Ivo & Lulu

Occasion: Date #2 with Boy
Location: Ivo & Lulu on Broome between Varick and 6th Ave
Edibles: cilantro baked shrimp, followed by the chicken for me; the roasted pear with blue cheese app, followed by the duck confit for Boy

Musings: I wanted to like Ivo & Lulu, I really did. It's the kind of quirky, hole-in-the-wall restaurant I want to open myself one day. The menu is short and sweet, giving the miniscule kitchen a fighting chance. The prices are right - mains are $14 to $16. BYOB helps keep the bill down, too. They have the fundamentals right - it just needs a few tweaks.

First of all, they need to remove a couple of the tables along the wall. They have about ten tables right up against each other, and the only way to get in and out is to pull the entire thing out, disturbing both neighboring tables in the process. If they had just a little space between them - I'm talking five or six inches - you could slide your table over against the next one to make room to get out.

The baked shrimp smelled DIVINE when it arrived at the table next to us (and by "next to us," I mean "this woman was sitting closer to me than my date"). I'm a fiend for cilantro and it's hard to make a dish with copious amounts of it that I won't like. This one? They over-baked it and the cilantro became a bitter, brownish mush. A great idea for a dish; it just needed to be properly executed.

Boy's app was a bit heavy-handed. Pears and blue cheese are a classic pairing but I thought the pears came out too sweet and the blue they chose was too pungent for an app. It almost would have made a better dessert.

The sauce on my chicken was creamy and delicious; the chicken itself was dry. And so on.

A lot of potential. If they fully realized it, Ivo & Lulu would be great.