I am a big fan of neighborhood restaurants. For me they are the backbone of the restaurant industry. Temples of haute cuisine may come and go but the neighborhood restaurant will live on long after they’ve turned their last white linen topped table. The neighborhood restaurant may be nothing all that fancy, but they’re sweet and charming in their own way. They offer crowd-pleasing, reasonably priced food so that you’re never dissuaded from popping in for a meal. They have a nice, friendly, warm staff, with waiters who’ll remember you like your butter with a little salt on the side, and bartenders who know that you like your margarita on the rocks, without salt.

They’re places you’ll stop in on your own for a beer and a bite and some easy conversation at the bar, places you can bring your parents, or stop in for a low key evening with friends. These are restaurants that come to mean something to you, that become an extension of your home. They’re restaurants that you miss when you move away. Well, for those of you lucky enough to live in the East Village, I have some good news. Allow me to introduce to you The Redhead, your new favorite neighborhood restaurant.

The Redhead may ring a bell. It used to be the bar called Detour until Rob Larcom, a longtime industry operations guy who opens restaurants for Drew Nieporent’s Myriad Restaurant Group, and partners Gregg Nelson (Devin Tavern) and chef Meg Grace (MOMA) snatched it up and began to transform it, replacing the ceiling, cleaning up the wrought iron façade, adding wooden flooring and installing crushed red velvet banquettes swapped from the old Montrachet. They molded the Redhead (named for The Red Head, an old East Village speakeasy that eventually became the 21 Club) with their hearts and hands into the sort of neighborhood restaurant they’d always envisioned—a warm friendly tavern with solid seasonal food, hand-crafted cocktails, and generous hospitality.

For nine months, they also worked on the menu, hosting $25 prix fixe family dinners every Thursday night to get feedback on the dishes and work out the kinks in the kitchen. During this gestation period, Pete Wells happened to come to dinner and wrote a glowing review in the NY Times $25 and Under column. I read his column and wondered about the place and made a note to check it out. Then last week, I heard that Meg had decided to open for dinner Tuesday–Saturday with a full menu. It was time for me to visit. Craig was in Vegas for his bachelor party (what happens in Vegas…), so I grabbed my friend Court and we headed over for dinner.

With temps in the high nineties, we started at the bar for a couple of cocktails to help cool us off. A Rhubarbarita ($9) had my name all over it—housemade rhubarb syrup with tequila and fresh lime juice over ice, and Court’s jala-pina ($9) was my second drink, a chile-infused tequila cocktail made with pineapple juice, shaken and strained and served straight up. The bar had a nice crowd of regulars at it, a gray-bearded guy with one hand on a pint and the other on the Post, a few girlfriends in flirty summer dresses meeting after work, and a nice couple seated next to us who struck up a conversation about weddings when they overheard me talking about mine. They were planning theirs in October and we exchanged wedding planning stories before sitting down for dinner. After only half an hour at the Redhead, I already felt right at home.

Meg’s menu follows the neighborhood restaurant edict with reasonable prices that invite folks to become regulars. Starters come in at $8-$10, and entrees are priced between $14 and $19. Beyond prices, it’s also her food that you’re gonna want to eat every night. She’s got some serious talent and correct technique from working with Jamie Leeds at 15 ria in DC, and at places like The Mansion at Turtle Creek and Postrio before even attending culinary school. Most recently, she was hired as sous chef at MOMA and within a year was promoted to executive chef at Café 2. Her style, though, is not very MOMA. It’s a bit more playful, a little more sassy. It’s food with a Southern twang and a slap of N’awlins attitude thanks to a stint at Commander’s Palace. Her style reminds me of a mix of April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton and Susan Spicer—feisty and rustic, edgy and seasonal, confident and terrific.

For instance, under snacks you’ll find chips & dip—homemade waffle potato chips with a warm French onion dip ($5), and wild mushroom flatbread—a thin, crisp platform for caramelized onions, mascarpone and Parmigiano Reggiano ($8) alongside the ultimate bar snack (or couch snack for that matter)—bacon peanut brittle—“because everything tastes better with bacon,” written as its descriptor. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a truer statement. The brittle is spicy and smoky with a slight bit of sweetness from the candied bacon, and it’s served in a mini ball jar, though Larcom reports that some regulars request it in a quart sized jar and have returned with their empty jar for weekly refills. It’s quite addictive. While I wanted to take a large vat of it to go, I know better than to leave myself alone in a room with an open jar of bacon peanut brittle. Self awareness is very important in this business.

Beyond snacks, her starters include a Kreuz market sausage with housemade soft pretzel ($8, and a great accompaniment to a cold pint of Allagash, Stoudt’s, Six Points or Guinness, all on tap), a crab and leek tart with wild mushrooms and pecans ($10), and a green goddess salad that’s stocked with asparagus, sweet peas, snap peas and pickled red onion, like summer in a bowl ($9). Her one-eyed Caesar ($8)–—a Caesar salad topped with an egg-in-the-hole, aka one-eyed Susan—marries fresh leaves of crisp romaine with the bright pungency of anchovy and Parmesan and the buttery decadence of warm brioche and an oozing egg yolk. I’d like all my Caesars with one eye from now on.

As a woman who spent some time in New Orleans, Meg sure knows her way around a pot of grits, and she prepares hers from Anson Mills antebellum grits—toothsome and textured not mushy and soft, and cooks them so they are slightly soupy. The grits are set up with smoky, spicy coins of Andouille sausage and plump succulent shrimp ($8/15). I’d save a bit of your Parker House roll to mop up the last bits of grits from the bowl.

Buttermilk fried chicken with cornbread and honey ($15) is already a house favorite, as is the massive burger, blanketed in melted white cheddar and tucked inside a tidy aluminum bowl with waffle chips and pickles ($9). But the trout called us, and I am glad it did. It’s silky and meaty and stuffed with mustard greens and smoked bacon, and balanced on a wedge of copes corn spoonbread set in a smoky tomato broth ($18). Now that’s my kinda trout. The spoonbread (sweet) and the tomato broth (smoky) were completely unexpected but added the most divine complexity to the dish, like surprise guests at a dinner party who end up making the night a hell of a lot more exciting.

One of Meg’s trips to the Greenmarket clearly inspired the cheese ravioli ($14), which are showered with a pageant of summer veggies—zucchini, squash, peas, herbs, and a few little florets of broccoli, punched up with a couple of bracing niçoise olives to make all the flavors pop. (I’d have even been happy with a few more of those olives, actually.) The gift you’ll find inside each delicate hand-made ravioli, nestled inside the ricotta and herbs, is a single quail egg that runs its yolk into the sauce when punctured. Save some of that Parker House roll for mopping up here, too.

Desserts at the Redhead will put an instant smile on your face. The first one on the list is a “Salted Caramel Ho Ho,” (come on, aren’t you smiling now, just reading it?), which led to a rather hilarious discussion of childhood snack cakes like Ring Dings and Twinkies and Yodels. I thought a “Ho Ho” was a snowball, but Court explained to me (in great detail) that it was more like a Yodel, chocolate cake rolled up in a log shape filled with cream and glazed in chocolate. Hey, you learn something new every day. We considered ordering it, along with the warm berry bread pudding with Greek yogurt ice cream and the strawberry rhubarb crisp with ginger ice cream (all $7). But we were, quite frankly, stuffed. (Too much bacon peanut brittle to start.)

As we were leaving, we were each given an individually wrapped oatmeal cookie as a little something sweet for later. It’s a gesture that speaks to the conceit of the restaurant, a warm friendly place that wants you to come back real soon now, ya here? Court, who lives a few blocks away, was already planning his next visit.
“I love it here,” he said as we stepped out into the thick, hot soupy night air. “I’m gonna come in with my book and sit at the bar.” Chances are he won’t get much reading done. It’s too friendly a place. You’ll see. Soon you’ll be a regular too.

The Redhead is located at 349 East 13th Street (near First Avenue), (212) 533-6212.

Andrea Strong