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Where to Eat in September
Illustration: Naomi Otsu
Welcome to Grub Street’s rundown of restaurant recommendations that aims to answer the endlessly recurring question: Where should we go? These are the spots that our food team thinks everyone should visit, for any reason (a new chef, the arrival of an exciting dish, or maybe there’s an opening that’s flown too far under the radar). This month: tripe, rice balls, Wienerschnitzel, and Peruvian canchita.
Arrigo’s of Fresh Pond (Ridgewood)
By day, this is a sandwich shop where eggplant parm is glazed with Pecorino cream, and night brings a dinner menu to meet all their ambitions too big to fit between halves of a semolina loaf. There’s Pet-Nat on the tidy wine list and a menu that steers away from simple red-sauce nostalgia. Crudo might be ruddy bluefin tuna or thick slices of scallop in a chilly, almost icy green-tomato dashi. Plump cacio e pepe rice balls are packed with cheese. A sugar-snap salad with endive and mint gets lightly dressed with labneh. The ragù over rigatoni is rib-sticking, but there’s no resisting the sakura pork chop, its craggily, shattering crust protecting juicy, still rosy meat. We got both desserts. A cup of soft serve came with pine nuts playing the role of sprinkles, and the winner was rich budino under a canopy of torched meringue. —Chris Crowley
Tortelli (Carroll Gardens)
As the weather chills a bit, there may be no more in-demand tables than the four sitting outside at this new Carroll Gardens pasta shop from the chef behind LaRina and Briscola. The titular tortelli comes in a very buttery pesto, while cavatelli is bathed in a sugo of heirloom tomatoes. Some items, however, are exclusive to the dine-in experience, like fresh frizzled snap peas served over ricotta with croutons. Eating at Tortelli feels like overindulging at the farmers’ market — without the work of cooking. To finish off the domestic feel, there are affordable wines available by the glass or the bottle. —Zach Schiffman
Café Brume (Brooklyn Heights)
If Brooklyn Heights is the Swiss canton of NYC — beautiful, historic, neutral — it only makes sense that an Alpine café would choose to settle there. Brume, in the space that once held neighborhood institution Teresa’s and has seemed a little cursed since that closure, has the dark-wood rafters and stripped-down chandeliers of an après-ski chalet, and a menu of spaetzle, schnitzel, and trout. This kind of elegant but nevertheless rib-sticking cooking didn’t quite fit its summertime opening, but now that fall approaches, the vibe feels right. I enjoyed the appropriately crust-bubbled Wienerschnitzel with bay-leaf spaetzle and cold marinated cucumbers, and the thematically appropriate wines (Swiss Chasselas, Austrian Blaufränkisch) by not only the glass, but the half-glass. Chef Ian Anderson, who has cooked at Le Coucou, is running the kitchen, though I’ll also be interested, in the interregnum of mild days between summer heat and late-fall cool, in charcuterie and cheese with a few hunks of Laurel Bakery bread at the restaurant-length bar. — Matthew Schneier
Bartolo (West Village)
In our Eating New York newsletter, I’ve previously expressed my admiration for Bartolo’s very small bar and its very large bowls of egg-topped garlic French fries. Here is why I think the entire restaurant is the place to be this fall: The bifurcated, low-ceilinged dining room — the back half of which can be closed off for private events — feels like it could have been built in 1955 ( a good thing), and chef Ryan Bartlow’s menu is a subtle, luxury upgrade of the cooking that helped make his name at his other spot, Ernesto’s. It includes golden nuggets of salt cod to be dipped in thick mayonnaise (not aioli, we were firmly informed); platters of jamón Ibérico with custom-stamped crackers baked in Spain; giant steaks and whole suckling pigs (the latter of which can be ordered weeks in advance); and bowls of long-stewed, soul-warming tripe. The biggest thing Bartolo has going for it, and which is missing from so many other throwback clubhouses, is also the hardest to replicate: Bartolo’s got a real, honest point of view. —Alan Sytsma
Nuyores (Greenwich Village)
Peruvians will judge a restaurant by the quality of its canchita, a free dish of toasted corn that tastes like a cross between popcorn and corn nuts. All the best places make their own, and Nuyores, which has just opened in Greenwich Village, is in that league, crunchy salted husks giving way to airy starch. Canchita is also a garnish alongside sweet yellow kernels and bulky hominy in ceviche garnished with frizzled strands of aji limo. The chef, who previously ran Contento in Harlem until it closed in December, paints with a rainbow of South American peppers: Rocoto beurre blanc’s ripe, meaty flavor is pleasantly rounded with wine and butter in a sauce for Peruvian potatoes with a thick, rare tuna steak. The “causa tater tot,” based on the layered potato salad, is actually a fist-size hash brown with an equal portion of crab salad, held together with just enough salsa golf, a doctored ketchup-mayo mix, and a jammy quail egg. They’re fitting dishes for the burrowlike room — last seen as the short-lived Il Totano — newly outfitted with dusky wall textiles and dark leather banquettes that make it a space where you’re happy to linger over a glass of Carménère. —Tammie Teclemariam
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