A bite of the brandade.

April Bloomfield’s Quietly Triumphant Return

Sailor, in Fort Greene, is a destination restaurant dressed up as a neighborhood spot—which is maybe the best kind of restaurant there is.

One of my many rules of restaurant-going is: if you see an unsexy vegetable given pride of place on a menu, order it. We pretty much know what to expect when a kitchen touts its Brussels sprouts—dollars to doughnuts, they’ll show up crispy and maple-syruped—or carrots (roasted, goat cheese), or beets (roasted, goat cheese, nuts), but when a chef refuses to play the hits, and instead goes for the produce-aisle deep cuts, something exciting is likely afoot. This principle explains why, while eating dinner at April Bloomfield’s spiffy new Fort Greene restaurant, Sailor, I found myself facing down a round, softball-size parcel, smooth-sided and inky purple, doused in a sauce of a similar hue. It was stuffed radicchio—starring one of the most curmudgeonly of vegetables, bitter and fibrous, almost always a supporting act—and therefore, by statute, a nonnegotiable dish to order.

In the right hands, radicchio is among the kitchen’s great transformation artists—it softens, with heat and care, into something mellow and tender—and there are few better hands than those of Bloomfield. As a chef, she is perhaps best known as a meat whisperer; she was a primary architect of the lard-and-offal era of the late two-thousands and twenty-tens. But true fans (and owners of her second, vegetable-focussed, cookbook) know that she is arguably even more adept with ingredients beyond the animal. Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year. Following the rules has rarely led me wrong.

Bloomfield’s previous tenure in New York, as the chef-partner of the restaurateur Ken Friedman, came to an end, in 2017, after she was accused of insufficiently protecting her staff from the alleged sexual predation of Friedman and Mario Batali, a Spotted Pig investor. (Friedman settled harassment claims against him; Batali denied assaulting anyone but acknowledged that his behavior was “deeply inappropriate.” Bloomfield has said that coming to terms with her failures in addressing employee concerns “blew my psyche wide open.”) After ending her association with Friedman, Bloomfield spent a few years as a wandering cook, stepping into kitchens in L.A., Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the U.K., where she is from, before landing at Sailor. Her partner now is the restaurateur Gabriel Stulman, whose constellation of West Village restaurants (as well as the NoHo gem Jolene) is of the warmly lit, tightly packed, casually refined variety that makes you feel marvellous simply for being in them. The way he tells it, getting Bloomfield to sign on to Sailor was a moon shot. Then, to his surprise, she said yes…

Read the whole review here.