Brooklyn foodism: artisanal, locavore, foraged, seasonal, small-batch, single-origin, hand-crafted, ethical, authentic, sustainable, farm-to-table, nose-to-tail. Back to basics, conscientious bearded hipster young 20- 30- somethings wearing flannel-in-the-city and bicycle clips are inventing new careers pickling and jamming, foraging for wild cress between concrete flagstones and using their roofs for chicken coops, growing collard greens and evaporating seawater into locally harvested salt.
It’s hard to get a coffee without the background construction noise of beans being roasted and milled on site. It’s hard to walk through the Brooklyn Flea or the carefully curated street art murals of Bushwick without being distracted by various carefully packaged delights of a foodie fetishism gone slightly silly: make-your-own kimchi kits, beer and pretzel caramels, righteous raisin cookies (a percentage of the price is donated to animal rescue), espresso dulce de leche brownies, and the ubiquitous kale chips.
Food shops have gone micro speciality. One makes chocolate bars with cocoa nibs that have been sailed up from the Dominican Republic, another focuses on mayonnaise in various flavours—bacon, preserved lemon, black garlic. Across the river in Manhattan there is a boutique that sells only salt and another that sells only water. Recently, a New York Magazine cover story asked: “Is artisanal Brooklyn a step forward or a sign of the apocalypse?”
Peter and Kristin invited me for dinner one perfect New York spring afternoon when the magnolia blooms turn Brooklyn Heights more beautiful than Paris. Their friend Jérôme Waag—a chef at America’s first and original local seasonal restaurant, Alice Water’s famed Chez Panisse in Berkeley—was staying with them and cooking.
I deliberately arrived three hours early. Jérôme—French, sexy, stubbled—spends six months a year devising a new menu every day and the rest of the time fashioning food as experiments in art, installation and participation. He described a collaborative ravioli project he had done with a friend in Japan. The pictures on his mobile phone showed a several-metre long tongue of fresh pasta heaped with multivaried mounds of filling waiting to be sealed and cut and cooked; asparagus, raw tuna, boiled quails’ eggs, tomato confit. “I don’t know what they were putting in there! And they were all adding to each others’. There was such a spirit of sharing!” he smiled.
Jérôme set Peter and me to painstakingly picking the leaves from herbs and chopping a combination of mint, coriander and oregano into a green dust for a thick salsa. “Is this fine enough?” “No!” “Is this fine enough?” “Nearly!” Meanwhile he made harissa with rose petals and wondered about a strange bitterness from the fresh ground cumin, seared the new spring ramps (a kind of garlicky spring onion) that he had found at the Union Square farmers’ market that morning, marinated squid and scallops for the grill and spent an hour or two carefully stirring, steaming and fluffing couscous.
The guests were also locally sourced: Nathan was a marketing maven for several new foodie start-ups and came with two bottles of Henry Farm varietal chilli extract for Jérôme to try. “Check this out,” he said pointing to the bottle of red Naga Jolokia Ghost Chilli of India. “One drop will melt your face off! It’s over a million scovills!” Jérôme put a tiny dab on his tongue and coughed violently.
Amelia—young, smart, pretty—had spent her day as an intern at a butcher’s, breaking down “two whole cows,” and her arms were aching. She brought with her a packet of Brooklyn cured prosciutto, dense and purple and funky, and a pot of creamy chicken liver parfait.
We ate very well, and talked well, too. Jérôme sat back, effort expended, and listened as Nathan talked about his Food Film Festival and a new app called Burger GPS—“if you have an iPhone, it will find you a good burger anywhere in the country.” Another guest had brought a bottle of Brooklyn-distilled Dorothy Parker gin, which had a pronounced floral juniper scent but went down much smoother than I imagine the lady herself did.
It is easy enough to poke fun, easy enough to have fun too when you are eating so deliciously well. But it is also plenty expensive to buy heirloom tomatoes and the entrepreneurial efforts of college-educated craftsmen. Wealthy societies will always throw up trends and waves of aspiration, but does the cult of “real food” signal some kind of Decline and Fall? A few years ago in New York, before the recession, I was confronted with a plate of toro tuna belly topped with a mound of caviar and sprinkled with edible gold leaf and I thought: Rome. This spring, breaking the crust of wood-fired sourdough, elbows on the table, forks in each others plates, I couldn’t help but feel we were playing, like Marie Antoinette, at rusticity.
A few days later I went to the book launch of Cooked, by Michael Pollan, who has become the narrator of the real food movement after his best-selling The Omnivore’s Dilemma articulated a generation’s misgivings with the industrial processing of supermarket fare. Hemmed by the crowd, I reached for a nettle crostini between Michael J Fox and a nun who made goat’s cheese and chatted to the new head of the American Slow Food Movement.
Afterwards, my old friend Nina Planck—who started the London Farmers’ Markets and is married to New York’s most famous fancy cheesemonger—took me to the restaurant Cookshop for dinner. We laughed a little about the earnest excesses of it all, reading through a menu that proclaimed, “socially responsible dining” and introduced us to “our favourite farmers.” We munched happily through charred ramp pizza and honey-braised beets with pistachio and sage pesto and housemade yoghurt. Nina had a sore throat and ordered a bee sting made with gin distilled in Brooklyn, lemon, honey and cayenne. The rim of the glass was dusted with spiced raw sugar. “Bartenders in locavore restaurants,” said Nina, grinning at the lip-licking suggestiveness. “You can’t beat ’em.”
