[Pigging by Wilfrid: August 10, 2010]
I may have no original insight for you today, but I have been trying to have deep thoughts. I mean, it does make you think.
Prime dining time on a busy Williamsburg strip; a dimly lit room more or less full of young people, plates and cocktail and wine glasses crowing their tables. Formally dressed waiters swerving around the room.
How many years ago could you practically have guaranteed that this would be an Italian trattoria or a French bistro. Maybe sixty per cent the waiters would be waving peppermills over the table and reciting the pasta specials; thirty per cent they would be pretending to be French and wishing everyone "bon appetit"; that last ten per cent might be something else - Greek, just Mediterranean, Caribbean, maybe American.
Things done changed. Oh, we could see it coming, maybe for some time - Marlow and Sons, after all, is no newcomer. But at last I think we can stop talking about New Brooklyn Cuisine and the changing dining paradigm - or indeed anything "new" or "changing" at all, because it's here and here to stay for the foreseeable future. The American bistro as first choice for casual dining. The deal is done.
And Walter Foods on Grand Street is an exemplary specimen. Its astounding lack of pretension gives me hope that the American bistro is growing out of its attention-starved toddler phase. This medium-sized, appealing dining room (garden tables in back) has not burdened itself with breaking down whole animals in the kitchen, with sourcing ingredients only from local backyards, with preaching to its customers about seasonality and locavore-ism. The menu is not a litany of producers and vendors. The staff are not too hip to serve you. A cocktail drinker will have heard of most of the cocktails on the list. The beer list gets no archly slacker than a bottle of Bud.
It all started with a phone call. I called the restaurant a few weeks ago to see if reservations were accepted. No, but a welcoming voice gave me a clear idea of when tables were likely to be available and urged me to drop by. Hospitality. Walter Foods just gets on with the job.
Heirloom tomato salad; best I could do under very low lights.
And the kitchen gets on with it to good effect. There's a fairly extensive raw bar, featuring king crab legs and whole lobsters the night I was there. You could also get half a lobster in a salad, or an unspecified quantity in a $24 lobster roll. I launched into clams, about which I am sentimental, and found them sweet and meaty, rinsed of excessive brine.
I essayed my second tomato experience of the summer (I grew up hating tomatoes and am still adjusting). The heirloom salad was just exemplary. Three different and contrasting tomatoes - sweet yellow; sharp green and fleshy red - a flourish of ricotta and sweetcorn kernels providing textural contrast, and dotted here and there good-sized grains of salt just to surprise you. Fresh, bright, and not boring to eat. Couldn't help but contrast it with the decidedly one-note red heirloom tomato on toast at the more expensive ABC Kitchen.
The cocktail list, as I said, has drinks customers like as much as drinks mixologists like to make. A Vesper, oh yes, a Mint Julep, a Sazerac, even a Pimms Cup. I chased my clams with a Negroni, and my only reservation was that it was served on the rocks; but I didn't see any cocktails being served straight up, which may just have been coincidence - it's surely an option.
So impressed was I by the scarcity of pork on the menu - there's a chop, but no belly in sight for once - that I celebrated by ordering fish. Wild salmon from the blackboard specials, just crisp on the surface but not overdone within, served over spinach and more of the sweetcorn, and made more interesting by the addition of slices of andouille sausage.
I admit I was having trouble seeing some of the food, the first time I've had that much problem with low lights in a while, but the salmon was light and flaky and enjoyable, as was the Mas de Gourgonnier I drank with it. Okay, the wine wasn't exactly flaky, but being organic was sort of soil-flavored in a nice way.
Bartenders as well as servers are outfitted in appropriate American bistro style, a white shirt, black bowtie, apron combo reminiscent of the steak and chop houses of an older city. Hair stylings are Brooklyn 2010 (as was the music, rock with a country twang here and there); service was in a longer-standing tradition of courteous warmth. The greeter at the door (probably my phone contact) had the air of someone who wanted to welcome people - by no means automatic in New York restaurants. My server cheered me by topping my glass of wine while I was waiting for food to arrive, then comping me a very good key lime pie.
The end of the review, but the beginning, more or less, of a story. The United States has a number of well-established regional cuisines - Cajun, for example - and culinary genres - steakhouse, barbecue - but it is rapidly developing something of a gastronomic lingua franca, not just in terms of the menu, but in terms of style of service, ambience and customer expectations. No mean achievement. We can argue about whether it started in Brooklyn or not, but it is blooming all over.
All about Walter Foods right here.
