Going for the soup and salad at Gossip. Yes, that's weird.

On Saturday night, AV and I had no destination in mind for dinner. He wasn't hungry; I was sort of hungry but didn't quite know what type of food I wanted. It was a bad combo. We walked up and down Ninth Avenue, getting rejected by place after place. Finally, inexplicably, we ended up at Gossip Bar & Restaurant. They had tables. They had TVs. And, ostensibly, they had food. We headed in.

Snagging a huge, elevated four-person booth, we settled in. Our server was nowhere to be found, and an enormous group of revelers at the table next to ours was thoroughly blocking the walking area between the bar and the tables, so we seized every opportunity we could to garner some attention. We started with a round of drinks-- diet coke and club soda, thank you very much. Yes, we were at a bar, and yes, we would only order food and soft drinks. I admit this entire night made no sense.

But order food and soft drinks we did. AV, who had had a hefty midafternoon snack courtesy of fresh sourdough and lamb sausage from the Union Square Greenmarket, stuck to a light repast of the black bean soup. He enjoyed it, aside from the incongruous lump of guacamole in the middle of the whole affair. Sans guac, it was a good bowl of soup.

Like a little green island

My choice was the beet and goat cheese salad. This salad was built upside-down: a tuft of greens on top, a generous base of ruby beets, a ring of toasted pistachios, and two huge (I'm talking ice-cream-scoop-size) dollops of warm goat cheese. It scratched my head at the composition, and then I dug in. Mmmmm, goat cheese. All the ingredients here were pretty standard, but you have to give them tons of credit for their heavy hand with the goat cheese. Well played.

A microgreen toupee hiding mountains of goat cheese

Oh, and there was bread. A complete afterthought, clearly baked-from-frozen rolls, but warm, and good with a nice slather of goat cheese.

So very average

So that was it. We were satisfied with our meal. Would we go back to Gossip? Sure, why not. It was a nice bar with a comfortable atmosphere, and the food was decent and well-priced. For what it was, Gossip is a three Offset Spatula restaurant-- a haven of downscale food, reasonably priced, devoid of pretense, and full of goat cheese.

Gossip Bar & Restaurant
733 Ninth Avenue, between 49th and 50th Streets
212-265-2720