Cynthia

Cynthia is about as small as a serious New York restaurant gets: roughly thirty seats on Jones Street, one of those short West Village blocks that feels more like a village lane than Manhattan. Chef Sherry Cardoso cooks a tasting menu here, which means the room sets the pace and you hand over the decisions — the appeal is exactly that. Because the kitchen is cooking for so few people at once, the plates arrive with a level of attention that larger rooms cannot sustain, and the dining room stays quiet enough to actually talk. It is a special-occasion restaurant rather than a drop-in, and one of the better arguments in the neighbourhood for booking dinner a few weeks out. The restaurant serves Tuesday through Saturday, from 5pm to 11pm, and takes reservations through Resy; menus change with the seasons, so treat any dish you have read about elsewhere as a snapshot rather than a promise. Come early and walk the surrounding blocks first — Jones, Cornelia and Bleecker are among the prettiest streets in the city at dusk.