IT is elbow to elbow at Battersby on a Saturday night, at tables barely wide enough for a game of checkers. “How am I supposed to talk to you?” a flummoxed swain whispers. Couples cleave to a wall; latecomers hunch at the bar. Outside it is Smith Street in Cobble Hill, a formerly insalubrious strip (weren’t they all?) that is now just a Marc Jacobs away from becoming Brooklyn’s Bleecker.
Much of the restaurant was built by hand by the young owners, Joseph Ogrodnek and Walker Stern, who chummily share duties as executive chefs in the claustrophobic galley kitchen. There are the obligatory exposed-brick walls and plank floors. You think you have heard this story before: the new Brooklyn!
And then the food arrives, and you are under a chandelier at Gramercy Tavern.
Well, almost. There are limits to what can be achieved by just three men — Mr. Ogrodnek and Mr. Stern, who worked together at Alain Ducasse at the Essex House and Anella, and their sous-chef, Michael Sowa — in a closet of a kitchen. But at its best, the food at Battersby is thoughtful, poised, occasionally revelatory.
Behold the lamb, presented three ways as part of a tasting menu: shoulder, seared and carmine, tasting of pure animal; shank, slow-braised into soft focus; and rib, pomegranate-glazed, with sweet and sour in a dead heat. This is a biography of lamb, intimate in its details. You sense that the person who cooked it broke down the animal himself. You do not coo over such a plate; you bow your head, in grace.
Kale, the current breakout vegetable, plays the seducer in a salad that tumbles together the raw and the cooked, all showered with a spine-tingling dressing of bird chiles, palm sugar and fish sauce ($12). Octopus and chorizo, that love affair of opposites, is garlanded by meaty chickpeas and brightened by a sun ray of lemon ($15). Branzino shows up with an entourage of braised fennel, tomatoes shriveled and collapsed in their own juices, and Taggiasca olives, buttery and mellow ($26). Everything on the plate is there for a reason.
But spaghetti with sea urchin is a mirage, the creature’s glorious brine lost in the muddy broth ($19). A lucid consommé cannot redeem chewy duck and leaden foie gras tortellini ($28). And then there is the promisingly labeled “pastured hen egg”: an almost-soup of chunky mushrooms and spinach leaves, beneath mushroom froth and a wobbly yolk ($12). It looks so pretty. Why does it taste of nothing at all?
The menu, about a dozen dishes, changes as often as three times a week. From the laconic descriptions, it is difficult to predict mediocrity or transcendence. Better to submit to the five- or seven-course tasting, which the chefs improvise on the spot, for half ($65 and $85) of what you might pay across the river.
One night the tasting began with whimsy (doll-size crudités of baby carrots and radishes, stems still on) and built leisurely from ethereal to earthy, including a bracing parfait of chilled crab, celery,cucumber and green apple; ricotta gnudi invigorated by lemon confit; cod with spring vegetables and aioli, an elevation of a folksy Provençal staple; and that astonishing lamb. It was a passage through late spring’s guises, with the yellow-green of chive blossoms a winking motif.
Did I mention that the chefs do their own baking, too? Each meal opens with a fluffy rosemary flatbread, wafting heat. And the desserts ($7 each) are noble efforts: fennel panna cotta in a rocks glass, a banana tart delightfully soused with lime and underpinned by dulce de leche.
Despite the tightness of the quarters, the waitresses manage, even at full tilt, to glide. The towels in the meticulously tidy bathroom are cloth. Battersby is grown-up, even earnest. This is fine dining in hipster’s clothing: the new new Brooklyn, perhaps.
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