Brooklyn has definitively trounced Manhattan as the city’s hot spot for new restaurants, which is apparently a big deal if you’re into that sort of thing and not tired of hearing people talk about how much they can charge for kale. Bon Appetite magazine today released its list of the top 10 best new restaurants in America and (for the first time ever? Sure, why not) Brooklyn got two entries on there —Blanca and Battersby — while Manhattan got a big ugly zero. Add this to Brooklyn making it to the front page of the Applebee’s of journalism and we’re having a hell of a week! Let’s say you wanted to actually try one of these. Can you afford it?
The Bon Appetite list goes into all sorts of fancy foodie lingo about how good the eats are, using phrases like “glass shrimp with celery flower, celery juice,” which is not a deleted line from this video. They don’t so much get into price.
Blanca: 261 Moore Street, behind Roberta’s, Bushwick
Price: $180 a person, excluding wine. For the restaurant’s 22-course tasting menu, that works out to about $8 a course, which doesn’t sound so bad, so long as they don’t mind if we skip out somewhere around course two.
Bon Appetite says: “To enter Blanca, you need to go down the rabbit hole. In this case, that involves trekking out to the Brooklyn artist enclave of Bushwick, entering Roberta’s (Blanca’s big-sister restaurant, which serves some of the best pizza in New York), winding your way through a crowd of tattooed kids to the patio, where a radio show is in progress, past the tiki bar and into the garden, where a Viking-themed hot tub party may be taking place, and, finally, downstairs to the adjacent building.”
Battersby, 225 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens
Price: The menu here changes daily, but current options include a kale salad (on which the Bon Appetite editors ejaculated with joy) for $12; veal sweatbreads for $12; a Berkshire pork belly parmigiana for $27; and a dish made of Hake, Piperade, Mangalica Ham and Espelette (of which I am not convinced any of the words are real, save for “ham“) for $29.
Bon Appetite says: “In many ways, Battersby is just like any other brick-walled, Edison lightbulb-lit restaurant in the hipper-than-thou culinary hotbed known as Brooklyn. … I’m probably going to regret telling so many people about the little restaurant up the block, but two of the hardest-working chefs I’ve ever witnessed deserve the recognition.”
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“The applebees of journalism”! Buy this man a vegan provolone-stuffed meatball fettucine!
I think you mean buy that for me. But with real goddamn cheese.
On second thought, please don’t buy me anything from Applebee’s.
credit where it’s due: that’s a David Colonism (Colonialism?)
It’s happening: Roberta’s is becoming too hip for itself.
To be fair, $180 isn’t cheap, but for a 22-course dinner that’s not unreasonable. You get a lot less for the same price in Manhattan. Doesn’t mean I’d skip over there and try it if I had the money–not that I could, as there’s a three month waiting list to even request a reservation–but still.
For some godforsaken reason kale is always expensive, and I never really understood why. Someone should really look into that. Ramps are even worse. I don’t want to talk about it.