SoHo Style That Lacks Substance
Rating: 3.9 out of 10
Link: https://manuela-nyc.com/
Address: 130 Prince St, New York, NY 10012
If you come upon Prince Street between West Broadway and Wooster, you will find a conspicuously unassuming five-story building with almost no qualities of note whatsoever besides a first-floor storefront that is smugly occupied by the plant-conscientious, fungi-obsessed restaurant Manuela.
Located such that it can adequately capture runoff from the triad of SoHo commuting streams in equal parts (them being consumption-brained Manhattan dilettantes, financial savants, and evangelists of tech startup culture), Manuela attempts to seduce this high-budget audience with a menu they refer to on their website as “honest, unpretentious and served with joy.”
If this was the food they served me, I would have left none the richer but certainly more satisfied.
I attended this undeniably American (in all its most miserable facets) eatery with the vacuous meatbags I call coworkers and found the most pleasurable aspect of my experience to be the conversation. The decor is a poor pastiche of the insufferable rustic Hampton aesthetic with subtle accents that nod to an undergraduate lecture series on Cy Twombly—a wink to their cadre of art director clientele.
“The food at best lacks flavor and at worst makes you wish you’d never shelled out a day’s worth of pay to taste it at all.”
This glorified hang-out space has one sole utility: to see-and-be-seen; a selling-point only valuable to young, bright-eyed entrepreneurs too poor or too ugly to secure seed/Series A funding from venture capital funds during their incubatory years on the campus of an élite Ivy/Ivy-adjacent university and must now play an elevated form of Shark Tank on the Hoka-lined streets of NYC.
The menu is almost perfectly bifurcated between arrogant plant-based fare or the kind of stuffy meat dishes you’ll find at any Connecticut country club, each half imposing on itself equally. The food at best lacks flavor and at worst makes you wish you’d never shelled out a day’s worth of pay to taste it at all. You can rest assured that the money you are paying does not go to fairly compensating the wait staff; we spent as much time fighting to hold on to our dishes as we did chewing on them.
If you, like myself, find yourself locked into an engagement at Manuela against your will, make sure to 1) eat before, and 2) ask for a separate check.
The Dishes
Please note: each dish unable to be photographed by our onsite photographer, whether due to lighting constraints, occupancy level, social distractions, or otherwise, has been digitally rendered via our proprietary computer-assisted textural modelling methodology.
Cream Biscuits, SoHo Honey Butter (v) | Add Country Ham
Lowokenuienly the best part of the meal.
$18 (or $34 with the ham)
Ricotta Gnocchi, Morels and English Peas (v) Good (in the way that new Trader Joe’s frozen meal you tossed in your cart on a whim ends up surprising you).
$34
26oz 30-Day Dry Aged Bone-In NY Strip Ramp Chimichurri, Aged Pecorino
Lacked flavor and overcooked. Shocking display considering the price.
$135
Tuna
Worse than steak (but I suppose it’s cheaper too).
$85
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