There are still toques in this city, if you know where to look. I don’t mean in the simpering, synecdochical sense of “chefs.” I mean literal toques, high and crisp as meringue, with their lofty connotations of French expertise and earned-by-blood chefiness. On a recent week, I saw eight. They topped the heads of rank-and-file cooks at dueling chef-counter restaurants, where they telegraphed their establishments’ ambition and aura, as instantly as the $400ish-per-person price tag after tax and tip. At César in Soho and Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare in Hell’s Kitchen, the higher the hat, the closer to God.
These restaurants are two of the latest iterations of New York’s luxury tasting menu, a genre that has limped a little lately. The four-figure dinner for two may be alive and well — those with money to spend have always found extravagant places to spend it — but some of the haute counters of yore have closed (Ko) or been overhauled (Blanca, now under the care of Victoria Blamey). César is new and Brooklyn Fare is newly updated, though both restaurants come with a provenance others do not. Neither would be here without the original Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, in the original Brooklyn, a tiny tasting room attached to a grocer across the street from the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. Back in 2009, César Ramirez began spinning 19 courses a night out of a janky prep kitchen, as much, it seemed, by compulsion as design — having honed his craft under David Bouley, he simply couldn’t not, even in comparatively reduced circumstances. The risk was rewarded; in 2010, the restaurant earned two Michelin stars. In 2012, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare was upgraded to three (the same year as Eleven Madison Park) and topped restaurant-of-the-year lists.
But 2024 is a long way, temporally and spiritually, from 2012. And many of the hallmarks of voluptuous excess that defined Ramirez and Brooklyn Fare’s cooking then — sterling ingredients flown in from all over the world, hushed solemnity, a parade of single, exquisite bites — define Ramirez and Brooklyn Fare’s cooking now, even though Ramirez and Brooklyn Fare’s cooking are these days at odds. Last year, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare abruptly closed, with a flurry of legal filings between Ramirez and its owner, Moneer Issa, with allegations of defamation and unpaid wages and theft and malfeasance flying on either side. From the ashes, two tasting-menu temples have risen: Ramirez’s César, and a revived Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, now under the stewardship of two of Ramirez’s former deputies, Max Natmessnig and Marco Prins.
César occupies a blond-wood oasis behind gauzy curtains on Hudson Street; Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, a slightly more caramel-colored counter once again tucked away in a well-stocked mini-market, now in Manhattan. (Ramirez originally moved with it, in 2016; the entrance is just past the tea bags and a tower of LaCroix.) The atmosphere at both is more spalike than restaurant; despite a radio-rock soundtrack (“Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” from Pulp Fiction came on while I dined at César), the rooms were almost penitentially still. At César, a couple — I think — seated next to me spoke barely a word to each other their entire dinner, preferring to silently photograph each course presented to them with professional-grade digital SLRs. The couple a few down at Brooklyn Fare subsided, not too long into their meal, into parallel consultations on their iPhones.
That’s no fault of the cooking, which remains — at both — precise, involved, and baroque. The seeming requirement to reward big-spending diners with braggable ingredients can shave down the surprise a great meal can offer; of course, there are servings of A5 Wagyu, langoustines, Hokkaido uni, and caviar by the scoopful. Even the preparations can echo, a reminder that both sprang from a common parent. One of Ramirez’s famous originals was a truffled uni toast, served on a buttered round of brioche. Having delighted last decade’s big spenders, it returns at César to delight this one’s, lest anyone get less than his money’s worth; and a version pops up at Brooklyn Fare, too, where the brioche is substituted for a baton of waffle (recipe courtesy of the Dutchman Prins’s grandmother) and showered with its own snow of shaved black truffle. (Australian, the server will tell you, where it’s still prime truffle season.)
Each counter does have its share of surprises. I never thought I could swoon for smoked-eel rillettes until I swooned for Ramirez’s, piped into a tiny cigarette of tuile — and I’m not likely to again, unless eel rillettes take off wildly, as I doubt they will. Some of his pairings of flavor and texture are exponentially delicious and completely underdescribed by the elliptical menu that will be furnished if you ask for it: “Live Norwegian langoustine with Kaviari caviar” doesn’t even hint at the cod mousse underneath or the basil gelée on top of it, a Pacific parfait. At Brooklyn Fare, I enjoyed a single Maine scallop in a sauce of vin jaune — the Jura’s oxidative white wine — and fig-leaf oil, as well as the way finger lime pulp and trout roe popped together like springy soda bubbles around an escabeche of Japanese snapper.
So why did I leave these restaurants feeling stuffed but unfulfilled? Their cooks have earned their toques; their technique is flawlessly correct. It’s the pampered chill I can’t warm to, the refrigerated, placeless ambience of total luxury. (I watched, at César, a woman in a Dior sweatsuit sit alone for 20 minutes, until her date returned to wrap her in an Hermès blanket.) Very little about either felt tied to New York; we might have been at any blond counter in any financial capital of the world.
It’s hard to lay blame for this on the talented chefs and staff members, who glide about knowledgeably and solicitously. Neither restaurant appears to be suffering. Having supported one Brooklyn Fare for years, New York City seems eminently capable of supporting a split and spored two: midweek in August, each was full. They are not the city’s most expensive outings — dinner at Yoshino will still run you $500 a head — but even so, they remain out of reach, by design, to all but the most wealthy or the most willing. What are the rest of us missing? After a week of touristing, I can confirm: quality cooking, but cold comfort.
