Three days in New York with nothing to do but eat. Driving in from La Guardia, the cab driver moans on and on about a recent blizzard, but this morning’s sunshine is benignly warm, dripping the last of the March ice from rooftops and scaffolding, warming the sidewalks and seen-it-all brownstones of Greenwich Village. Serendipity has brought me here—a conversation with Nathan Isberg, 31-year-old chef of Queen West’s Czehoski and Coca. Wise restaurateurs often bring their chefs to New York for research and inspiration. Felice Sabatino of Via Allegro eats Manhattan annually with his chef, Lino Collevecchio, and members of their crew. Franco Prevedello was just down here with Splendido’s Yannick Bigourdan and David Lee as homework for their upcoming Queen West collaboration. Isberg, however, works on his own, much leaner budget. Every six weeks or so, after service on Saturday night, he catches the Greyhound, dozing until it pulls in to the Manhattan terminal around 10 the next morning. He starts with a slap-up breakfast at the Coffee Shop diner on Union Square, then walks and eats and window shops for 24 hours (no need for a hotel room at his age) before riding the bus home to Toronto, his head full of fresh ideas. It’s a fine and romantic thing to do—and conscientious. Many Toronto chefs inhale the critics’ reports in New York magazine and Wednesday’s New York Times, eager to learn (and often imitate) what’s happening in Manhattan; far fewer choose to see for themselves. “Next time you go,” I said to Isberg, “I’ll meet you there. We’ll check out some new places and some favourites. See what’s happening.”

And so here we are, on the corner of West 11th and Greenwich, perched like schoolboys on uncomfortable little stools in the Spotted Pig (314 W. 11th St., 212-620-0393), the much-praised gastropub, while the sunshine and the early lunchtime patrons stream in, pondering a small but promising menu. With his curly blond hair, beard and earrings, Isberg has the dashing look of a troubadour, though his manner is a good deal more thoughtful. He drops Plato and James Michener into the conversation (but only when appropriate), and now that I think of it, there has often been an intellectuality to the way he cooks—certainly to his youthful, ambitious experiments with molecular gastronomy when he and co-chef David Haman opened Czehoski. The ingredient-driven, Spanish-style tapas of Coca are based on meticulous research and trips like this one, rather than time spent in Spain. He takes notes when he eats out and promises he’ll send them to me when this adventure is over. “Last time I was here, I had the deep-fried whole pig’s ear,” he sighs. “It was so good, so crispy, but it’s not on the menu today. At least we can have the gnudi and the pork tonnata.”

The Spotted Pig looks like a tiny Victorian pub, with a pressed-tin ceiling and crowded tables, bare brick, gaudy mirrors and shelves crowded with hundreds of pigs—or at least their wooden, china or plastic effigies. Part-owner Ken Friedman designed it, advised by his friend, star restaurateur Mario Batali, but the senior partner is English chef April Bloomfield, whose CV includes a stage with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and, more significantly, two and a half years as sous at the River Café in London, a restaurant famous for fabulous, domestic Italian dishes. When it opened in February 2004, New York’s critics hailed the Spotted Pig as the city’s first British gastropub, but it seems more tightly packed, more self-consciously quaint and more cheerful than anything like it in England.

The gnudi are truly amazing—each one a ball of warm, salty, flavourful, so-soft-it’s-almost-runny sheep’s milk ricotta wrapped inside a delicate semolina skin. Strewn with crisply fried sage leaves, they paddle in a sauce that is mostly molten parmesan cheese drizzled with tangy brown butter. Richer than Bill Gates, they’re utterly irresistible, like almost everything else we order: sweetly sour rollmops or smoked haddock chowder or a perfectly cooked duck egg, its yolk half set and half liquid, its flavour enhanced by olive oil and a few shavings of tuna bottarga.

The service is also spot-on. T-shirted waiters have a casually friendly, rather worldly manner, but customers’ needs are perfectly met. And it works both ways. “Did you get the wooden French pig?” a woman at another table asks the sous-chef, who is working on the menu at the bar. “I left it for you on Friday.”

“That was you?” he says. “I love that pig.”