In this era of low-risk burger bars and glorified pub food, there’s something to be said for quirky unpredictability and the thrill of the new. At least that’s what the merry band of Manhattan food pilgrims I was dining with were telling themselves as we huddled around the table at Taavo Somer’s quirky, unpredictable, singularly interesting new Williamsburg restaurant, Isa. On my first visit to the snug corner space on Wythe Avenue, I’d enjoyed a plate of fried pigs’ tails, and the melting, delicately crisped skeleton of an entire sardine. But those dishes were gone now, replaced by creations with runic names like “sunchoke cream” and “smoked yolk, spelt, sorrel.” There was the image of a gorilla head on the front of the day’s menu, and as a waiter arrived, we peered at this document in the flickering candlelight, looking, I later imagined, like tourists in Tokyo puzzling over a subway map.
Unlike Somer’s Manhattan restaurants (he and his partner run the popular Freemans and Peels), Isa (“Father” in Somer’s native Estonian) has not been heavily publicized. Somer did much of the carpentry in the beamy, comfortable space himself. His chef, Ignacio Mattos, also comes to Brooklyn from Manhattan, where he was the chef at the venerable Italian restaurant Il Buco. Mattos is a proponent of the local, highly stylized haute forager cuisine popularized by the Danish chef René Redzepi, and in coming to Brooklyn, he and Somer have done what artists do when they move from the towers of Manhattan to the hinterlands. They’ve exchanged high rents and glitter for the freedom to pursue their own quirky ideas and experiments at a languid, agreeably neighborly pace.
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