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“Chestnut”

Occasion:	Cuisine:	Area:	Cost:	Rating:
Night Out	New American	Brooklyn	Moderate	Good

ad, pickles, cookies, Cracker Jacks), he does so. Nothing is outsourced.

Like a good neighborhood restaurant the dining room is warm and welcoming. It is framed by French doors and decorated like an old country house with weathered flooring, wainscoting lining walls and soft low lighting. The new bar next-door, simply named Chestnut Bar, is also quite cozy but it’s less farmhouse and more mountainside tavern. Its walls are raw brick, its windows are high (you’d need a step ladder to peer inside) and lit with small votives and filled with bud glasses of flowers that give the place a hideaway vibe. Small round tables made from salvaged wood line the far wall, and the big chestnut bar is long and shaped like a half a rectangle with room for many to drink and dine and snack on Daniel’s addictive house made “Cracker Jacks” made from freshly popped popcorn (popped in their vintage popcorn maker) that’s tossed in salty maple caramel with roasted soy nuts and peanuts ($5 a bowl).

On a night when you’re just craving a light bite the Chestnut Bar fits the bill nicely. The room is especially welcome as the days grow shorter and colder and the soft glow of the votives makes you feel like you’re somewhere in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. The new expanded small plates menu offers a terrific salt cod brandade ($10), served hot and bubbly in a white porcelain bowl with a little green salad and a giant slab of homemade grilled focaccia bread. This is the ideal platform for slathering heaping spoonfuls of the creamy brandade. Squash blossoms ($12), piped with chickpea puree, are sadly less successful. The chickpea puree is fairly mushy and it’s not the right match in terms of flavor (bland) or texture (too soft) for the overly breaded blossoms. While the menu reads that the dish contains chorizo, it’s a chorizo powder, not actual hunks of chorizo. Personally, I’d rather have the real deal than dust.

The grilled calamari ($12) is a better bet, tender tubes stuffed like cannoli with a Spanish pimenton-spiced quinoa. It’s one of the most intriguing presentations I’ve seen or tasted of calamari, which is often the subject of thoughtless deep-frying and nothing more. The tri-color beet salad (beautiful roots) gets treated to arugula and Marcona almonds, a very nice combination, though it seemed to me that the salad needed more arugula (there were just a few tiny ... [more, click below]

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Posted: November 2, 2008

Other restaurants in Brooklyn :
+ Chickenbone Cafe-- Closed   + Pier 116-- Closed   + Chestnut   + Lunch at Peter Luger's   + 360   + Palo Santo   + The Good Fork   + Porchetta-- Closed Now   + Bocca Lupo   + Flatbush Farm   + DuMont Burger   + Dressler   + Farm on Adderley   + The Grocery   + Saul   + Black Mountain Wine House   + The General Greene   + Char No. 4   + James   + Chestnut   + No. 7   + Vinegar Hill House   + Motorino   + Buttermilk Channel   + Buttermilk Channel   + Vutera   + Watty & Meg    + Prime Meats   + Aqualis Grill   + Jack the Horse Tavern   + Roman's   + Fatty 'Cue   + Thistle Hill Tavern   + Broken English   + Trix, by Dara Pollak   + An Ode to New Orleans in Williamsburg: Maison Premiere, By Dara Pollak   + Brooklyn Wok Shop by Dara Pollak   + Arthur on Smith   + La Vara   + Gran Electrica   + Pok Pok Ny   + Ganso    + Reynard   

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