The Musket Room

The Musket Room is a small, sneakily sophisticated downtown establishment with a casual party atmosphere in the front of the house and an obsessive young cook in the kitchen. The two-room setup is owned and operated by veterans of the popular AvroKO hospitality empire (Public, Saxon + Parole), and it consists of a bar-café area (which tends to fill up with crowds of fashion-conscious revelers early in the evening) and a relatively peaceful dining room in the back, which looks out, through tall windows, over a boxed herb garden strung with lights. The garden is cultivated by the restaurant’s chef, Matt Lambert, and if you sit down early, you may see him bent over with his clippers, happily harvesting bunches of fresh microgreens for your dinner. Lambert is from New Zealand, and he has a deft touch with poultry and game dishes (roasted duck, quail with a delicious bread sauce, fillet of red New Zealand deer flavored gently with gin).