Jody Williams’s hands become animated when she talks about a dish. She chops the air, flips something in a nonexistent sauté pan, pretends a piece of paper is a crêpe and explains how to fold it. One day while we were working on this book, she got so carried away telling me about Aligot (here), pretending to stretch the elastic potatoes, that she abandoned a baking sheet of beets she had been roasting! “Ooh, bad Jody!” she says, aloud, to herself, taking them out of the oven. “What’s the matter?” I asked her. “They don’t look like they enjoyed their time in there.” She splashes the baking sheet with a bit of water and tucks a piece of aluminum foil over the top and folds it around the edges as if putting a fitted sheet on a bed. She puts the baking sheet back in the oven, sighs loudly, and says, “Your intention really does count for everything.”
Jody’s intention, as it were, is quite simple: she wants all the puzzle pieces to fit. With dishes influenced by both history and her personal travels, her food is informed both by collective memories and her own nostalgia too. Her cooking is simple and seasonal, and she expresses unmitigated respect for her ingredients and the setting her dishes are served in. At Buvette, her perfect slip of a restaurant tucked on a charming stretch of Grove Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Jody has fully realized her puzzle.
Buvette is the kind of place you can go to every day (and many do). Its doors open at 8:00 a.m. every weekday morning, 10:00 a.m. on the weekends, and don’t close until 2:00 a.m. It feels so good to be inside Buvette that you can’t help but leave a little happier than you arrived—in other words, it’s a total escape. It’s a place where you can press pause, where you can leave your phone in your pocket, where work seems just a little less urgent.
Jody accomplishes this all through her intrinsic sensibility that steers her toward everything good. Her menus are full of classic dishes, refreshingly not reinvented. They’re also full of simple plates featuring great ingredients that she’s not afraid to leave alone. Cheese, for example, is looked after and always served at the right temperature, while a leg of prosciutto is perpetually poised on its Berkel slicer, ready to be cut at any moment. While she has a full liquor license, she only lists three cocktails on her menu: a Manhattan, a Martini, and an Old-Fashioned. Presenting her customers with an edited selection guarantees that there’s no such thing as a bad choice. Buvette runs, it seems, on a terrific mix of restraint and generosity.
Jody’s good taste applies not only to Buvette’s menu, but also to the entire atmosphere. The place is flush with good lighting and beautiful surfaces, the long bar a cool slab of marble. There’s good glassware and plenty of ice in the lemonade and nothing moves to or from a table unless it’s on a silver tray. Baskets of apples and lemons sit in front of the bathrooms where gorgeous soap and fragrant, but not too fragrant, lotion is installed by the sink. Every moment you experience has been considered and curated.
Translating the experience of eating and drinking at Buvette to the page required Jody to dig deep, to recollect all the stories, people, trips, lessons, even the failures and bumps in the road that got her to where she is today—all the puzzle pieces, so to speak. This entire book is filled with all of the dishes that accompany these memories.
Recently I was with Jody going through some of her old ephemera. She’s got everything stored here and there, mostly cigar boxes bursting at the seam with menus from every restaurant she’s cooked in (with notes scribbled on them, mostly of phone numbers for local takeout places!), letters from chef friends, grocery lists and food cost breakdowns scribbled on the backs of napkins, photographs from her time in Italy, portraits of her grandmother holding a hunting rifle and a fishing rod. Pointing to it all, taking in this lifetime of travel and work, she sighed. “This is what it looks like,” she said, “when you’ve taught yourself how to cook.”
—Julia Turshen