Andrew Tarlow is known for Brooklyn spots with low lighting, tattooed servers, and hunks of meat. Now, across the East River for the first time, he shifts the vibe toward stately elegance at the restaurant Borgo. The menu 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, Helen Rosner writes.

 

Andrew Tarlow is known for Brooklyn spots with low lighting, tattooed servers, and hunks of meat. Now, across the East River for the first time, he shifts the vibe toward stately elegance at the restaurant Borgo. The menu 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, Helen Rosner writes.

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.

The kitchen’s wood-burning oven is used to cook, among other things, the “focaccia Borgo,” 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. Read more about the restaurant evoking a Manhattan of 20 years ago.