As any knowledgeable restaurant anthropologist will tell you, the seeds of the new Brooklyn style of dining were planted in Manhattan. That’s where locavore, seasonally driven menus originated. So did bewhiskered mixologists, trendy no-reservation policies (thank you, Mr. Chang), and ye olde dive-bar restaurants with carefully distressed décor (thank you, Freemans). But as the Brooklyn restaurant scene continues to mutate and evolve, the kind of raffish, casually inventive, modestly priced neighborhood cooking associated with such now iconic institutions as Marlow & Sons and the Frankies Spuntino empire in Carroll Gardens is starting to loop back across the river. And more and more restaurateurs in Manhattan are attempting to bottle the elusive, homespun alchemy that the best Brooklyn restaurants are known for, and make it their own.
At least those were my thoughts as I hunkered down at the bar amid the bearded, flannel-shirted, bourbon-swilling hordes who are already flooding into Gabriel Stulman’s latest restaurant, Fedora, which opened recently on 4th Street in the West Village. Over the past few years, the energetic (and, as it happens, bearded) Mr. Stulman has made a specialty of taking pokey spaces near Sheridan Square, where he lives, and turning them into the kind of hopping, corner-bar destinations that you’re more likely to find in Williamsburg or the newly gentrified borderlands of Fort Greene. Stulman’s restaurants are tiny, as a rule (Joseph Leonard, on Waverly, has seven tables, Fedora has eight), the menus are filled with hearty hipster staples like braised lamb shanks, brisket sandwiches, and oysters on the half-shell (Stulman’s a former partner in the Little Owl), and in the evenings, the crowded little rooms take on an intimate, almost private-party-like feel.
Read more at http://nymag.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment