Wandering around Fort Greene on a fall evening is like floating through a Brooklyn dream. Majestic brownstones line the sides of the quiet roads, kids scoot home with parents hurrying along side, flowers fill the front gardens and climb over front doors, and trees line the sidewalks. It's picturesque. When you then round the corner and find a glass-fronted, plant-surrounded, bustling restaurant, you should definitely go in. Hopefully the restaurant you walked into is called Metta.
The main focus of this restaurant? The open wood fire. It warms the room (both atmospherically and temperature-wise), is the source of much of its attention, and dominates the menu. In a good way. The executive chef, Noberto Piattoni, hails from Argentina, where he spent time learning the magic of cooking over fire with the food world’s fire god, Francis Mallman.
The menu features a showstopper steak cooked on the wood-fired grill and served with an addictive chimichurri. I'll now never want to each chicken that's not cooked over a fire. And I'll need to build a fire before I next try to cook mackerel. But that was only the mains. We started with crispy, crunchy schmaltz potatoes (aka marathon runner's heaven), and charred flatbread with tzatziki. Then we worked our way through the farmers' market with the small plates: tonnato with market vegetables, charred fairytale eggplant, and a salad of peach, rye berries, charred tomato, tomatillo and crème fraîche.
We were pretty overwhelmed by char by this point. We loved it, but charred sweet potato wasn't the dessert we were craving. So back we went to
Van Leeuwen for ice cream, because that's our routine these days.
Metta, 197 Adelphi Street, Brooklyn, NY 11205.
