Below 14th Street ...

Little Owl and the extraordinary collection of restaurants in the neighborhood within a neighborhood ...

If you were a fan of the show Friends, you know this building.

Ann invited her NYU young adult literature class to our apartment the week before last, where she hosted special guest Francesco Sedita, head of Penguin Workshop, which publishes everything from picture books to YA lit (such as this forthcoming “vivacious debut”). Ann had secured a 9:30 reservation at Little Owl for a perfect late dinner. This is one of the cosiest little rooms in the West Village in the very coolest part of the West Village, streets that feel like a neighborhood within a neighborhood.

It comprises a diamond-shaped cluster of blocks, essentially three-by-three blocks if it were a regular shape (there are few regular shapes down here, in terms of blocks, or people for that matter, and happily). It’s bordered by Christopher Street to the north; 7th Avenue to the east; Morton Street to the south; and Hudson Street to the west. I walked this neighborhood within a neighborhood with my old college pal, John Lambert, last fall and he couldn’t believe how picturesque these blocks were; indeed, he was amazed, he said, that he was still in New York City.

If you don’t venture below 14th Street, where Manhattan’s relentless grid ends, you cannot know the pleasing confusion of these West Village streets. (West 12th Street, for instance, is parallel to West 11th Street—they run east-west—but they are perpendicular to West 4th Street, which runs north-south in this part of the Village.)

I’m so glad to have returned to Little Owl (chef-owner is Joey Campanaro) for a perfect sautéed chicken breast, just like we were taught in culinary school, along with eggplant parmesan and sautéed halibut.

Little Owl’s sautéed chicken (notice the nicely cleaned wing bone on what’s called a suprême or airline cut).

But what I realized the next day, looking at Google Maps, was what an oasis this little diamond of streets is, and they hold an uncommon concentration of restaurants. (See Google map for paid subscribers at the bottom of this post.)

On the south side of Christopher Street, a block between Hudson and Bleecker: North Fork, Red Paper Clip, two beer joints—the Beer Garage and Talea Beer Co.—Fiaschetteria Pistoia, and L’Industrie Pizzaria, an outpost of one of the biggest names in NYC pizza that opened here in October.