Day One Seventy - A recap of Lunch at Tre Dici, albeit a tad late

Gosh, it's Friday, how did that happen? This week certainly flew by!

I thought we would play a little catch up here and give you a recap of yesterday's lunch and then a little later on today, of course, our weekly GCF, how could we miss that? GCF recipes to me signal that it's the weekend!

So, before we get into weekend mentality, let's have a quick recap of yesterday's lunch. I feel that restaurant lunch menus are much more of a challenge than dinner menus for restaurants -- at their best, they span the gamut from salads to sandwiches to entrees to soups and smaller bites.

Yesterday for lunch, we went to Tre Dici, a small rustic Italian restaurant tucked into that "new" neighborhood that is springing up near the Ace Hotel in the mid to upper twenties east and west of 6th avenue. A mixture of factories, high end shops, cheap perfume outfitters, new and hip hotels and the odd bar or restaurant -- this is a neighborhood that's definitely on the up and up.

Tre Dici's lunch menu did what you wanted for lunch --it had a salad section, a panini section, of course a pasta section (what would an Italian restaurant be with a pasta section?), and an entree section.

I find that a restaurant's bread basket is always a good judge of the upcoming food's character and Tre Dici served delish foccacia with rosemary, sea salt and sauteed onions with an herbed butter spread. A good sign...

We split two different dishes each delish in it its own way:

We started with their zucchini chip salad. Composed of arugula, a few small slivers of tomato and red onion, some crumbles of blue cheese and a light blue cheese vinaigrette topped with homemade zucchini chips. The zucchini chips had been lightly sauteed and coated with a thin phyllo dough crust making them crunchy and delish but not heavy and overly greasy. It was the perfect melange of flavors.

Then we split their homemade semolina ravioli with a spring pea and cheese puree, mint, nettles, pea shoots, oregano and a sage brown butter sauce. Full of flavor, three of these ravioli were definitely enough for me for lunch!

Overall a lovely lunch that was an ode to summer's bounty.

Tre Dici

128 West 26th Street

New York