Greetings, eater, and welcome to The New Brooklyn Cookbook.
First, a word about the “old” Brooklyn. We love the old Brooklyn. We eat there all the time: Di Fara’s Pizza in Midwood, where the legendary Dom DeMarco labors over every pie like it’s the last he’ll ever make; Primorski in Brighton Beach for herring with onions, too much vodka, and way too much Lady Gaga; Peter Luger in Williamsburg for the porterhouse, of course, but also for the starter of thick-cut bacon; Tanoreen in Bay Ridge, which is not even that old (it opened in 1998) but is undeniably the reigning Middle Eastern restaurant in all of Kings County; and Nathan’s in Coney Island for dogs and fries before the Brooklyn Cyclones take the field (not recommended before a ride on the original Cyclone).
Thank God and Marty Markowitz for all that. Due respect. But this book is about something else. It’s about the surge of culinary energy that has coursed through Brooklyn in the past decade or so, generating dozens of excellent neighborhood restaurants, many of which have become destination restaurants. It’s about the people who pulled it off, too, the dice-rollers who many called crazy for trying to sell calf’s tongue salad and ricotta beignets in the borough of pizza, bagels, and ethnic takeout of every conceivable flavor. And it’s about the community of Brooklyn-based food entrepreneurs many of these chefs buy from—the coffee-roasters, picklers, granola makers, brewers, bearded Willy Wonkas, and kimchee-making deejays who peddle their products at markets like the Brooklyn Flea and specialty shops throughout the city and beyond.
The social and economic forces that transformed Brooklyn have been gathering momentum for decades. Food-wise, though, it’s easy to pinpoint the beginning of today’s thriving scene: late 1998. True, there were a few trailblazers before, since closed. Remember Cucina on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope? Or Oznot’s Dish in Williamsburg? Due respect to them, too. Ahead of their time. But for all the dynamism that characterizes Brooklyn’s dining scene today, you can trace it all back to two restaurants: Al Di Là, which opened in November 1998, and Diner, born less than two months later, on New Year’s Eve. These restaurants have little in common. Al Di Là is a traditional Venetian trattoria that pays loving homage to dishes, not their component parts; Diner was an early advocate of the local-seasonal-sustainable approach, spreading the gospel of organic produce and humanely raised meat and helping to create a whole new framework for doing good by eating well. But from the beginning, both demonstrated that there was a vastly underserved market for ambitious, Manhattanlevel cooking at Brooklyn prices. The Grocery and Saul, a pair of high-end French-inspired New American restaurants (both more expensive and fancier, culinarily, than either Al Di Là or Diner), stress-tested that notion further when they opened in the fall of 1999 on Smith Street.
This was no “scene” yet, just a smattering of believers who placed a big bet on Brooklyn. But over the next few years, this initial diversity morphed into something like a movement. Rose Water, Franny’s, iCi, Applewood, the Farm on Adderley—these restaurants, building on the ideas of Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Peter Hoffman at Savoy in SoHo and, yes, Caroline Fidanza at Diner, formed the foundation of the so-called New Brooklyn Cuisine, “a very specific subgenre of the more familiar New American Cuisine,” wrote Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite, New York magazine’s influential Underground Gourmet critics, in an ecstatic four-star review of the General Greene. “It flourishes in the bucolic hinterlands of Boerum Hill and Prospect Heights, the low country of Carroll Gardens and Williamsburg, and the great plains of Park Slope, and has as its common denominator a very New York culinary sophistication melded with a wistfully agrarian passion for the artisanal, the sustainably grown, and the homespun.”
That review, headlined “Best of Breed” and published in August 2008, might have been the high point for that particular conception of a New Brooklyn restaurant. When you talk to people about Brooklyn food these days, it’s not hard to detect fatigue with the farm-to-table, local-seasonal-sustainable thing, even among those who fully subscribe. “I’m not here to preach at all,” Catherine Saillard, owner of iCi, told us. “I want to make it stronger, the attachment and philosophy that I have here, but I never want to preach, and to be like, What?! What do you mean? You don’t eat organic?! Oh my God, that’s why the earth’s not turning! No.” We’ll stop short of calling it a backlash. Chefs still believe in these ideals, after all. So does everyone else. By now, we just expect ingredients at a certain type of restaurant to be responsibly sourced. And we appreciate it. But let’s declare a thousand-year-ban on the buzzwords, shall we?
Another occasional quibble with the new Brooklyn is that it’s thriving at the expense of the old Brooklyn—the slice counters, red-sauce Italian joints, and Irish bars that defined the borough for decades. And yes, that world is losing ground, at least in so-called brownstone Brooklyn. No point in denying that gentrification has been a huge factor in the creation of the borough’s dining scene. (Fifteen years ago, the core clientele for these restaurants would have lived in Manhattan.) But the curious thing is these new restaurants represent a modern-day version of the prototypical Old World establishment where the owner’s always there, the customers know each other by face if not name, and the specials are scrawled on a chalkboard. In this sense, at least, these are the good old days.
Always evolving and obsessed with maintaining their own freshness and vitality, Brooklyn’s new wave of restaurants have nevertheless been around long enough to have produced a repertoire of well-known dishes, from The Good Fork’s steak and eggs Korean-style (page 108) to Marlow & Sons’ brick chicken (page 65) to Al Di Là's braised rabbit with black olives and polenta (page 8). The New Brooklyn Cookbook has plenty of these signature recipes. Yet we’re just as proud to include many lesser-known creations, those hidden gems and occasional specials you might not order until your fourth or fifth visit. We’ll single out the General Greene’s soft tofu with broad beans and chili paste (page 165), Egg’s duck legs and dirty rice (page 94), and Locanda Vini a Olii’s spicy seafood guazzetto (page 45) as prime examples. After all, every dish in this book was carefully selected by the chef who created it. We consulted with them, sometimes suggesting that, say, a pasta might be nice for the mix, but the final choices were theirs. Which means these recipes all convey something essential about how the chefs perceive their restaurants.
We’d like to stress: This book is not meant to be comprehensive. Brooklyn’s dining scene is constantly expanding. There are plenty of very good restaurants we couldn’t include because we just didn’t have the space, and others that have opened since our deadline. We’re not saying these are the thirty-one “best” restaurants in Brooklyn. (The Michelin guide would probably agree: There are only four Michelin-starred restaurants in the borough, and two of them, Peter Luger and the River Café, wouldn’t make sense in this collection.) We’re just saying they best embody the food culture we’re celebrating between these covers.
To stay fresh, to stay exciting, Brooklyn’s restaurant culture needs to expand and evolve. And it is. The New Brooklyn Cookbook is organized in chronological order, and this ongoing evolution reveals itself as the book progresses. Later entries include Prime Meats, an “American-German” restaurant, to borrow the owners’ term; No. 7, where chef Tyler Kord dabbles in all kinds of kitchen craziness; and the Vanderbilt, a surprisingly Manhattan-ish restaurant on a vast (for Brooklyn) corner space in Prospect Heights. All of which hint at the future of great eating in Brooklyn—an increasingly diverse and vital future, in which the dining choices rival Manhattan’s not just in quality, but in range. Amen.