Unfortunately, while the place gives good vibe and made me want to spend many a night dining there, the food gave me little desire to return. And after that atmospheric build up, such an uneven meal was a major let down.

The chef and owner of this lovely corner spot is Matt Hamilton, who has worked at Zuni Café in San Francisco and most recently here in New York City under the tutelage of the cool diva of Triscuits, sardines, and canned chickpeas, Gabrielle Hamilton, at Prune (no relation). Her style is in evidence all over his bar snacks menu that includes cheese and crackers, deep-fried pickles, shrimp fritters, and sweetbread poppers served with a harissa mayo. While the mayo with those poppers was terrific, sadly the sweetbread popper part of the equation was not. The sweetbreads were cut so thin you could not really get much of the texture or flavor of that marvelous gland; these pups were mostly breading. Not that there is anything wrong with a popper of crispy breading, but a bit more sweetbread would have given them more soul. And as for the rest of the menu, I’d have to say that while the intention to deliver honest, invigorating, and soulful food seems to be there, the execution is off.

Uovo, which means egg in Italian, symbolizes for Hamilton the beginning, and respect for the simplicity of ingredients. This philosophy is an earnest one and one that I respect and admire, but he misses the mark when his laudable philosophy about food and ingredients comes head to head with the practical matter of cooking.

His dinner menu is divided into four sections, none of which is labeled, but each of which follows the progression of a meal, starting with salads and small plates, moving onto appetizers, then entrees, and sides. I was having dinner with Steven, Susie, and Court, all high-quality eaters and among my family of close friends, and we were intrigued and excited by the menu. We started with a couple of salads. His bitter greens with warm anchovy vinaigrette ($7) was one of the best dishes of the evening—a sharp and salty vinaigrette, if a bit strong, but well seasoned and flecked with little bits of the fishes, that was a smart counterpoint to the mound of twisted bitter greens. But the salad of romaine, market beets, blue cheese and bacon ($8) was a mess. Fresh long ribs of crunchy romaine were suffocated by a runny blue cheese dressing, and topped with some seasoning-free cubed beets and a tongue-sized slab of over-cooked leathery bacon. It was like something from TGI Friday’s. What a disappointment. Next we ordered the asparagus with fried egg ($9). I am not sure why asparagus are on a menu now (asparagus season is done), but this dish is sort of a classic, so I might forgive the seasonal error, but it was a let down. It was assembled from firm pencil-thin grilled asparagus that were properly sprinkled with sea salt, but the rubbery fried egg had a yolk that would not run, and that tasted like plastic. If you are a chef and you see that plate leave your kitchen with a firm orange yolk, re-fry that egg. And throw a bit of salt on that egg before it goes to the table.

After our first course plates were cleared, Susie noticed that we had not been served any bread. And we like carbs, so we asked our waiter, a very enthusiastic guy who recommended a great bottle of red wine from Juan Gill ($32), if we could have some sort of bread with our meal. He said sure, but that it would take three minutes. “Okay,” we said. “We’ve got time.” And we continued chatting about matters that ranged from cancer (a scare last week turned out, thankfully, to be nothing), sleeping with people half your age (and the consequent need for afternoon naps), and the new man in my life (who is amazing, and is not half my age, for the record). Just as we were getting through part one of the “oh-my-god-is-it-cancer” story (a great story because it has a happy ending), a gorgeous grill-marked flatbread arrived, topped at one end with a scoop of cold, thick and tangy yogurt spread. This was one of the most rewarding parts of dinner. We tore into it—it was hot and steamy, chewy and soft, and it went great with that yogurt spread. It was gone in less than three minutes. But I was curious about why we had to ask for the bread, and so I asked our waiter about whether it was a menu item that people needed to order, or whether it was free and they had just forgotten to serve it to us. The waiter explained Uovo’s bread policy this way: “I know isn’t that bread great? It’s sort of a secret. We don’t charge for it, but you have to ask for it. If you don’t ask for it, you don’t get it. You just get the toasted pumpkin seeds.”

Okay.

Now, I liked those spiced toasted pumpkin seeds, but what is up with making the bread some secret password thing? The bread is magnificent. Either give it to all your tables or put it on the menu and let people order it and pay for it. Why make it a secret? This is a restaurant. Aren’t you supposed to want people to know about and eat all wonderful things your kitchen makes? Not sure what the purpose of the secret bread is, but if you go to Uovo, make sure and ask for it. It’s awesome. (And since the rest of the menu at times isn’t, you’ll need it.)

Hamilton does know his way around a sardine, and his grilled sardines ($11) were spot on. He grills two fat and meaty ones, well seasoned with cumin, garlic, and coriander, and squeezed with lemon, and serves them with caper berries. They were sweet, salty, a bit unctuous, crispy skinned, and delicious. Hamilton’s take on an heirloom tomato salad ($10) is interesting. He serves sliced tomatoes—sliced way too thin for a salad, more for a fixin’ on a sandwich—and then warms them up and tops them off with a beautiful grilled plop of manouri cheese—a wonderful Greek cheese that can be made from sheep or goat's milk, that is sort of like a creamier ricotta. It was a fine salad, swimming in a pond of amazing fruity olive oil, but what it lacked was a spritz of lemon and some coarse sea salt. And I also think it’s sort of a shame to warm up late summer tomatoes, but the grilled cheese part of it was fun and tasty.

Allow me to just interject here with this one little side note. I don’t know about you but my main problem with food lately is a lack of salt and acid. Food needs to be seasoned and it needs, most of the time, a hit of acid in some form or another—vinegar, citrus, wine—pick one. These are notes that make flavors sing. One chef who does get these two elements right consistently is Akhtar Nawab at Craftbar. Say what you will about the new design—actually I wish people would stop knocking his place down because it is no longer what it used to be—but that guy is fiercely talented. And in my experience, he gets the art of seasoning.

Okay, moving on, I must preface this next bit by saying that my friend Susie is prone to overly dramatic and super passionate commentary about food, so please take her reaction in the next sentence with a grain (or ten) of salt. This was the phrase that came out of her mouth after tasting the Whole Roasted Suckling Pig ($22) with citrus honey and jicama slaw, which we ordered to share: “If this were my only entrée, I would want to kill myself. This is awful.” Though I am not sure suicide is the right remedy here, I did agree with her. This little piggie, while very moist and tender, was almost soggy and had zero flavor. I could have been eating a shredded roll of wet paper towels. It was bland and uninspired and such a let down because its menu description was so mouthwatering. When our waiter came over to check on us, we were honest with him and told him that was rather flavorless. His response was: “Wow, really?” He didn’t offer to get us something else, and even though we didn’t eat it, leaving the entire pig on the plate, we were charged for it. Not the best way to win over repeat business. How about pretending to care that we didn’t like the dish, and offering to replace it with something else? Hello? Hospitality anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

Moving on from the sad pig, Hamilton’s skate wing ($22) was beautifully cooked—golden and pan-fried on the outside, with corduroy-like ribbons of sweet flesh beneath the crust—but it was served with two condiments that were the equivalent of getting hit over the head with a Louisville Slugger (a caper remoulade) and then an ax (the super cloying pickled summer squash). Together these accompaniments were just overkill. I had a headache.

His sides were a whole lot better than his entrees, especially his roasted gyspy peppers with caramelized cippolini onions dotted with a thick red almond sauce that was sort of like a spicy romesco ($7), a grilled corn sukqutahhash with roma beans tossed in a crazy amount of heavy cream ($6, I seem to have put five pounds directly onto my glutteal area thanks to this succotash), and a summery bowl of sweet peas and diced asparagus tossed with olive oil and mint ($7).

At this point, we were sort of worn out from the up and down, roller coaster-like nature of our meal, and we were hoping that desserts would redeem the evening. They almost did. The tarragon and pink peppercorn ice cream was terrific, as was the lemon verbena sorbet (but VERY tart), but the chocolate biscuit, made to order with a great scoop of vanilla ice cream, tasted like something a five-year old with no familiarity with baking soda made with an easy bake oven. It was gummy and chalky and quite close to vile. It was time to leave.

While some parts of my meal at Uovo were wonderful—the company, the bread, the wine, the sardines, the bitter greens, the sides—for the most part I was pretty disappointed in the experience. I had heard great things, and was looking forward to loving it. And the thing is the place has potential. It gives off a welcoming amount of sincere charm, and has the right stuff to be a favorite little neighborhood place. But the food is just not there. While I had eaten enough, and was certainly full, a big part of me was not satisfied. And there is a quite a difference between being done, and being sated.

Uovo is located at 175 Avenue B, at 11th Street, 212-475-Uovo.

Andrea Strong