After 16 Years, Quaint West Village Bistro Little Owl Still Slings an Epic Pork Chop | Eater NY

"When it opened in 2006 I found that Little Owl had already reshaped the neighborhood-bistro template by shifting focus from exclusively French fare to seafood, salads and occasional Asian and Italian flourishes, and it carried pop-culture luster from being in the building that contained the Friends apartment and launching Gabriel Stulman’s career. The room that once had a quaint 30-seat dining area (with the eponymous plastic owl visible in an adjacent eave) now radiated with multiple outdoor sidewalk tables and heated dining structures, and on a frigid weeknight the place was jammed. The famous pork chop ($36) arrived bone-protruding and cross-hatched from the grill on a bed of greens over butter beans; it was perfectly pink, soft and slightly chewy with the texture of a well-marbled steak and faint notes of cumin and curry that only amplified its porkiness — the taste as good as I remembered, though the price was exactly $10 more. Small plates remain central: tuna ponzu ($19) replaces the older seared hamachi, there’s grilled octopus among the starters, and we chose a brilliantly orange lobster bisque dotted with chives but stingy on crustacean. The mushroom risotto came loaded with wild mushrooms and a wiggling raw egg yolk and smelled faintly of truffle oil; the Seasonal Vegetable section (new since the original menu) includes a very agreeable skin-on delicata squash with apple and toasted pumpkin seeds ($15), while the french fries ($9) were crisp outside and fluffy inside. Large, shareable entrees like the ultra-shareable pork chop and a skate sandwich (two layers of breaded, fried ray on a modest roll with a haystack of slaw and fries) encourage grazing and carb-loading. We finished with desserts — a carrot cake crowned by a lighter-than-usual cream cheese frosting and a rolled apple strudel dusted with confectioner’s sugar and served with vanilla ice cream — and left shivering but agreed the food was every bit as good as we remembered, perhaps a tad better." - Robert Sietsema