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Once upon a time, long, long ago, Brooklyn wasn’t considered hip, or interesting, or even, for those who lived and dined and died in Manhattan, a socially appropriate place to go out to eat. In the late twentieth century, Williamsburg was nothing like the condo-filled, tourist-thronged, Epcot-ified theme park of brand-approved “coolness” it is today. The charming repurposed warehouses that now promise flagship retail opportunities were simply warehouses. People lived in Brooklyn, sure, but they were just people; restaurants fed them, but they were just restaurants. The cultured people, and the moneyed people, and the people who chronicled them, all stuck to their little island, maybe bravely venturing across the bridge every couple of years for a steak at Peter Luger, on a gruff block of the other Broadway, in the shadow of the faraway end of the Williamsburg Bridge.
The Martini No. 2 gets an elaborate tableside preparation.
In 1999, catty-corner from Luger, two former Odeon bartenders named Andrew Tarlow and Mark Firth opened the restaurant Diner, in a retrofitted old diner car, and more or less created what the entire world now thinks of as a “Brooklyn restaurant.” Before it was a cliché—low lighting, tattooed servers, garlicky greens, hunks of meat from local producers, sturdy glasses filled to the brim with oddball wines—it was Diner, and shortly thereafter it was Marlow & Sons, which the duo opened, right next door, in 2004, and further refined their sincere, austere, hand-hewn vision. This was, if you remember, the era of bright colors and neon lights and the “metrosexual,” the heyday of “Sex and the City” and the social scene it both mirrored and shaped—a prevailing cultural aesthetic at which Tarlow and Firth’s restaurants, with their earthy insouciance, was decidedly at odds. Marlow & Sons became famous for buying a whole cow, butchering it in-house, and serving only what one animal could provide. Want a hanger steak? There’s one on each animal. Good luck.
The kitchen’s wood-burning oven turns out many of the dishes on the menu, including a cannelloni with braised beef cheeks.
As the years passed, and Brooklyn became Brooklyn, Tarlow remained one of the architects of the reimagined borough’s cultural identity. (Firth left the partnership in 2008.) His business grew into a bit of an empire, with more restaurants—Achilles Heel, Roman’s, the now-closed Reynard—plus a butcher shop, a bakery, and more, all in Brooklyn. Each place was distinct in its own way, but all bore the candlelit, scratchy-wool, Shaker-goth aesthetic that marked a place as a Tarlow joint, or (both in New York and elsewhere) a Tarlow knockoff.
Now, in a somewhat disorienting narrative reversal, Tarlow has come to Manhattan, just as twenty-five years ago those breathless Manhattanites spilled out of their yellow cabs into the wilds of Williamsburg. Borgo, which opened in September, on East Twenty-seventh Street, is his first new restaurant in eleven years, and his first ever outside the borough with which he is so inextricably linked. For Tarlow, this is, without a doubt, a vibe shift; it was also, perhaps, inevitable. Manhattan today is, bizarrely, often more affordable than Brooklyn. The never-outer-boroughers and the illegal-loft artists of an earlier era have colonized the brownstones of Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill; they’ve got kids now, they’re in couples therapy, they’re prepping for colonoscopies. Tarlow’s fans have, in one way or another, grown up. His restaurants remain wonderful to eat at, but they also remain dim, cramped, and loud. Borgo, which occupies a double storefront, is more brightly lit. There’s more space between the tables, fine serviceware, tailored linens—a sense of stately elegance and offhanded ease. I wouldn’t call it a quiet restaurant, but you can definitely hear yourself better than you can in the Sturm und Drang of Achilles Heel or Roman’s, with their packed tables and hard surfaces. The menu, too, is very grown up—fundamentally Italian, as much of the cooking in the Tarlow universe is, and built around a live-fire oven that crackles in the open kitchen, which fills the front section of one of the restaurant’s two rooms.
Clockwise from left: supplì all’amatriciana, radishes and turnips bagna cauda, chicken-liver crostini, veal sweetbreads spiedini, and fava purée with marinated greens.
You don’t need to know any of this history; if you’re willing to make the trek to Nowheresville, upper-downtown Manhattan, it’s enough just to know that Borgo is excellent, full stop. Tarlow has brought over his most reliable lieutenants to staff the kitchen, the bar, and the dining room, and imported some of his most charming tricks and dishes as well: a fava purée straight out of Roman’s, a crisp-skinned half chicken that harks back to old-school Marlow & Sons, which has in recent years pivoted, with the interests of its chefs, away from the semi-Germanic, semi-Catskillian mode of its ultra-influential first decade. You might arrive at your table to see the first name of the reservation-maker scrawled in loopy cursive on the white paper that tops the white linens, evoking the kooky dramatics of Diner’s menu, which servers scribble on the table as they recite each item. The recitation-as-gimmick, too, is echoed at Borgo in an elaborate tableside preparation of the Martini No. 2, whose impeccably artisanal components arrive via wheeled cart and are jiggered and poured into something smooth and Vesper-like, with hints of tomato and a little zing from the skewered garnish of pickled aji dulce peppers.
Borgo evokes warm, sophisticated, fancy-but-not-fussy Italian restaurants of a slightly earlier Manhattan era.
If you’re in the bar, or in the main dining room just beyond it, you might miss the kitchen’s wood-burning oven. It’s used to cook, among other things, the “focaccia Borgo,” which is not the lofty, bubbly slab you might be imagining but an unassuming disk of bronze-blistered flatbread that, like an Italian quesadilla, hides a layer of nutty, melty robiola and Fontina cheeses. The oven’s smoke suffuses the flame-orange flesh of sweet, tiny beets piled in a quasi-salad atop a swoop of garlicky potato purée. Its heat caresses a skewer of marshmallow-tender veal sweetbreads shining beneath a lip-sticky demi-glace. It crisps the skin of a whole branzino, served with bones removed but head still on, beside a rousing, Sicilian-ish pile of greens with sweet onions and pine nuts scented by the ferric kiss of saffron.
None of this is terribly groundbreaking, but I don’t think it’s intended to be. Tarlow and his chef Jordan Frosolone seem focussed instead on precision—the food is exciting not for its novelty but for its proximity to perfection. Chicken-liver mousse, another Tarlow classic (his restaurants were instrumental in bringing the dish back from gastronomic Siberia), is here smeared lustily on flame-darkened toast and ornamented with jammy slivers of fig. Order it alongside the wood-fired, golden-skinned half chicken and—if it weren’t for the serene sophistication of the room around you—you might as well be in the twilit back room at Marlow & Sons circa two-thousand-oh-something, hotly debating with your date if that’s really Narciso Rodriguez at the next table. An appetizer of radishes and turnips bagna cauda, presented not in the familiar way, as crudites with dip, but—surprisingly, delightfully—with the little root vegetables sliced in half and carved with fingertip-size divots, into which the warm, anchovy-rich bagna cauda has been poured. I haven’t had so much fun with a raw-root-vegetable appetizer since the NoMad restaurant (R.I.P.) exploded the whole hors-d’œuvres game with a plate of radishes enrobed, like chocolate-covered strawberries, in tempered butter.
There are a few pastas on the menu—a fettuccine in a wildly rich guinea-hen ragù, a slightly one-note baked cannelloni with braised beef cheeks—but, unlike at other Italian-inflected fancy restaurants, these seem more like technical obligations than culinary showpieces. And, uncommonly for pastas, the portions at Borgo seem a little large, especially given their forceful flavors. A pile of precisely stamped ravioli filled with sunchoke and mushrooms is, on first bite, a thrilling explosion of mycological umami, but by the time I made it to the bottom of the plate I felt like the point had been somewhat over-made. Desserts, overseen by the pastry chef Adam Marca, are gracefully simple: a nutty riff on affogato, with the espresso poured into a soft pillow of pistachio gelato; a bittersweet sliver of fudgy Sachertorte (Tarlow’s grandfather is Viennese), dressed in jewels of candied apricot.
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The room, like the food, is sophisticated without trying too hard. It’s decorated in shades of wood and white, with gently curving ceilings (a little cavelike, a little nautical) and walls dotted with interesting, mismatched pieces of art. When I asked a server about one painting I particularly liked—a Cézanne-ish still-life of fruit—Tarlow, who had been making the rounds, appeared tableside to proudly inform us that it had been painted by his daughter, and that it hangs directly on the other side of the wall, back-to-back, from an abstract work done by Tarlow himself. A double-sided fireplace connects the two dining rooms, a holdover from the Italian restaurant that occupied the space before. (A server told me that they hadn’t yet quite figured out how to light it without either overheating the space or tingeing the air with a smoky haze.) The mood and the menu evoke not only Tarlow’s own spots but a certain sort of warm, sophisticated, fancy-but-not-fussy Italian restaurant of a slightly earlier Manhattan era: the roaring fire at Beppe, perhaps, or the intimate idiosyncrasy of the Upper West Side’s Cesca. Tablecloths, a nice cheese selection, a bit of grandness, never snooty. Is it too soon to be nostalgic for twenty years ago? Maybe I’ve grown old, too. Maybe Manhattan’s worth a second look. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
