Satisfying the Body and the Mind
August 30, 2013 by admin
Filed under Yoga Articles
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times
Take Root started as a supper club in an apartment. But since January, it has occupied a more formal space, with seats for 14 diners. More Photos »
It is an intimate thing to be cooked for by someone who loves to cook, and does so with skill, ardor and imagination, alone in a kitchen, knowing that at the end of the night, she will have to scrape off the dishes and scrub down the counters herself.
It is a rare thing to pay for a meal but feel as if it were a gift.
Take Root, which opened in January in far west Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, is an improbable enterprise. By day, it is a yoga studio for children. (Stay with me. It is not as twee as it sounds.) Three nights a week, it turns into a restaurant serving multicourse, unascetic, remarkable meals.
The staff comprises Elise Kornack, the chef, and her fiancée, Anna Hieronimus, the host, waitress and busser (and yoga instructor). What started a year and a half ago as a supper club at their apartment has, since January, occupied a more formal space, with seats for 14 diners, on a drowsy block by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
But if the setup is homey (garden bench out front; driftwood on the windowsill; pots of marjoram, mint and basil hanging from a wall), the food is not. Ms. Kornack, who is 26, was a sous-chef at Aquavit, and traces of that restaurant may be found here, in seasonally attuned dishes with a quiet, questioning intelligence.
The $85 tasting menu is officially five courses, unofficially eight. On a recent evening, it began with a drop of carrot purée under coins of raw carrot and carrot juice gelled into tiny spheres that evoked salmon roe. The textures relayed the carrot’s sweetness in gradations, with a flutter of salt from flakes of Pecorino. This was followed by the small marvel of pain de mie, fresh from the oven, served with brown butter that Ms. Kornack makes herself, whipping and re-emulsifying it for three and a half hours.
There is a sidelong whimsy to Ms. Kornack’s scrupulous compositions, which she helps bring to the tables and introduces herself. Cherry tomatoes, smoked until their juices darken and thicken, are set against bright, crisp orbs of cantaloupe; beets are diced as fine as quinoa, with which they are rolled and packed inside a beet leaf. Minor ingredients are exploited in ingenious ways, like scallions blackened under lamb belly in a pan, dehydrated and crushed into “ash,” or pearl onions painted with a caramelized harissa paste, then covered in plastic wrap and steamed, in what Ms. Kornack called “a MacGyver version” of sous-vide.
Then there are genuine surprises, like the juxtaposition of olive purée and coconut milk in a plate of cod, puzzling at first and then convincing; linguine cooked in corn milk and finished with a Parmesan-leek broth; and the somewhat macabre configuration of Japanese eggplant, cut like tree stumps, on a loose black garlic pudding looped with garlic scapes and stems of purslane. It is as close to carnal as vegetables can get, the meaty eggplant taking on the brooding sweet-sour character of the black garlic.
The occasional off note barely registers. On the nights I visited, oddly chewy Parmesan crisps were a mild distraction from an otherwise exemplary tortellini with airy white bean filling and a simple, gorgeous breakdown of Sungold tomatoes. Lamb belly, almost entirely fat, was redeemed by a smoked chickpea purée and that vivid scallion ash.
Desserts are complicated assemblages that somehow yield straightforward satisfactions. One night, a dusting of cardamom shortbread over black cherries, chocolate cake and black cherry semifreddo winked at brandied cherries. On another, a trail of crumbled buttery pie crust (properly baked in a tin before being pulverized) united a sprawling pageant of olive oil cake, milk reduced to a jamlike texture, nectarine purée, fresh nectarine and vanilla semifreddo.
There is only one seating, at 8 p.m., and it takes close to three hours for the meal to unfold. I never noticed the passing of time, thanks in part to Ms. Hieronimus’s attentive but unobtrusive ministrations, the good, kindly priced wine and the nostalgic soundtrack of ’40s French songs. But mostly it was because, dining at Take Root, I was happy.
Take Root
187 Sackett Street (Hicks Street), (347) 227-7116, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, take-root.com.
RECOMMENDED Dinner is a set menu with no choices, but with advance notice, the chef works around dietary restrictions.
PRICES $85 five-course tasting menu at dinner; $3 to $12 à la carte at brunch.
OPEN Thursday to Saturday for dinner (one seating at 8 p.m.); Sunday for brunch.
RESERVATIONS Required for dinner.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance is a step up from the sidewalk; restroom does not have handrail.
