By Cambrey Thomas
In the beginning, there was the egg cream. It was fizzy with seltzer and creamy with chocolaty, milky foam. Then there was Junior’s cheesecake — sweet, smooth, rich and served in dense slices on Flatbush Avenue. There were also slice counters with hot pies waiting for a shake of red pepper flakes and, at Coney Island, Nathan’s Famous hot dogs topped with a drizzle of bright mustard. And it was all good. And it was, unquestionably, the food of Brooklyn and an edible narrative of the borough’s citizens.
It was so Brooklyn that in 1991, Lyn Stallworth and Rod Kennedy, Jr. wrote The Brooklyn Cookbook. The 415-page narrative-style compendium included these dishes as well as recipes for Charlotte Russe, and Cream of White Onion Soup for Ten. There were also the stories that told how these recipes came to be Brooklyn food.
“Trivia about Brooklyn is arranged around the recipes from all the borough’s neighborhoods,” wrote the New York Times in 1993. “The wife of a Brooklyn Dodgers relief pitcher gives chicken testimonials, photographs of neighborhood spots and formulas for matzo lasagna, karelian piirakka and curried goat.”
The book traced Brooklyn food from the Canarsee Indians and the Dutch, began with a Baked Indian Pudding (cornbread), and ended with a recipe for Cranberry-Orange Relish Cups from the hospitality management program at Flatbush’s Erasmus Hall High School.
Nineteen years passed. Then, this past October, came a successor, The New Brooklyn Cookbook. It contained no trace of knishes or updated takes on Ebinger’s Chocolate Blackout Cake. Instead, its pages were filled with dishes like Coriander-Cured Wild Salmon with Pickled Sweet Corn and Ricotta Beignets made by husband and wife teams who live above their restaurants.
And in those recipes, and in the stories of the people who came to Brooklyn to create them, the cookbook told how Brooklyn’s food narrative changed – a change that came to be because over those 19 years Brooklyn changed, too, but not without a nod to its past.
“I use this line in the book, but it’s like ‘these are the good old days,” says Brendan Vaughan, who co-authored The New Brooklyn Cookbook with his wife, Melissa.
The Vaughans have lived in Park Slope for eight years. Melissa is a recipe developer and tester while Brendan is the senior articles editor at GQ. They came up with the idea for the book early last year as a way to mark and celebrate what was happening around them in.
“Everybody responded really enthusiastically about it and it was kind of like a ‘duh’ sort of reaction,” says Brendan of their book proposal. Everyone thought that the need for a new Brooklyn cookbook went without saying. And so eighteen months later, they had The New Brooklyn Cookbook.
The book is a journey across foodie Brooklyn from the perspective and palate of 31 “new” Brooklyn restaurants. It is a rough guide assembled from a neighborhood by neighborhood journey by two foodies and Brooklynites. Along the way, the Vaughans meet and introduce the people who settled in the borough, opened restaurants, and redefined what food means in Brooklyn.
“We approached it from the perspective of just fans and diners who live in the neighborhood and who’ve watched this happen and who’ve been delighted by it,” Brendan says.
Take, for instance, the 16th stop on their journey, The Good Fork in Red Hook. “Even though it’s modern and hip, kind of D.I.Y. and cool, it also reminds old Brooklynites of mom and pop shops that existed like Italian places in Bay Ridge back in the day,” says Brendan. “That whole idea of you come in, you know the proprietor, the proprietor knows you, and you recognize the other people at the table even if you don’t know their names.”
So too, says Melissa, are the chefs propelling Brooklyn’s food renaissance drawing upon the borough’s tradition smaller, local, more intimate way of cooking and running restaurants.
“They’re cooking simple foods, they’re cooking some authentic foods, and in certain cases they’re living above the store,” she says. “It’s like it all works together.”
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Melissa grew up in Queens and remembers going to Brooklyn as a child to eat Eastern European food with her great-grandparents who lived off the Belt Parkway. Brendan, who is from northern Virginia, says his earliest taste of Brooklyn came from a slice counter called Antonio’s Pizza on Flatbush Avenue. It was across the street from his first Brooklyn apartment in Prospect Heights, next to a movie theatre that is now an American Apparel store.
“My first memory of something interesting afoot in Brooklyn as an adult was actually… I can’t decide if it was Noodle Pudding or Cucina,” says Melissa.
“For me,” Brendan says, “it was Cucina.”
Cucina was an Italian restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope that opened before any of the other restaurants featured in the book and closed before the Vaughans moved to the neighborhood. What made Cucina different was that it had a wine list, valet parking, and seasonal ingredients from the green market.
Brendan describes it as a trailblazer.
But by 2002, it had, in the view of New York Times food writer William Grimes, lost its luster in the face of growing competition from all the new restaurants opening on the borough.
“For years,” Grimes wrote, “it was the lone bid for Manhattan-style respectability in a crowd of mom-and-pop Italian restaurants stronger on atmosphere than food quality.”
“But,” he continued, “that was then. In recent years, Cucina coasted. As newer, more ambitious restaurants opened, it started to look as antiquated as the formulaic Italian places it overshadowed a decade ago. It aged badly, or to put it another way, time caught up with it.”
Among those competitors was Al Di La, in Park Slope, the first restaurant the Vaughans profile in their cookbook. It opened in 1998 — 4 years before Brendan and Melissa moved to the neighborhood.
Chef Anna Klinger and her husband, Emiliano Coppa, had been living in Park Slope while she worked at Lespinasse, a celebrated and, in its time, hot Manhattan restaurant. The two met while Klinger, who grew up in Westchester, was a student at cooking school in Italy and Coppa was one of the instructors.
Klinger says that in 1995 the two were working hectic days and nights, living lives so busy and schedules so different that they rarely saw each other. Back home in Park Slope, Klinger noticed that there weren’t many food local options and that things got sketchy at night. She also wanted a career that would allow time to see her husband. So the two talked about opening their own restaurant.
They found a sleepy Asian fusion restaurant on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Carroll Street and convinced their then-landlord to invest in their idea with a loan so they could buy the place. He agreed, and soon Coppa began decorating their new restaurant with his salvaged woodworked pieces while Klinger scoured thrift stores for things to bring an Italian vibe to the restaurant. Neighbors joined in, too, donating vintage curtains and other odds and ends.
When the restaurant finally opened a year later serving Venetian trattoria cuisine, its first customers were relatives, friends, and neighbors. Then, people just started coming. “It was like the stars aligned,” Klinger says.
Two months later, Diner, opened in Williamsburg and soon grew in popularity serving local and seasonal cuisine. It also inspired yet another restaurant owner to join the movement.
Sam Buffa, co-founder of Vinegar Hill House – the 31st stop in the book – says it was Diner that told him something was happening in
the neighborhood. “That was sort of a real magical thing because it truly was at a time when you felt like you were in the middle of nowhere, which was exciting,” he says.
Buffa came to New York from the Bay Area 12 years ago to visit a friend. “I ended up really having a good time,” he says. “And then I went straight to Brooklyn, to Williamsburg.”
He didn’t move straight into the restaurant business. Instead, he worked in fashion. Next he did marketing and photography before opening a barbershop in Freemans Sporting Club on the Lower East Side. But Buffa always wanted to open a restaurant. He was particularly excited by the design aspect of it, but knew nothing about the business.
Then he met Jean Adamson. She was a chef at Freemans and she lived in Brooklyn, too. They started talking about different neighborhoods and they realized that they both wanted to open a restaurant.
The two moved to a carriage house behind the then residential space that would become the Vinegar Hill House. A year later they shared their restaurant idea with their landlord. He was interested.
“The space became available and we both just sort of knew that we had to do it,” says Buffa. “Like most things, when something presents, you either pass it up or get on board and figure it out.”
Buffa did the interior while Adamson worked on the menu, coming up with, among other dishes, the restaurant’s signature pork chop.
“The first day was just trying to finish every little thing to get open, still, while we were opening,” he says. “Literally, painting, or nailing something down.” Even now, two years later Buffa spends most days at the restaurant making repairs.
“Our initial goal was to open something that was supported by the neighborhood in Vinegar Hill that was a true neighborhood restaurant that would have people come over from Dumbo and then from other parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan,” he says. “And we’ve been really fortunate to have people come in from all over.”
Buffa believes the borough is experiencing its food wave because it is cheaper to build and rent in Brooklyn. He also attributes it to the borough’s new residents. “What’s been a main driving force is just the creativity you get when you have people that are younger,” he says, “that have great ideas, and are actually able to scrounge up some money and make something really special, just truly from the heart and has that quirkiness that a lot of the Brooklyn restaurants have as opposed to a place in Manhattan where they have to nail it because they’re paying huge rents and big salaries right off the back.”
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Brendan Vaughan echoes that view. “The truth is that the audience was here for it,” he says. “It’s fair to say that the demographic is both interested in this kind of food and this kind of menu, and has the means to eat this way.”
He continued. “Going back further, Wall Street guys and workers have always lived in Brooklyn Heights because it’s easy to get to Wall Street and there’s always been money in Brooklyn Heights. But, there being that kind of upwardly mobile audience in Brooklyn is something that hasn’t been there in any kind of number for all that long and that’s really the answer.”
Melissa Vaughan, on the other hand, believes that the phenomenon was propelled by Manhattan chefs who lived in Brooklyn, got burnt out in the New York restaurant scene and who decided to return home to cook. Those chefs, she says, may have felt that strong neighborhood ties would nurture their restaurants and attract neighborhood people who would appreciate what they were sending out the kitchen – diners who would appreciate the chefs as pioneers.
“There was this really underserved market in Brooklyn that was still having to ride the train or take a car into the city for this kind of food and now doesn’t have to do that,” says Brendan.
One of those chefs, Bryan Calvert, co-founder of James in Prospect Heights – the 19th stop on the Vaughans’ tour — believes that Brooklyn is going to become the food capitol of New York. Calvert founded new American-style restaurant with his wife, Deborah Williamson, two years ago.
“There weren’t very many restaurants where you’d say “Oh, it’s Saturday night, let’s go out to a nice meal in Brooklyn.’ And that’s changed,” he says. “There’s also a lot of young professionals that at first probably couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan. Now, they don’t want to live in Manhattan. They want to live in Brooklyn because there’s more restaurants, there’s more bars, there’s more things to do here and it’s kind of a nicer lifestyle.”
Calvert is one of them, having moved to Brooklyn because it was the only place he could afford to live. He had grown up in New Jersey, the son of a Jewish mother from Queens and an Irish father from Harlem. His mother would make tabbouleh while his aunts and uncles would sneak him egg creams.
He started cooking at 15, before he joined the Marine Corps and ultimately decided to go to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. After he finished the program he attended Boston University and then traveled around Europe.
When he moved back to New York he chose Prospect Heights and ended up living on the same street and a few blocks away from his future restaurant. But before opening it, he worked in Manhattan at busy and popular restaurants like Union Pacific and Bouley.
“As my career progressed and I went from a cook to a sous chef to chef, the neighborhood grew also,” he says. And with the neighborhood growing, he and his wife moved to a new place above a little corner bodega with bulletproof glass.
Around the same time, he says, he needed a break from the Manhattan restaurant scene and took an offer to work for the photographer Annie Leibovitz for a summer as her private chef. Soon, he and his wife were catering photo shoots full-time for Leibovitz and other prominent photographers. That opportunity led them to create a catering and event planning company, Williamson and Calvert.
But they also purchased the Atlas restaurant in Manhattan and reopened it as Café Atlas before selling it in 2004.
At this point, the bodega downstairs had become the French restaurant Sorrel, whose owners were looking to sell. Calvert and Williamson had lived in the building for about ten years and were ready to get back into the restaurant business. They outfitted the clean and modern space with bar built from salvaged wood and a large mirror from a Harlem brownstone. They removed the covering from the ceiling to revel its original tin paneling. Calvert says he wanted to restore its old Brooklyn feel.
“We opened with the idea of ‘We’re going to be a little neighborhood restaurant’,” he says. Thinking back on it, Calvert adds, the first days were tough and he wanted the place to feel a part of the neighborhood.
Calvert and Williamson now split their work between their catering business and the restaurant, working on the menus, overseeing the kitchen, and going to the local farmers market. They keep a little herb garden on the roof.
Now, he says, “I know all the neighbors, I know all the people who come in.”
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