batter and now that’s the recipe.
Why do we love eating in the
middle of the night so much anyway? Why, after we down our last drink,
do we suddenly crave eggs or pancakes or French fries?
When
we’re awake, we want to eat. Sometimes, I still crave a waffle, even
after a three-course dinner and a few glasses of wine.
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