English peas

As hotel restaurants go, the shop at Andaz Fifth Avenue tries pretty hard.

Determined to cast itself as a New York restaurant, it likes to broadcast just how local it is. Its Web site rattles off a litany of New York purveyors — eggs hail from Feather Ridge Farm in the Hudson Valley; lox comes from Russ & Daughters on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which has been providing New Yorkers with smoked fish since 1914. And there's even a self-conscious little area that sells snacks made by small, lesser-known brands in New York.

This is all in line with the in-the-know feel that the hotel, part of Hyatt Hotels & Resorts' chain of boutique properties, tries to give off. It's a pretentiousness you can already sense from the fact that it is the shop — spelled all lowercase, the hotel insists — and not, well, The Shop. (You'll have to check out my review of the hotel in the New York Times Travel section for more on this Andaz.)

How would the food stack up against all this posing? We decided to find out …

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When a girl leaves town for seven weeks, the City is full of advice for her the moment she returns.

Because she has been known to have an appetite, there is, first and foremost on the minds of many, the issue of where she should eat now. Restaurants have closed and opened in the time she’s been gone, sequestered in the woods of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., finishing a book, making new friends.

“Obviously,” a friend emails, “the Lion in the Village is the place to go.”

And by all accounts, that appears to be right. The West Village restaurant with Waverly Inn chef John DeLucie at the helm and backers like David Zinczenko of Men’s Health magazine has been one of the most breathlessly anticipated new restaurants of spring. In the last few weeks, its private preview dinners have been a Page Six hotbed, reportedly drawing bold-faced names like Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Nora Ephron and Mary J. Blige.

The issue, of course, becomes, well, how on earth to get a table? If you aren’t God, Gwyneth Paltrow or Graydon Carter, that is.

On Monday, the very night that it opened, we decided to swing by and try our luck …

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