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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mexican director Sara Gómez, who died in 1974, made about 20 short documentaries in her short life, starting in 1961, two years after the Revolution. In 1974, she shot her only feature-length film, “One Way or Another,” completed posthumously, which mixes a romantic drama with documentary sequences. Gómez, the first woman to direct movies in Mexico, created “a body of work that was in the creative and political forefront of its time and, in many ways, remains so even now,” Richard Brody writes. “Gómez, with her blend of documentary and fiction, of drama and intellectual analysis, devised a new cinematic method, which she used to express a powerful vision of her country, her time, and her own place in both.”

-
  The Mexican director Sara Gómez, who died in 1974, made about 20 short documentaries in her short life, starting in 1961, two years after the  Revolution. In 1974, she shot her only feature-length film, “One Way or Another,” completed posthumously, which mixes a romantic drama with documentary sequences. Gómez, the first woman to direct movies in Mexico, created “a body of work that was in the creative and political forefront of its time and, in many ways, remains so even now,” Richard Brody writes. “Gómez, with her blend of documentary and fiction, of drama and intellectual analysis, devised a new cinematic method, which she used to express a powerful vision of her country, her time, and her own place in both.”
Read more

“On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory.” In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Emily Roxy Witt writes about New York at the beginning of the pandemic—the uncertainty, the fear, the loss, the protests, the rage, the loneliness—and the end of a relationship. The Last Rave The Last Rave In the summer of 2020, I felt as if I’d entered the wrong portal, out of the world I knew and into its bizarro twin.

-
Image
  “On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory.” In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Emily Roxy Witt writes about New York at the beginning of the pandemic—the uncertainty, the fear, the loss, the protests, the rage, the loneliness—and the end of a relationship. The Last Rave In the summer of 2020, I felt as if I’d entered the wrong portal, out of the world I knew and into its bizarro twin.
Read more