Restaurant Review: Gwynnett St.

Photo by Dana D. Via Yelp

Gwynnett St.

Has fine dining finally made its way to Williamsburg or will you have to keep taking the L train into Manhattan for your four star fix?

I sat on writing this review for quite some time. I like to write when something if fresh on my mind, otherwise it’s hard for me to remember all the small details. Every time I got to writing, it didn’t seem fluid—it felt like work. The feeling I got from writing this review was much like the feeling I was left with leaving Gwynnett St., but I’ll get into that later. My chefs at the FCI (International Culinary Center) taught me something very important early on in my education; they taught me what it meant for a chef to vary their palate. How can a chef or restaurant critic eat the finest, freshest, and most expensive food day in and day out and still have cash in their pockets? Don’t they get used to the food and the lifestyle? Do they have their eggs, quail of course, over easy in the morning with a thick slice of Hudson Valley foie gras and a heavy spoonful of Beluga caviar? No, they don’t. They have their eggs like the rest of us, and I’m sure they love every bite just as much as that petite filet with the Périgueux sauce and truffled Pommes Anna they had from that one star place down the road. One chef put it bluntly as ‘dumbing down one’s palate’. When he went further he explained that as a chef you need to dial it up or down—enjoy that burger from the greasy spoon on the corner but then go to Daniel and know how to appreciate the trio of milk fed veal. He continued that if we didn’t learn how to do this, we would grow up like stuck up pricks and probably become food critics… oops.

Why do I even bring up this anecdote? I, like a lot of my classmates I’m sure, feel I can do just this. I’ve been to many Michelin star joints in my days and hope I can tell the difference between great and average cuisine. When it comes time to go out for a great meal, I’m able to turn it on. I send my taste buds into hyper drive mode. No unfolded napkin goes unnoticed, no scruffy waiter, no cloudy wine glass, no unwiped rim. I become a right bastard, never letting it show on the outside of course, but critiquing every little thing inside the comfort of my own head. The stage was set and I was completely ready for my night at the critically acclaimed Gwynnett St., or so I thought.

To this point, my meals in Williamsburg have been great. Williamsburg is becoming quite the foodie town as I’m sure everyone who stumbles across this blog knows. I’ve had tasting menus, oddly paired meals, simple fair, artfully crafted meals, and everything in between in Williamsburg, but when it comes time for that special meal, I’m always taking a cab to 76^th street or 51^st street in Manhattan. I always wondered why there wasn’t a restaurant like Le Bernadin in Williamsburg—it seemed like there was the clientele for it. I believed I was getting my answer in the form of Gwynnett St., but instead was faced with a conundrum. Can I treat Brooklyn restaurants like I do Manhattan restaurants, other than of course Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare. (Review as soon as I can get a reservation) Take a look at the ratio of starts from restaurants in these two boroughs; Manhattan wins 15:1 (give or take a star here or there) Is it too early to treat Brooklyn like one of the big boys? I mean, Gwynnett St. got a very respectable two starts from the New York Times. Was I wrong to dial up my inner critic to full bore?

We walked into this inviting, yet inconspicuous little restaurant on a Friday night. We had a reservation and talked to a bartender who was filling in for the host for a moment. We were seen by three people before we finally saw the host and were taken to our table, one group of four that came in after us getting seated first. A minor detail, but an annoyance I filed into the back of my head. We were sat at a large two top with no-nonsense flatware, glasses, and napkin—pretention was obviously not the goal at Gwynnett St. We had decided earlier in the day we would shell out the extra cash for the tasting menu with wine pairing as it was a special occasion. We both ordered a cocktail to start off our meal and I immediately noticed something was off with our waitress. She was very terse, not in a mean or disrespectful way, but it just seemed like she wasn’t having fun. I like to converse with my wait staff, talk about the menu, bullshit to lighten the mood—she was allowing none of this. It’s a shame that I got more personality out of the runner than I did my waitress. I chalked it up to a busy Friday night dinner rush—she did just have two four tops sit in her section.

Photo Via Gwynnett St. Tumblr

Our cocktails arrived and were stunning. The Fogg’s Wager for me consisted of Aquavit, Chartreuse, tarragon, and citrus while my girlfriend had the Flower Power which had Macchupisco grape brandy, aperol, rose, and lemon. You can see why I was excited to eat here—I love a great cocktail list and between our two drinks we racked up a whopping 11 ingredients. Both cocktails were outstanding. Our meal was getting started.

Our first course was chicken liver with chestnut, apple, and mushroom. This was a two bite amuse-bouche which absolutely hit the spot. The livers were cooked to perfection and paired perfectly with everything on the plate. They sat in a very interesting bowl that served its purpose again, without being pretentious. Our runner brought us some whiskey bread with cultured butter, and our next course arrived; stinging nettle soup with clam kombu broth and parsley. I’m not a huge fan of stinging nettles and being paired with parsley they had something like the taste of grass. I did have one great bite where everything came together perfectly and I could see what the chef was going for. Unfortunately, this was just one out of maybe 10 bites that came together. The whiskey bread was amazing, I just wish there was something better to drag it through.

I was thinking of ordering our next course if we didn’t go with the tasting menu; maple glazed pig’s ear with yuzu and radishes. This gave me the feeling of a deconstructed Korean barbecue taco or something right out of David Chang’s cookbook. It tasted great. My only criticism came with the amount of radishes—whenever you can lean over to an eating partner and whisper something about the plate and start laughing, you know something’s wrong. There were too many damn radishes! on top of the staggering amount of radishes, one of them was pickled, and it was only a small disk. This was the best bite on the whole plate and I desperately needed it to cut the sweet fatty pigs ear. More picked radishes, but less radishes.

We we’re now moving on to our mains. Our first main was salon with fennel and a white beer sauce. I had a major problem with this dish—I couldn’t get what the chef was doing using so much fennel in pairing with salmon. The salmon had light Asian flavors and the fennel was completely overwhelming. The salmon was cooked to a perfect rare, a semi cooked raw dish that I loved. I got one bite that made sense where I took almost all of the fennel aside and picked which part of the sauce I dipped my salmon in—it tasted like the best salmon sashimi I’ve ever had. unfortunately, I was left with a licorice taste that lingered unpleasantly until the next dish. Chicken with rutabaga, shallots, pineapple, and clove was spectacular. The chicken was cooked perfectly and everything worked extremely well together—even the pineapple. The amounts on the plate were absolutely perfect. Unlike the previous dish, everything fit so well together, every bite perfect, until the dish disappeared to my dismay.

Photo Via Eat This NY

Our desserts were wonderful. We started with the orange with chicory and cream which was so needed after all of our savory dishes. We then ended our night with the chocolate with rose hips and bulls blood… those are red beet tops by the way. Both dishes were high points of the meal, but something was bugging me again. ¾ of the way through the meal our introverted waitress came to our table and let us know we would be waited by her colleague for the rest of the night. I thought maybe she was having an off night or was sick and needed to go home, but this was a welcomed change of pace. What I didn’t expect was for her male counterpart to be just as awkward and cold as she was. On top of that, he seemed to know next to nothing about the wine pairings or restaurant itself. None the less, I settled the bill and walked my girlfriend back to her apartment before going out for the night.

Photo Via Gwynnett St. Tumblr

I had a long walk from my girlfriend’s apartment to Bushwick to contemplate the meal I just had. I had a long time to mull over the wait staff, the use of negative space in plating, and the pairing of ingredients. By the end of my walk I was no closer to understanding than when I started it. It took a few commutes to Stratford to really get my mind across my final take on Gwynnett St.—I treated it unfairly. I put it in the same light as Per se or Momofuku Ko when I don’t think I should have. It’s an amazing thing to see a kitchen and front of house performing to Michelin standards day in and day out—if you haven’t had the experience, save up and throw a dart at any Michelin rated restaurant around the world. The kitchen runs like clockwork silently pushing out hundreds of covers a night to the same standard over and over again. The front of house moves like a ninja ballet. The best waiter or waitress is one you don’t even notice. You have your utensils laid to your side swiftly and silently, your water and wine getting refilled, and those crumbs next to your bread plate? What crumbs? This is what I was missing. Granted, I didn’t get a chance to look into the kitchen, but I can only assume it’s happening in there too. Everything seemed forced, which is odd because of the relaxed look and feel they were trying to portray. The wait staff didn’t have uniforms, which screamed casual to me, but it was completely bollocked up to the point where I had to wonder if I was asking the right person where the bathroom was. I was confused and so was Gwynnett St. Are they trying to be the casual Brooklyn restaurant quietly and effortlessly putting out Michelin-worthy food day in and day out, or are they a formal juggernaut who knows what they’re doing is damn brilliant and that they’ll have two stars next year? I don’t think they know and I sure as hell don’t. What they get is this middle ground where the wait staff seems like they’re scared to make a mistake and the adventurous food seems over adventurous just for the sake.

The last paragraph may seem harsh to my readers, but there are redeeming qualities to Gwynnett St. The drinks were spectacular, minus the wine which was a complete afterthought to the pairing. The desserts were amazing and imaginative without going too far, and the chicken—oh the chicken. That’s the one thing that has kept me so caught up on this review is the chicken. That chicken could easily sit right next to the oysters and pearls on the menu at Per Se or French Laundry. That chicken can hack it at any three Michelin star restaurant in Paris. That chicken was absolutely sublime, perfect, end of story. That’s what makes me think there’s hope for Gwynnett St. That’s what makes me think that in a year’s time I’ll go back to Gwynnett St. and they’ll make me eat my words, cry over the review I’m writing right now, and make me write an apology in the form of an absolutely glittering answer to the question at the top of this page. Someone at Gwynnett St. needs to take a look at that dish and say, “That’s what we need to do more of here!” The staff needs to calm down and turn friendly. Whether it was an off night, attitude issue, or timidity, there should be no place for that in any restaurant.

I’ll circle back to the beginning of my review when I posed a question to all my readers: Will Gwynnett St. keep you from heading into Manhattan to get your fill of fine fare? The answer is a complicated and waffled, ‘Not yet.’

-Adam from Tipped Mixology