This week’s restaurant review brings us to Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, a chef’s atelier on a bleak stretch of Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn, attached to a supermarket. Customers sit on metal stools there, in front of a stainless-steel counter, and César Ramirez, the chef, cooks for them. He is assisted by a small staff of cooks and runners, as well as by a woman named Michele Smith, who would be the restaurant’s sommelier if the place had a liquor license, which it does not. The Chef’s Table is hardly a formal meal — the experience is more of a performance piece — but it is surely an excellent one.
César Ramirez, the chef, is great to watch. (He’s Denzel Washington in a remake of “American Gangster,” the heroin and violence swapped out for Iranian saffron and hard stares.) He has some of the aspects of a Zen bouncer, a scowler with a kind smile who works mostly silently with his cooks to present dishes as if they were magic tricks. He has an easy relationship with his customers, but does not appear interested in coddling them — the Chef’s Table is not a place to go if you want to act out this scene from “Portlandia.”
Some accounts of meals at the restaurant — including Joshua David Stein’s, for New York Press, the newspaper that birthed me — use Mr. Ramirez’s affect to cast him in the role of a latter-day “Soup Nazi.” Multiple meals at the restaurant, as well as interviews with regular customers I was able to track down in my digital Ferragamos, suggest that this criticism may be unwarranted.
Mr. Ramirez is unstinting in his desire to provide an environment that is free of distraction. But as he has said, and said a few times during my meals there, “I want people to come here and enjoy themselves.”
Gary Studnick, a retired businessman from Pound Ridge, N.Y., who said he has been to the restaurant “close to a dozen times,” put it this way one night at the restaurant, as winter began to gnaw on the city’s leg: “The point of the place is, the guy’s working and it’s going to be cool. So don’t be a jerk.”
Last week, on the telephone, Mr. Studnick put it differently. “It’s really easy to shoot foul shots in practice,” he said. “But it’s hard in a game, and you have to respect him for maintaining focus when he’s in the game of making dinner, when he’s facing the pressure. He’s not a center-of-attention guy. So he’s got his rules.”
These are listed on the menu. One is: Don’t take photographs of the food. Another is: Don’t take notes. Finally: Don’t use your mobile phone in the restaurant.
These strike me as perfectly reasonable requests (though from a professional perspective they were onerous!). What rules would you like to see enforced in restaurants? Feel free to weigh in about them, and about Brooklyn Fare, in the comments below.
