When Jeremy Salamon, of Agi’s Counter in Crown Heights, opened a second restaurant, I’d not have guessed that the standard-bearer of Hungarian Jewish cooking’s party-of-one revival motion would go so goyische. Salamon had simply revealed Second Technology, a cookbook dedicated to retaining alive the traditions of his grandmother, Agi, who survived Holocaust-era Budapest. At Agi’s, Salamon makes dill-feathered nokedli soup and heat Hungarian crêpes often known as palacsinta utilizing Agi’s personal recipes, plus Ashkenazi American staples like borscht and chopped liver (the menu calls it hen liver mousse, however we all know higher). After which in January, together with his boyfriend and companion Michael Herman, he opened Pitt’s, with country-club fare like shrimp cocktail and chops. The restaurant, within the outdated Fort Defiance area in Crimson Hook, appeared like an act of defiance itself, with the striped awnings and carrot-print wallpaper of a Dodie Thayer fantasy. Wainscotting. Peggy Lee on the stereo. French-fried onions and powdered ranch on the menu. Farblunget!
After I went to Pitt’s again in February, it was, regardless of being perched almost on the Ikea rim of Crimson Hook, packed. However I didn’t get it. New York was pulling out of a stretch of supper-club faddism, restaurateurs with connoisseur bona fides pushing pandemic consolation meals to its illogical conclusion, midwestern Masonic Corridor fare at New York Metropolis costs. I’d already had sufficient upsold shrimp cocktail to final a lifetime. “It appears to be like like a kids’s guide in right here,” my sister-in-law whispered as we had been ushered right into a windowless again room, with a clubby, rec-room bar and the carrot wallpaper. The shtetl appeared very far-off.
However eating places, like the remainder of us, have seasons, and summertime appears to agree with Pitt’s. Not as a result of it’s particularly mild; of 4 entrées, just one isn’t crimson meat, and that one is a catfish amandine so lavishly brown-buttered it tastes like pastry and so thickly topped with slivered almonds it resembles a cake. The menu however retains a picnic-basket allure that enhances the lengthening days and the tree-lined sidewalks of Van Brunt Road. A meatloaf tea sandwich — pâté, actually, with pork liver and stomach — served chilly on squishy triangles of crustless white bread with a sidecar of pepper jelly was cool and excellent when washed down with an $8-on-Wednesday martini, the form of pairing that’ll kill you, fortunately.
By now, you should have heard the thick southern twang that vibrates by means of Pitt’s menu. Salamon comes by it actually — his different grandmother is country-club-going Arlene, whose plates beautify the partitions and at whose North Carolina dwelling he spent summers. (In later years, he cooked within the Analysis Triangle, too.) So fried onions are “tobacco onions,” and veal sweetbreads are cornmeal-crusted; a wedge salad options inexperienced tomatoes. There’s pimento cheese made with Gouda.
Clockwise from prime left: pimento cheese, escargot, meatloaf, and steak in lovage butter. Hugo Yu.
Clockwise from prime left: pimento cheese, escargot, meatloaf, and steak in lovage butter. Hugo Yu.
The best way to consider Pitt’s and Agi’s is much less as two sides of 1 chef’s biography and extra as one expression of his M.O.: dedication to the bit. He’s an fanatic, agency in his convictions, and, as Agi’s sudden Hungarian renaissance signifies, a reasonably good evangelist, too. Southern cooking doesn’t want as a lot introduction to the broader inhabitants of New York diners as Hungarian does, and Salamon makes use of this built-in data to his benefit: The world he has inbuilt Crimson Hook is, if something, much more elaborate than Agi’s. Even the toilet-paper holders, a carved bear and carved horse, are hunting-lodge kitsch.
Within the chilly darkish of February, this put me off. As Might turned to June, I warmed up. Pitt’s shtick could also be a bit, but it surely isn’t a joke. Salamon swaps the meat in his patty soften for lamb, for a extra subtle gaminess, and drags completely tender steak by means of a veg-patch swath of lovage-infused butter. I didn’t love the pimento gouda, however I did the home made fried saltines served with it, and a chilly salad of confit mussels with tomato dressing didn’t remind me of any nation restaurant I’ve ever been to — simply this one.
It’s the uncommon meal at Pitt’s that doesn’t finish with head pastry chef Goldie Flavelle’s pancake soufflé, served with maple syrup and salted butter and to be ordered, like La Grenouille’s earlier than it, firstly of the meal. It’s handled with all due pomp and circumstance, arriving tall, bronzed, and lovely, steaming mightily. It’s IHOP couture, a quirk that works, and it makes you consider in shtick. The one factor that would enhance it, the last word dedication, could be for Pitt’s to take it to its logical conclusion: Open on weekend mornings and serve it for the shtickiest meal of all, brunch.
Child-Pleasant
Pitt’s has a small devoted kids’s menu for “Tiny Pitts,” that includes pimento grilled cheese, “rabbit patch greens,” and even a “kid-tail” pandan mocktail.
Shaken, Stirred, Named
Pitt’s cocktail menu is courtesy of Ben Hopkins, who mixes good and names cute. Desire a “Crimson Hook Pinball Museum”? The menu received’t inform you what that’s, however I’ll: It’s a tackle the Crimson Hook cocktail, with rye, añejo tequila, candy vermouth, and Maraschino.
Leisure Included
Wednesday nights by means of the summer time, Pitt’s will function free reside music (together with these $8 ’tinis) beginning at 6 p.m.
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