Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, Brooklyn’s only three Michelin-starred restaurant, is unlike any other. Settle in to the kitchen counter at this intimate 18 seat space for a unique dining experience featuring the cuisine of Chef Cesar Ramirez.
This unlikely locale, annex to the Brooklyn Fare supermarket—where the chef spends his days preparing deli-case items—also serves one luxurious, daily-changing, 15-course meal to diners perched on stools around a stainless-steel prep table each night. It’s not quite the Brooklyn Per Se, but it certainly harbors that type of ambition. There are no waiters, mood lighting, candles, music or coat check, and unless you bring your own wine (there’s no corkage fee either), you’ll only get water to drink. It’s not a restaurant, really—a dinner party’s more like it, served five nights a week in a chef’s atelier.
The first tastes from the kitchen come out, shot glasses of cool cucumber and green-apple soup plucked from the walk-in fridge by Ramirez and his sous chef lieutenant, who are your hosts, cooks and waiters for the night. Out comes the bluefin toro tartare, a decadent velvet bite with a dollop of mustard and soy. A single sultry Kumamoto oyster reclines on crme frache and yuzu gele. A collective sigh. More wine, more jewel-box nibbles: frog-leg and veal-brain beignets, lump crab wrapped in crispy kataifi, a mini sardine caught in a precious potato-chip cage. Eight or nine little fabulous bites and we’re still technically on the amuse part of the evening. Dinner, really, hasn’teven begun. Another shot glass ends the opening run, an astonishing layered dollhouse parfait: avocado mousse, cured salmon in mignonette cubes, maple foam, salmon roe, American caviar.
Cesar Ramirez, who is originally from Mexico is largely self taught and previously worked at Danube and Bouley in New York, but it is his visits to France and particularly Japan that have most influenced his cooking. What Mr. Ramirez is doing at the Chef’s Table is entirely his own production, a kind of sui generis exercise in personal expression. He and his staff draw no attention to themselves save for when Mr. Ramirez introduces each dish. Then there is silence as forks go to the food, and food goes into mouths and suddenly everyone starts nodding and chirping and staring at cooks who suddenly might as well be magicians.
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