Honey & Ricotta: dinner

Showing posts with label dinner. Show all posts

Friday, 20 October 2017

Metta

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.

Saturday, 24 June 2017

Ava Gene's

We've found our new favorite neighborhood restaurant. Unfortunately it's not in our neighborhood. Or city. Or state. It's a five hour flight away, over in Portland. I'm still not sure what to do about this situation: if a move to Portland were possible, that would be best. Hey, Ava Gene's, fancy moving over to New York, and bringing the Portland lifestyle with you? And maybe some of those mountains too?

Of the four nights we spent in Portland, two were spent at Ava Gene's. This wasn't intentional. But it was a happy accident. By our second visit, we'd befriended the waiter and felt more like locals than we've managed to achieve anywhere other than Van Leeuwen in 2 years in Brooklyn.

When a restaurant tells you that "our story can be told through our pasta," the executive chef has just written a beautiful, uber-seasonal, vegetable-forward cookbook, and it's located in your dream Portland neighborhood, you can be pretty sure you're walking into a great meal. When Bon Appétit won't stop shouting about it, you can be pretty sure it's going to be wonderful. And after the first sip of a Negroni Sbagliato, we were head-over-heels in love.

On both visits we shared as many antipasti, giardini (veggie-centric salady things), and primi (pasta!) as we could manage. All the pasta is milled, rolled, and cut in house. This could lead to the claggiest, most indigestible pasta in the world. Obviously, it doesn't. It makes some of the best.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that we loved every single thing. Huge plates of greens, radishes with tonnato, pane with borlotti beans and rosemary, and bruschetta piled high with favas and English peas filled the table with color and bright flavors. Linguine with clams, Sunday's special sugo, agnolotti pillows which burst like magical candy, and charred spiced chicken combined the most spectacular pasta with the freshest Portland ingredients, and made for four very happy, greedy people.

We'd started dreaming of a future in Portland as soon as we arrived, and Ava Gene's made the return to this big, tough, sweaty East coast city 100% harder.

Ava Gene's, 3377 SE Division St, Portland, OR 97202.

Sunday, 11 December 2016

Sunken Hundred

Restaurants on Smith Street seem to either open and fizzle out into nothingness in under 5 minutes, or they open and are wildly popular and will be there for the forever future. Despite opening as the first 'Welsh' restaurant anyone in Brooklyn has ever heard of, Sunken Hundred has, since its first day of service earlier this year, managed to achieve the latter status. At 6.30 on a Friday it was already bustling, drinks were being poured, and food was whizzing out the kitchen.

And no, before you ask, the menu isn't just Welsh Rarebit, Glamorgan sausage, and Bara Brith (although they do make an appearance). It's filled with seafood, seaweed-tainted dishes, and warming (necessary both here and in the Welsh countryside), seasonal, vegetable-rich sides and salads. With a drinks order in (one huge glass of red wine, one beer, and one dark rye cocktail), we picked out all the non-shellfish foods on the menu (B is supposedly 'allergic'), and watched them all steadily appear on our table over the evening.

Croquettes were crisp and fishy and perfect dipped in a mustard sauce. Fish churros (described as the most 'Instagram-able' dish on the menu, so obviously we were sold) were genius: all the flavors and textures you want from classic fish and chips in one fried mouthful. A lamb pasty was how pasties should be, with crisp pastry and a flavorful interior — a far cry from the pasty scent which fills most British train stations. The squid was pretty and sweet, while the mushroom salad was earthy and autumnal, and the ffagodau (meatballs on minty peas) are what I'll be eating for the rest of winter

And obviously we ended with pan fried Bara Brith with rum and walnut ice cream. Twice. Because when a group of runners go out together, one dessert between three is simply not enough.

Sunken Hundred strikes the perfect balance between curated, carefully crafted food, comforting, homey dishes, a warm, welcoming atmosphere, and prices that mean this really can become a neighborhood local.

Sunken Hundred, 276 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231