One day after many months of getting zero response from Sam, I was feeling pretty badly about the situation, and I decided to write him a different sort of email. In it, I was very direct and asked him why he never responded to me, what he thought of my ideas, and whether I had any chance of ever writing for the Times, or if I should just pack up and move to Peoria. Before I could think about whether this was a good idea or not, I hit send. Moments later, an email from Mr. Sifton had arrived in my inbox. I almost fell off my chair. In a nutshell he told me he was busy, he thought my ideas were good but not right for the Times, yet. “Keep on pitching me,” he wrote, “and one day, maybe you’ll get in.” I still had a chance!!!! I was over the moon.

Later that week, I was on a blind date with a bankruptcy lawyer my friend Susie had fixed me up with. We met for drinks at Washington Park, Jonathan Waxman’s restaurant in the space that is now Cru. It was not a match. Let’s just say he thought the intricacies of the bankruptcy code was something I might be interested in as cocktail conversation. Not so much. I was bored to tears, but intrigued by what was in his cocktail. “What’s in your gimlet?” I asked, looking at some strange alien creatures on the lip of the glass. “I have no idea, I asked for it with onions and this is what I got.” I fetched the bartender, a guy named Alex Miranda. “Alex, what’s in this drink?” I asked, perplexed by the slim pinky-shaped garnishes. These did not look like onions to me. “Oh, those are ramps that our chef Daniel Eardley forages for upstate and brings back here. He pickles them in house for the cocktails. We don’t like to use any of those creepy cocktail onions.”

Eureka! This was a story idea. (While this is common now, back in June of 2002, no one was making pickled ramps for cocktails.) The next morning, I called and interviewed the chef, headed back to my office and pitched Sam. This time he wrote back right away. The email was short and to the point: “Get me 300 words by the end of the day and maybe I’ll print it.” It was official: I had my first assignment for the Dining Section. I sent in those 300 words and waited and waited. When the fact checker called that Friday, that’s when I knew. I was in. The article came out on Wednesday June 27, 2002. I woke up as the sun was rising, and probably still in some part of my pajamas, ran down to my corner bodega. I tore the paper open to the Dining Section and read the article right there on 3rd Avenue as my bleary eyed neighbors walked their dogs around me. As I go to the end of the piece and read my byline, fat wet circles of salty water dropping out of my eyes stained the page. I went back inside and bought five more copies.

It’s hard to believe that almost seven years have passed since that warm June morning. Not all that much has changed, I suppose. I am still writing about food, though not as much for the Times anymore, and Daniel is still a chef, though not at Washington Park which sadly closed. He’s actually cooking at a little restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, called Chestnut where he’s been quietly doing his thing for five years now. While we’ve stayed in touch over the years, it wasn’t until I moved to Cobble Hill, and he opened a new wine bar next to the restaurant, that I got around to stopping in to say hello. Shame on me, I know. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long.

Chestnut is a quintessential neighborhood restaurant, but one that takes its food a bit more seriously than the norm. Like Daniel was doing at Washington Park, he often forages for his own ingredients or finds them from local farmers who can do a better job than he can. If it’s something that he can make himself (bread, 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 leaves tossed in) and less dressing (it suffocated the flavors of the beets).

If you’re up for a real meal (read: fish, meat, pasta), Chestnut performs much better. While weekends are quite busy (though the 45 minute wait for walk-ins at the bar is actually a lot of fun), if you’d rather go when the neighborhood crowds are at home tucking in the kids, the restaurant is less hectic during the week. Pair this with the mid-week (Tuesdays and Wednesday) prixe fixe that the restaurant offers (any three items off the menu for $30), the warm and friendly service, and there’s little reason to eat anywhere else.

Dinner begins with a pewter tray of exclusively housemade snacks: a generous bowl of crunchy sliced pickles, and two kinds of bread: a soft and fluffy foccaccia and a heartier whole grain with pumpkin seeds and golden raisins. On a Tuesday night last week, Craig and I shared the Bobo farms chicken ($20), a wildly juicy and flavorful bird that Daniel stuffs with housemade sausage, and serves with a potato galette fashioned from potatoes that were sliced way too thin and cooked too long so it tasted like a burnt potato chip more than anything else. No matter, this recipe makes the humble chicken regal enough to serve as the centerpiece on Thanksgiving.

The striped bass ($26) was also terrific, set on top of a mound of roasted acorn squash with “chorizo” which unfortunately was once again the dust, not the actual Spanish sausage. Despite the powder, this dish was very good: the fish was perfectly cooked (moist, flaky and topped with a crispy skin) and it tasted like it had just been pulled from the cold waters off Montauk. The accompanying squash was roasted for a long time so it was soft and almost sweet enough to be filled in a pie shell. I added a side of braised mustard and collard greens, which added a welcome measure of sharpness to balance the plate.

On another visit, the hanger steak ($26) stole the show: rich and meaty and nicely charred, but cooked so its center was tender and ruby red. It’s served rather austerely, just sliced on the bias with a sort of fancy and fantastic hash made from roasted fingerling potatoes and some ripe and ready bleu cheese. Pastas looked terrific, especially the cavatelli with duck sausage and sage, but we’d just made pasta the night before (with spicy Italian sausage, chickpeas and broccoli rabe from Andrew Carmellini’s new book) and so instead we opted for the skate Meuniere ($21), which unfortunately was a huge let-down. The fish, while cooked so its corduroy-like flesh was sweet and flaky and nicely browned, was in mourning for flavor. Rather than seasoned, it seemed merely drenched in olive oil without a trace of lemon, caper or any sort of brightening acidity or salinity. As we pushed the fish aside, we stole a glimpse of the table next to us, happily sharing a big bowl of pasta. “We should have had the pasta,” we both said at the same time. Drats. Next time.

Dessert cheered us up. The cookie plate is listed fairly unassumingly on the menu ($8). It’s anything but ordinary. It includes a housemade ice cream sandwich (a giant scoop of vanilla smacked down by two soft chocolate chip cookies), along with about a dozen other freshly baked cookies and brownies. It served as breakfast the next morning. Cheesecake is also very good, a creamy ricotta recipe anchored by a graham cracker crust with a seasonal fruit compote over the top.

There’s a true generosity of spirit and homespun vibe at Chestnut that comes across in every detail, from the salvaged bar chairs that the chef refinished himself, to the piles of pickles that he cures weekly for the restaurant and the neighborhood (they’re sold next door at Stinky Brooklyn). The staff goes a long way to making eating here a pleasure. It’s the sort of place where you’re welcomed as a regular even on your first visit. It’s just a feel-good spot and that’s why you’ll find that even when dishes don’t hit the mark, you’ll want to return. Chestnut may not perfect, but it’s impossibly sincere. That goes a long way.

It’s funny to think back to that first article in the Times. It was Daniel’s debut as well, and we shared that moment together. As I write this review, all I have to do is look to up my right to find that first article I had published in the New York Times. It is the one and only piece of writing I have ever had framed. While it was all of 300 words and took up just a slim column on the left hand side of the page, there’s nothing I’ve written since then that means as much to me. We all started somewhere, and that’s that place, stowed way back there in the memory banks, that makes where we are now mean so much.

Chestnut is located at 271 Smith Street, near Degraw Street, 718-243-0049.

Andrea Strong