Prince Street Café

Prince Street Café suffers from an identity crisis. Is it a café, as the name and espresso bar would suggest? A soup-and-sandwich lunch joint, as the midday menu tacked to the window implies? Or is it a chef-driven restaurant, as indicated by the dinnertime entrées and pedigreed chef and co-owner Gary Volkov, formerly of One if by Land, Two if by Sea? This slim spot, with breakfast pastries and free Wi-Fi, makes a fine if unremarkable neighborhood café. But Volkov seems intent to make it so much more than that. His mission is hampered, most of all, by the setting. Putting silverware and Chilewich place mats on the tables at night adds little to the fluorescent-lit atmosphere. Plus, with the exception of a nightly list of special homemade pastas, everything on the encyclopedic dinner menu is also available at lunch. Both a velvety carrot-ginger soup and hearty Ukrainian borscht—two of the nearly dozen soups on offer—are generous but underseasoned. The chef, presumably eager to cut costs, multitasks ingredients: Instead of the usual stewed beef, he throws the roasted pork from his Cubano panini into his borscht. The hunks of duck confit mixed with mushrooms into a bland pasta dish are also tossed into a frisée salad. Prices are low and the service genial enough—for an overreaching café that along with everything else, also bakes its own tarts, brownies, cupcakes and cookies. Those sweets, by the way—including a moist and not overly sweet carrot-cake cupcake—are a much better reason than lunch or dinner to pop in for a bite.

—TONY