Brooklyn Fare Takes Top Honors in GQ’s List of City’s Best Restaurants

April 10, 2012 Brooklyn Eagle Staff
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Nine of the 10 restaurants on GQ’s list of the “The 10 Best Restaurants in New York 2012” are in Manhattan. The other one is in the number one spot.

 

The Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, Brooklyn’s only three-Michelin-star restaurant, is the finest dining room in the five boroughs, according to GQ food critic Alan Richman, who gets near-ecclesiastical in his praise of Chef César Ramirez and his Boerum Hill brainchild.

“In the pursuit of perfection, there is nothing this man won’t do,” writes Richman.

 

The 18-seat restaurant is just down the block from its companion grocery store, Brooklyn Fare, on Schemerhorn Street and its menu has one option: a $225 (before wine, tax or tip) tasting odyssey planned and personally executed by Ramirez that includes what Richman calls a “seemingly infinite” number of courses composed of “insanely deluxe” ingredients.

 

Though Ramirez’s meals are partially based in a Japanese tradition, he also draws on French and Spanish styles and in the end his nightly composition is “whatever [he] wants to make it,” according to Richman. This could mean riffs on veal brain and Korean fluke, or a ration of “tiny, yeasty donuts with wild huckleberries and Riesling ice cream.”

 

Even Ramirez’s competitors across the river stand in awe of his deceptively diminutive kitchen.

 

Chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin, the runner-up to Brooklyn Fare on the GQ list, told Richman: “There is not another place like Brooklyn Fare on the planet, maybe the galaxy. This guy is a [expletive] genius, and this is the best restaurant we have in New York. You have no choice but to say that.”

 

The Chef’s Table’s singularity might not last for long. As the Eagle has reported before, Brooklyn Fare owner Moe Issa has signed a lease on an 11,000-square-foot space on 39th Street between Ninth and 10th avenues in Manhattan that he plans to turn into another Ramirez-headed grocery-store-cum-restaurant. Staying true to his roots, Issa will call that new spot Brooklyn Fare.

 

The Chef’s Table, at 200 Schemerhorn St., takes reservations for six weeks out every Monday morning at 10:30 a.m.

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