Aftertaste: Notes on Reviewing Sweet Chick in Williamsburg

Sweet Chick in Williamsburg is a restaurant that, more than anything, surprised me. I walked in and I was ready to be disappointed. 

It's on Bedford Ave in Williamsburg, where most new restaurants are either too cool for school and/or so highly concept-driven that they overlook the quality of the food, even in a town where everyone is a discerning eater. Bedford Ave in Williamsburg is a lot like Smith Street in Carroll Gardens—there are more restaurants than you can shake a stick at, and yet nothing really sticks out (though there are notable spots on both streets). 

In particular, too many of the restaurants on Bedford Ave and the surrounding area try too hard to cater to the Williamsburg clientele and loose originality and character in doing so. Trendiness breeds complacency among many of the new establishments which, like pubescent teens, care more about fitting in than finding their own niche or adding their own value to the community. We want to tell them, "just be yourself!" But they just want the Edison lightbulbs and the kale salads and the reclaimed hardwood countertops like everyone else. Puberty, in fact, is an apt description for Williamsburg's food scene right now. There's no doubt Williamsburg is on its way to becoming a landmark dining destination (perhaps it already is), but it carries a teenage awkwardness with it too right now. Gentrification causes growing pains. An evolving identity causes social discomfort. 

And so it's this puberty that makes reviewing restaurants in Williamsburg difficult, because you want to recognize the restaurants' strengths, but they can act like annoying teens. When I walked into Sweet Chick to review it for this week's Brooklyn Paper, the "Spread Love, It's the Brooklyn Way" sign above the counter made me cringe. Really? I thought. And so I thought I knew what I was in for. But, as you can read in my review above, the food was surprisingly good. For a restaurant designed around Chicken and Waffels, their version had better be good. And it is. A kale salad, a Brooklyn staple, was one of the best I've ever had, coated in a tangy sour cream dressing and topped with killer house-cured bacon. And while other dishes didn't always deliver, I left satisfied. 

In the hustle and bustle of the Williamsburg food scene, it can be hard to look past the noise and find real pleasure in a plate of food. And while I'll keep preaching "be true to thine own self" to each and every restaurant, judging by the quality of the food alone, Williamsburg has some real standouts. And Sweet Chick is no exception.  

Sweet Chick 

164 Bedford Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn 

sweetchicknyc.com

Newspaper Clip © The Brooklyn Paper May 3, 2013

Early Bird Gets the Word: Tørst Beer in Greenpoint

Early Bird Gets the Word: Notes on Brooklyn Food+Drink

Sometimes, my favorite moment of the week comes in the form of a sip of cold beer on a Friday afternoon. It's a familiar sip. Finding a life-changing taste of beer isn’t difficult at Greenpoint’s new beer bar, Tørst ("thirst" in Danish), where hipsters mingle with starched collared businessmen for a taste of the 21 draft and over 99 bottled beers you’ve probably never heard of.

The eager bartenders will let you sample any of the rotating selection on draft – names like Nebuchadnezzar, Black Walnut Dunkel and Aún Mas Á Jesús (Tørst is no foe of accented vowels) make the selection an interesting but sometimes intimidating process to navigate. I tasted many, was delighted by some, turned off by a few, and perplexed by a few more. An even longer list of bottled beers, which changes daily, can prove difficult to approach. Good thing for the knowledgeable bartenders (sometimes a little too knowledgeable).  

On a recent night, the bartender led us towards the Stillwater Stateside Saison, a reasonably priced bottle from on the list which hails from Maryland. The large 75cl bottle (true to its Nordic roots, Tørst uses European measurements) arrives with a snarling dragon embellishing the label. Saison is a generic term for farmhouse-style ale, and the yeast often adds a little “funk,” as the bartender described it, to this style of beer. But the first sip of the Stillwater proves light, floral, and bitter with just the slightest farmhouse funk. It’s an approachable and refreshing beer among Tørst’s many options. Approachable and refreshing—that's how I like my beer.

Another winner was the Aún Mas Á Jesús, a slightly darker, more bitter and more complex option that requires no special knowledge of beer to appreciate. Perhaps more difficult to appreciate is the modern, all-wood interior. The stark Scandinavian design feels a bit out of place on Manhattan Ave in Greenpoint, its geometric shapes more fit for a Chelsea gallery than a Brooklyn beer bar. It makes it clear that Tørst is trying to be the cool kid on the block. Then again, it kind of is.

Whatever you choose and whatever your opinion of the build, the beer is best enjoyed with a meat plate from Chef Daniel Burns, who opened Tørst with beer brewer Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø (notice the vowel). (Tørst only serves a meat or cheese plates now, but will serve a full menu at a hotly anticipated Nordic restaurant opening soon in the back room.) Our plate included an addictive New Jersey salami and Kentucky country ham. Burns, who makes cameos in the bar and has the Noma look down to a T, serves the platter with small slices of warmed Danish rye so good you'll want to spend your winters in a small bungalow in Denmark subsisting on the bread alone. If his restaurant's food is as good as this plate, Burns will have a Brooklyn sensation on his hands. 

If a mug of beer is the everyman’s glass of wine, then there is something aspirational about Tørst, where the high-quality beer is served in art-deco wine glasses. In fact Tørst may feel more familiar to a wine connoisseur than a beer enthusiast for a first time visitor. It felt unfamiliar to me. But a few sips in, you really wont care. You'll just want to know what other beers you can try.

Tørst
615 Manhattan Ave, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
www.torstnyc.com 

Grown Up Bread Pudding

Shortly before starting our catering business in the 6th grade, Alex and I cooked our first multi course dinner. It was for our parents and siblings and our family friend Norma at my house in a suburb of Boston on a Saturday night circa 2003. We'd scrabbled together a shopping list, had our parents drive us to the supermarket and spent the better part of a short winter day cooking and prepping until the sun went down and our siblings were crying out on behalf of their hunger. With our middle school hands we set the table, dimmed the lighting and served each course to our "guests" - the time between each course growing and growing as we further delved into confusion and chaos in the kitchen with the progression of the meal, the sink stacked higher and higher with dishes and the counter space shrinking with each new dish.

There was, to begin, a curried butternut squash soup flecked with grated cheddar, which we'd made before. By the time our families got through as much of the thick soup as they could handle, their bowls sat empty as we scrambled to get the next course to the table -- roast cod with mashed potatoes from The Black Dog Cookbook (yes, of the clothing company from Martha's Vineyard). Pillows of well cooked potato sat side by side with not-as-well cooked cod, the fish flaking and dry and riddled by a doused in lemon and salt. Our generous families did the best they could to enjoy our creation. Next, another fish course (why, I don't know) of roasted salmon and asparagus from my mother's Cooking Light. This course was more bearable - the salmon well cooked and arranged artfully on top of the asparagus. Not bad.

By the time everyone had finished what was an adventurous and drawn out process, we weren't about to let anyone move an inch, because dessert was still in the oven. Another standby from the The Black Dog Cookbook, the blueberry bread pudding with lemon sauce was our grand finale. Rich with cream and eggs, challah bread, blueberries and a thick lemon sauce, we had high hopes.

Pulling the bread pudding from the oven, it steamed and bubbled and puffed and sagged all at once. We delicately spooned servings onto small plates and drizzled over the lemon sauce. Alex and I finally joined everyone at the table for dessert, and we all took a bite at once. The bread pudding was soft and spoonable, sweet and sticky and succulent. The cubes of challah were rich and eggy and melted like custard on the tongue. We'd struck baker's gold with pure luck.

And we'd been introduced to the pleasures of sharing food with others -- our first meal of many, many more to come.

Peter Reinhart, a world renowned bread baker and theologian, often shares a fact when he gives talks on baking. It's a simple fact, but it carries a round and simple message that pleases me. I last heard it at our LongHouse Food Revival in South Carolina this past winter.

"The word companion," he said, "comes from the latin com, meaning with, and panis, meaning bread. Which is to say that a companion -- a friend -- is quite literally someone with whom we break bread."

Many years after my first bread pudding and my first foray into the world of "breaking bread," I still seek out what that first meal brought me, in a slightly different context. I live in a big city, in Brooklyn, on the top and fourth floor of a walk-up in an anonymous building on a long and busy street in an city that, on some nights, seems endless and disappears only somewhere far beyond the horizon. In that apartment, the kitchen can become the axis of my little spinning planet. With the city stretching its arms out around me, my life zooms in on the boiling of water and the chopping of onions and the adjusting of the stove's flame beneath the saute pan.

The people at my table become the only sights around me, the only sounds their voices and the loud clanking the oven makes every few seconds as it heats up. Some things are more grown up, I've bought the groceries on my own, there is beer and wine at the table and there are no parents or siblings. But mostly it is the same. And sometimes, I still make bread pudding.

Below is a recipe I made recently that that is a far shot from my first bread pudding but that -- I promise you -- is so damn good it will have you breaking bread with everyone you know. It's a grown up version, savory instead of sweet. I usually don't write up recipes any more, but for this I made an exception. Because, as often is the case, some things are better left shared.

Oscar Dogs 2013

Just like last year, Oscar Dogs are back with 9 hot dogs for each of the 9 nominees for Best Picture in this year's Academy Awards. I designed everything from "The Bloody Western Dog" for Django Unchained to "The Tiger Dog" for Life of Pi and "The Dog Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand" for, you guessed it, Lincoln. Check it out on Serious Eats!

Prune: Hearts Cooked in Butter

Prune asks for your trust, then it asks for your love.

Hearts cooked in butter. A whole poached orange, served whole.  Sweet, saffron-colored slices of fall persimmon. The hostess’ fabulous beehive hairdo.

The last does not come on the menu, but what’s on offer this fall at Prune often, though not always, delights, surprises and finds itself easily loveable. With a confident hand, the kitchen produces the simple, understated cuisine of Gabrielle Hamilton, whose presence seems to linger in every perfectly polished soup spoon and pink-shirted server. Hamilton, who has worked hard to define a culinary voice very much her own, has a soft spot for butter, for salt and for the ethereal qualities of meat (her book, Blood, Bones and Butter, suggests as much). In her restaurant, she has cushioned her food by friendly, approachable service and one of the most inviting dining rooms in the city. More than anything, patrons must put faith in Hamilton as they work their way through a meal. They must trust that an uninspiring description for boiled ham with lima beans and cottage cheese is in fact a brilliant combination worthy of its place on the menu. They must trust the waiter who, when asked for suggestions, only responded, “Everything on the menu is good.”

For the most part, the trusting diner wins.

Braised fennel with Pernod butter and trout roe is a rich, filling dish which, through the transformative properties of butter, turns the bulb from light and crunchy to soft and intensely savory. The croque “mademoiselle,” a splayed, open-faced sandwich of bread, cheese and egg, hits all the right notes, recalling a childhood egg-in-a-hole and a well-crisped grilled cheese. Veal hearts, though served in winter, are nicely charred morsels of meat and muscle which taste every bite of a smoky summer barbeque. 

In one case, the truly lucky diner might opt for the most familiar of menu items: a cheeseburger and fries. Between the sharp cheddar, the meat (an impossibly juicy mixture of 80 percent beef and 20 percent lamb), and a generous slathering of parsley-shallot butter, you are in for mouthful after mouthful of pure calorific joy sandwiched between two unassuming English muffin halves. By the time you’ve reached all but the last bite of the burger, you must ask yourself, “Do I dare finish? For after this bite, it will be all gone.” It’s true love indeed.

Prune, now in its thirteenth year of business -- no small feat for a bite-sized restaurant in the East Village -- has a proven record for food, for flavor and for falling in love with fat. But not every dish will turn your heart to butter. Half an avocado dressed in olive oil and sea salt, sent out by the kitchen before the meal, seemed a lost wanderer on our table, and proved awkward to share. Likewise, a dessert of whole orange poached in simple syrup kept perfectly with Prune’s aesthetic, but drew little affection (one bite of the shimmering orange globe was plenty). A date “shake,” a warm and watery concoction which can only be categorized as a lackluster chai latte, felt like betrayal. How could our waiter misguide us like that?

“Everything on the menu is good,” he’d said.

Well, that’s because nearly everything is. And no relationship is perfect.  

Prune
54 East 1st St., New York, NY
www.prunerestaurant.com

The Importance of Cookbooks

BEFORE my grandmother passed away this fall, before she stopped painting flowers and taking photographs, before her final trip to the ballet, before she made her last batch of sweet, sticky schnecken, before she could no longer eat anything but fudgesicles, before she was forced to sleep for much of the day and could no longer entertain visitors, she took me into the sunroom of her house in Kansas City early one morning.

"Go into the kitchen cupboard, the one below the China," she said, "Get the cookbooks. We'll sort through them, you'll choose the ones you want."  Her voice was fuzzed by the oxygen tube that was strapped  to her nose.

It was just the two of us, alone, the sun speckling in through the screen doors and the humid heat of a Kansas City morning in August. My siblings were sleeping, my father running errands, my mother was on the telephone with doctors, always more doctors. My grandfather was in the kitchen in his Joseph A Bank suit eating Grapenuts and Cheerios mixed together in a blue-rimmed ceramic bowl. My grandmother's arms were skeletal beneath her pink blouse, but otherwise much remained the same. The cockoo clock ticked. The light puddled on the two lacquered card tables on her sun porch. Through the windows, Eric, the gardener, pruned my grandmother's roses, her delphinia, her dahlias and daisies.

The cupboard contained a chaos of cookbooks, lined, stacked, piled, crammed into corners.  Her favorites stood in the front row – a 1932 edition of Thoughts for Food from which she often prepared a gelatinous Thousand Island Crab Ring Mold, multiple volumes of The Barefoot Contessa, a Spanish tapas book written by one of her friends, The Silver Palate Cookbook. Crammed behind these, other volumes had been gathering dust since before I was born. A Cuisinart cookbook published in the 1980s was virtually untouched. A midcentury Guide to Napkin Folding – good as new.

We began sorting through her collection,  spreading the books out on one of the lacquered card tables, considering them as one might bottles in a wine cellar. Of her three children and seven grandchildren, I was the only one who had pursued food professionally – the only one who asked, every time upon arriving in Kansas City, when we would be making the deviled eggs. When I was growing up, she would often pull out an old cookbook, read me the notes that her own mother had made in the margin, and reminisce.

“How I used to love pickled tongue, Willie. Pickled tongue on toast. It was divine, Willie. Really divine.”

That August morning, however her eyes flitted from cover to cover like so many  photographs in an old family album.

“Well, you know what to do,” she said. “Make a pile. Whatever you want is yours.”

Some selections were obvious. She placed the cookbooks that she’d read to me, the ones that had already been passed down for two or three generations, into my hands.  The 19^th century Art of Cookery I’d once found  in a box in a closet in her guest room. The Settlement Cookbook with a four leaf clover tucked inside. The duct-taped copy of Thoughts for Food from which she had cooked  until her cancer  made the smell of savory food unbearable to her but which had also granted her a life's wish: to eat ice cream always and only and without hesitation. 

Beard on Bread, a well-worn copy of the 1973 classic with a sketching of Beard on the cover, big and proud, rolling out dough, caught my eye. I flipped through it -- Saffron Bread, Potato Bread with Caraway Seeds, Myrtle Allen’s Brown Bread. I placed it in the TAKE HOME pile. She handed me Italian Bouquet: An Epicurean Tour of Italy, a heavy 1968 volume published by Gourmet. TAKE HOME. The Congressional Club Cook Book. TAKE HOME. Better Homes and Gardens Famous Foods from Famous Places, in all its 1960s glory. TAKE HOME.

There were community cookbooks too, spiral-bound collections from the country club, from local schools, a holiday cookbook from the women’s society.  A thin, stapled booklet with a drawing of a forlorn looking poodle printed on the cover called to me: 120 Best Recipes Compiled for the Benefit of the Las Vegas Humane Society. It looked like a Brooklyn 'zine, but was an early-century recipe booklet that my grandmother’s great aunt (my great-great-great-aunt) had put together from her ranch in Las Vegas, New Mexico. It was a dessert-heavy collection: Cherry Sponge Pie, Fabulous Chocolate Cake, Oatmeal Crispies No. 1 and No. 2, Snow Pudding. TAKE HOME.

NOW I am home in my Brooklyn pad. There are no flowers outside. I line the windowsill with plants from the local garden shop. I have a miniature desk and a stout bookshelf from Ikea that houses some of the cookbooks that, beginning in fifth grade, I used to teach myself how to cook: Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson and Rose Levy Baum’s The Bread Bible, Thoughts for Food and, of course, the poodle booklet from my grandmother.

It was cookbooks, in great part, that taught me how to cook. The ten-pound cooking textbook that my oral hygienist gave me when I was in sixth grade provided me a solid culinary education. It taught me how to respond to ingredients. And then I learned, by trial and error and doing things over and over again. The fullness of the kitchen can never be realized through ingredient lists and numbered steps alone. But cookbooks have an important place in my life. 

I’m 22 now, and in my first home that I must create on my own, I cook by touch and taste and whim. Once in a while, I use a recipe -- it's like having an old friend to dinner. Sometimes there are recipes so inspiring that I must try them. 

And maybe, the cookbooks I've collected and the new ones I can't resist buying are, or will someday be, a record of my own life, as certainly as my grandmother’s were of hers.