As we march, wearily, into the new decade, assorted gastro-bloggers, tweetheads, and old-line culinary gasbags like me have been dutifully pontificating on the future of posh big-city dining in this post-boom era of comfort-food madness and general thrift. But if you want to glimpse firsthand how the obsessions of the old-school food world have shifted from four-star soufflés to a more elemental style of cooking, do what I did the other day and take one of your classically attuned food-snob friends to April Bloomfield’s latest gastro-grub outlet, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room. Braised beef shins appear on Bloomfield’s menu, as do many trendy, predictably heart-stopping iterations of pig, including a fried trotter the size of a small canoe. But the dish my friend focused her refined palate on was the headcheese (a.k.a. skull meat), which Bloomfield fries in little bonbon-size nuggets. She popped one in her mouth and savored it for a time in rapturous, even priestly silence. “You can tell it’s good,” she said, “because it tastes like sweat.”
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