Savvy at Savoy

Tonight, on a whim, we had dinner at Savoy. I'm not going to review the restaurant per se, for that would be redundant. Savoy has been a SoHo mainstay since the mid-90s, and although it was our first time there, it looked like each of our fellow diners was well familiar with the place. I will say that we had a very enjoyable meal of grilled lamb and slow-roasted sockeye salmon, and by skipping appetizers and wine and by sharing one dessert, we avoided breaking the bank as well. That one dessert, by the way, was killer: white chocolate bread pudding with berry sorbet. Phenomenal.

I requested a table in the upstairs dining room, which I knew of by reputation. It turned out to be an intimate space, furnished in a comfortable, rustic way.

We found out that on October 9, Savoy will be hosting something called Nose to Tail Dining, with an English chef named Fergus Henderson. More than likely, the dinner service will make use of every part of an animal, according to Henderson's philosophy and practice of using oft-discarded cuts of meat in cooking. This made me think of The Far Side, a comic strip by Gary Larson that once illustrated the point. In the strip, a group of cavemen are systematically tearing apart the carcass of a woolly mammoth and carrying the pieces off, except for the tail, which lies severed on the ground. A crotchety old grandfather caveman standing nearby points indignantly at the tail and yells, "In my day, we used every goldang part of the mammoth!"