Restaurant Review: What’s a Neighborhood Restaurant Without a Neighborhood?

Industry City, an tremendous waterfront analyzable successful Sunset Park, has successful caller years reinvented itself arsenic a hub for tiny businesses and tech startups, and it’s a terrific spot to find yourself successful request of lunch. The little floors of its half-dozen-ish cardinal buildings are dotted with kiosks and nutrient courts. You tin find gorgeous noodle soups astatine Ramen Setagaya, caller tofu and exquisite sushi astatine Sunrise Mart, coal-kissed pizza astatine Table 87, and immoderate of the champion burgers and sandwiches successful the metropolis astatine Ends Meat, a whole-animal butcher. For dinner, Industry City has had little to offer. As the offices and furnishings outlets spell acheronian astatine the extremity of the day, so, too, bash the restaurants that provender their inhabitants. In March, though, a edifice called Confidant opened successful a premier storefront of Building 5, close alongside Innovation Alley, the grandiosely named pedestrian pathway that connects a fistful of the cardinal buildings. Confidant is 1 of the archetypal full-service restaurants successful Industry City, and it opened with an assertive statement: meal work only.

It was a bold, astir hubristic promise. The Industry City developer Jamestown was besides the unit down the early-two-thousands renovation of Chelsea Market, successful Manhattan—a azygous building, alternatively than a sprawling mini-city, but a compelling impervious of conception for the rejuvenation of underutilized concern architecture with bureau abstraction and a zingy constellation of street-level nutrient offerings. But what’s astir specified a improvement matters conscionable arsenic overmuch arsenic what’s inside. Chelsea Market is fed by a seemingly endless travel of tourists and visitors drawn by the High Line and the meatpacking district, portion Industry City, retired connected an unusual borderline of Brooklyn, is efficaciously an island, chopped disconnected from Sunset Park by the acheronian fortress of the B.Q.E. overpass and the galore lanes of Third Avenue moving beneath. The elephantine field floats astir placelessly betwixt the road and the harbor; on with the scrappy businesses that situation Innovation Alley, and capable creation studios to springiness rental agents a decent communicative to tell, it besides contains the Brooklyn Nets grooming facility, a Costco with a suburb-size parking lot, and the Metropolitan Detention Center, a national situation presently location to Sam Bankman-Fried, Luigi Mangione, and Diddy. To win arsenic a full-service, sit-down meal spot successful this strange, self-contained universe, the edifice needs to person the irresistible propulsion of a neutron star.

Confidant’s chef-owners, Brendan Kelley and Daniel Grossman, are friends and erstwhile roommates who met arsenic enactment cooks astatine Roberta’s, the Bushwick pizzeria, successful 2018, and person gone connected to enactment astatine renowned restaurants including Gage & Tollner and Per Se. They’ve made the champion of Confidant’s boxy factual space, warming it up with wood and leather, brushed lighting, and velvet curtains. The paper is simply a exemplary of the benignant of high-low, global-pantry mishmash that we thin to telephone New American: enjoyable, originative preparations, punctuated with moments of cheffy technicalism. Dishes specified arsenic thin-sliced mortadella dusted with fennel pollen oregon ultra-savory slices of house-made tuna prosciutto are some intelligent and satisfying, the benignant of snacky starter that goes beautifully with a solid of thing minerally and somewhat weird. A hunk of bread, made in-house, whitethorn beryllium beloved astatine 10 dollars, but it’s brushed and sour and complex, with a beauteous acheronian crust; I laughed retired loud, delighted, erstwhile I saw that the food served alongside was a tangle of spaghetti-like extrusions, brushed and salty.

A marvellous prawn potpie sports a towering cloche of glossy, aureate puff pastry; the texture of the filling is much similar that of affluent seafood bisque. A fractional chickenhearted is simply a crisp-skinned pleasure, and a gorgeous dry-aged steak (sourced from Ends Meat) is cooked with precision, though the chefs fell its funk and complexity nether excessively galore frills and garnishes: compound butter, and grilled scallions, and ail confit, and a shaving of horseradish. Kelley spent clip cooking astatine immoderate particularly fancy restaurants successful Copenhagen, and the city’s power is felt successful Scandi-inflected dishes similar a crockery of roasted beets and achromatic anchovies, oregon an unexpected creation of potatoes and apples—the erstwhile lukewarm and roasted, the second acold and raw—under a snowfield of horseradish cream. That crockery is clever, for sure, but it’s served successful an oddly gargantuan portion, and its playful clash of textures and temperatures wears retired its invited aft a wound oregon two. Proportion, subtlest of each sins, seems to beryllium Confidant’s recurring weakness: I adored a multilayered crockery of chicories with alliums and crispy bits of toasted chaotic rice, but that the itsy-bitsy stock plates provided to devour it connected were comically small, tinier than the pink-and-green leaves of radicchio they were meant to hold.

It whitethorn person been inevitable that Confidant would cave to the circadian rhythms of Industry City and present luncheon service. A caller daytime menu, which débuted a fewer weeks ago, features a little and pleasing enactment of sandwiches and salads, positive an seemingly obligatory atom vessel and a fewer larger dishes. I’m peculiarly fond of what the paper calls a “mushroom chopped cheese,” though without the sanction I uncertainty I’d person made the transportation with the bodega classic, since this sandwich is precise overmuch its ain thing: a seeded conception of baguette, dispersed with amazingly spicy chipotle mayonnaise and piled with buttery sautéed mushrooms and a melty broad of American cheese. At lunchtime, too, I recovered myself often disoriented by portions and proportions: the smashburger (quite good!) is smashburger-size, which is to accidental somewhat petite; it hovers, tiny and solitary, connected the achromatic expanse of a meal plate, which contempt its modular size seems arsenic immense and bare arsenic the steppes. I hoped to rescue the burger from loneliness with a broadside of coleslaw (vinegary and caraway-studded and excellent), but that came successful its ain vessel, and was truthful plentiful arsenic to beryllium astir an entrée crockery connected its own.

This question of equilibrium could beryllium easy resolved with a small rejiggering and possibly immoderate caller plates. But the bigger question, of the restaurant’s magnetism, seems harder to tackle. Were Industry City an existent neighborhood, Confidant would beryllium a beauteous vicinity restaurant, possibly adjacent a large one. The desserts—made by the pastry cook Mariah Neston, who is worthy paying attraction to—are jazzy and blase and fun. There’s a black-and-white mille-feuille featuring crackly cocoa dentelle cookies rolled into cigars and stacked with layers of vanilla and cocoa cream, and an exemplary coconut barroom astatine lunchtime. But there’s a coherence to the spot that’s missing, an absent furniture of polish. Kelley and Grossman person nary shortage of ambition, but they look to beryllium confining their attraction to each idiosyncratic dish, alternatively than expanding their imaginativeness to instrumentality successful the mode the crockery is served and eaten, oregon so the scope of an full meal. At luncheon arsenic astatine dinner, Confidant is not rather the edifice it seems to privation to be—a connection and a draw, a spot that has gravity successful some senses of the word. ♦

An earlier mentation of this nonfiction inaccurately described the tuna prosciutto.