NYCReview
photo credit: Adriana Rodriguez
Chef's Table At Brooklyn Fare
Included In
When was the last time you heard about the discovery of a new species? You were probably perusing Twitter at work, or watching an educational YouTube video that auto-played after six clips from Shark Week. You may have felt some brief excitement before moving on with your day, but somewhere out there, a scientist was doing the scientist equivalent of popping bottles. Maybe drinking schnapps out of a graduated cylinder.
You’ll have some understanding of that scientist’s feelings after dinner at Chef’s Table At Brooklyn Fare. It’s technically a fine dining restaurant - but it really belongs in a category on its own.
The first thing that separates this place from almost every other restaurant in New York City is the price. The seafood-focused tasting menu is $362.21, hospitality included - and the optional wine pairing is an additional $195, plus tax and tip. Which is why you may be a little confused when you arrive at the location wearing the formal attire that this place requires, and find a very normal-looking supermarket in Hell’s Kitchen. You’ll wander between the aisles of Lucky Charms, frozen Eggo Waffles, and pre-prepared chicken parmesan, until eventually, you’ll spot the host stand in a corner, surrounded by couples celebrating their anniversaries and hedge fund managers chatting about hedging things, waiting to enter for one of the two nightly seatings.
Inside, the majority of the space is taken up by the 20-seat chef’s counter overlooking the open kitchen, where chefs in white uniforms and servers in black suits weave in and out silently like opposing chess pieces. There’s no printed menu, so when the chefs begin plating in unison and the platoon of servers gathers to bring out each of the approximately 15 courses, everyone in the restaurant leans forward in their chairs like they’re trying to get a first look at a horse with a horn on its head or a bird with teeth.
photo credit: Adriana Rodriguez
The food here is the evolutionary tweak that makes this place its own species. As dish after dish is delivered, you’ll realize exactly where your money went - to uni topped with black truffle, foie gras wrapped in the highest grade jamon iberico, A5 wagyu you can cut with a spoon, and king crab topped with a scoop of Kaluga caviar the size of a pool ball. Many of those ingredients are flown in daily from another hemisphere, and served alongside excellent sauces like a saffron bouillabaisse that would be the best soup in the city on its own.
For some people, the wine here is going to be even more impressive than the food. If you’re someone who sees two-bedroom apartment listings as one-bedrooms with ample room for wine storage, you should do a deep dive into the 7,000-bottle wine list full of famous producers from France and Italy. But for everyone else, we recommend going with the pairing. Wines this good (and expensive) are almost never offered by the glass, so this is an opportunity to taste a bunch of things that would each cost you three digits at another restaurant. You may have a riesling as old as the La-Z-Boy in your parents’ living room with red sea perch, then syrah from southern France with quail from southern France, before finishing with a dessert wine from a tiny island near Sicily that tastes like caramel sauce when you chase it with the vanilla souffle.
That vanilla souffle, which is frozen in liquid nitrogen and dissolves like cotton candy as you bite into it, is just the last in a series of unforgettable moments that started when you turned left out of the cereal aisle two and a half hours before. Find a way to eat at Chef’s Table At Brooklyn Fare, and you’ll experience what it’s like to discover something truly different. And maybe also the urge to track down some schnapps.