I take you to the Meatball Shop

It was raining and windy last night and almost every New Yorker was on their couch watching their DVR, but me and Traci thought tonight would be a great night to try the Meatball Shop and take our chances on the wait. It was only 30 minutes for a party of two, but don't go there with anymore than that because the wait was an hour or longer for 4. It went by fast once we ordered our $27.00 bottle of wine and caught up.

Next thing we knew we had our table in the front, a blackboard marker in our hand and began check marking the menu. Yes, you write on the menu saying what you want - pretty easy concept and even easier for the wait staff. Hence the name, The Meatball Shop only serves meatballs and sides. You can get them plain, with a sauce, over a side of pasta, mashed potatoes, vegetables, on a hero, in a slider or on a brioche bun.

There are 4 kinds of balls to choose from and a special that changes every night: chicken, beef, pork and vegetarian. The sauces are spicy meat, tomato, mushroom, creamy parm and also a special that changes nightly - last night was a pesto.

It was hard to decide exactly what to try but we decided to get four different kind of sliders, a sandwich and some sides to make sure we covered our basis. The food came out pretty fast and all at one time. The sliders are on the small side (you can see from the picture below) but were easily cut in two. We had to try them first and at the same time, first with the chicken and pesto. It was awesome. The bun was soft, meatball was flavorful and the sauce wasn't over powering at all. Next was the chicken with the creamy parm sauce. It tasted exactly how it sounded and was pretty rich. Perfect to go with a slider, but could never have eaten it on a sandwich or as a sauce - too heavy. The tomato sauce was good, but nothing special and the meat sauce was great. It made us both think of Max's special meat sauce and it wasn't spicy at all. We should have gotten that sauce with our sandwich, but who knew.

The mashed sandwich came with melted mozzarella cheese and a side salad of arugula and apples. We ate that last, the bread was a little too soft and we maybe should have gone with the hero but the meatballs were still delicious. We also got some mashed potatoes which were creamy and so good. You could tell they were home made and they had pieces of the skin in it also. And then we got a side of steamed spinach, but we barely ate it. It didn't have any flavor to it - could have used some garlic powder if anything.

This time I definitely saved room for dessert. They only have one thing on the menu - home made ice cream sandwiches. They have the standard chocolate chip cookies and then they have ginger snap cookies and cookies in between. Regular ice cream flavors like vanilla and chocolate and also espresso, mint and caramel. We went with a chocolate chip cookie with mint ice cream. Not the best choice I have to admit. The mint ice cream was not the kind you would get at Baskin Robbins and it was way too minty. We ate the cookie instead and ordered an extra one on the side. The cookie was soft and really good. There weren't chunks of chocolate chips but it was still chocolaty enough.

We left super stuffed and didn't even break the bank. I feel like I got to taste everything on the menu and can't wait to go back!