Trying to recover from a catastrophe that nearly ended her career, April Bloomfield is cooking the best food she’s ever made at her new restaurant in Brooklyn, Sailor.
She has always been able to express herself in the kitchen more easily than in interviews. When asked by a New York Times reporter in 2018 how she had allowed her former business partner, Ken Friedman, to get away with behavior that several former employees said included groping them and pressuring them for sex, she seemed at a loss for words.
In the end, every restaurant she and Mr. Friedman owned was sold or closed. There’s no way to wrap up that chapter of Ms. Bloomfield’s career with a neat moral conclusion, or even a messy one. Like many chefs, she was a good cook and a bad manager, very much in her element in the kitchen and less so when faced with the other responsibilities of owning restaurants.
Sailor, which was opened in September, is owned by the restaurateur Gabriel Stulman with his wife, Gina. It is the most mature restaurant of his career, and Ms. Bloomfield’s, too. Starting with the Spotted Pig, probably the first gastro pub in the United States, Ms. Bloomfield’s places blurred and sometimes erased the line between bar and restaurant. Considering that alcohol was almost always implicated in the worst goings-on at the Pig, the lines may have become too blurred.
But this collapsing of distinctions was widely influential. Soon people in Ohio, Texas and other places found themselves wondering if they were in a bar with exceptional food or a restaurant where lots of people stood around with drinks in their hands. One restaurateur who had to have been paying attention was Mr. Stulman, although the vibe at Joseph Leonard and his other places in Greenwich Village was more “New Yorkers hooking up” than “backstage with the Rolling Stones.”
Sailor, in any case, has two distinct sides: an 18-seat barroom, where reservations are not taken, and a 20-seat dining room where they are, and disappear within minutes of being offered. Which side you will eat on is a question of whether you would rather hang around on DeKalb Avenue waiting for the door to open on the day you want to eat, or loiter on Resy at 11 a.m. two weeks before. Neither half is rollicking. People go there to eat.
Lamps with brass pedestals, bright enough to help diners with fading eyesight read the menu, sit on every table. A movable ladder, as in an old library, climbs to the higher shelves where wine is kept, or at least displayed. The linens are white, the trim navy, the art nautical.
Ms. Bloomfield’s understanding of her craft has deepened since the crack-up. She is now one of the most expressive cooks in the city. She doesn’t get her ideas across through bizarre marriages of ingredients or avant-garde technique. She does it by burrowing down into an ingredient until she’s found flavors nobody else seems to know how to reach.
I’ve always thought celery root was a two-speed vegetable: It goes straight from raw and crisp to cooked and mushy. Poaching it in small dice that hold their shape, Ms. Bloomfield locates a third speed: firm, yielding and soft enough around the edges to drink in their dressing of melted butter and lemon juice.
There is also a roasted fennel bulb, sticky with caramelized pan juices, laid over creamed goat cheese and herbs — a nod and a wink to Boursin.
Cooking like this is often called intuitive, which is silly. As with any other skill, you get better at cooking by being responsive and observant and by remembering what you’ve learned. You really need to get to know your radishes if you want them to end up as wonderful as the ones at Sailor, which are tart and still a little crisp after cooking in lambic.
They are also draped with guanciale. A generation ago, when American chefs seemed to be trying to out-swine one another, almost nobody dished up the pork fat more generously than Ms. Bloomfield. (She called her first book “A Girl and Her Pig.”) But these bands of guanciale are shaved so thin you could read the menu through them. This is not the lard-slinging April Bloomfield of old, and the guanciale is playing the role that olive oil plays in Sailor’s terrific radicchio salad — it blunts the vinegar. There is a new restraint in her cooking, and possibly a sense of mortality.
Ms. Bloomfield makes very little obvious effort to dress the food up. It just looks good, the way that delicious things tend to. Some of her dishes are not too far removed from farmhouse cooking, although it’s hard to tell if the farm is in England (where Ms. Bloomfield lived until she was hired for the Spotted Pig), or France, or Connecticut. There’s one called Toast With Green Sauce + Parmesan that is basically a thick slice of toasted polenta Pullman drowned in chopped herbs with capers, anchovies and oil. Cheese has been grated over the top, making it something like a Welsh rarebit with an Italian salsa verde. It might have been dreamed up by a hungry cook standing in the light of an open refrigerator at midnight.
The main courses are not all-out assaults on the human body, as they sometimes seemed to be in the old days. There is a piece of cod, medium-size, patiently bronzed and given to you “in a soup with coriander relish.” The soup tastes something like bouillabaisse. It is very good.
One night there might be a juicy, pinkish pork chop with tender whole shallots in a syrupy brown reduction. On another, you could find a pork shoulder steak, brined and smoked but not hammy, and braised with meaty green olives until it is barely able to hold itself together.
Whenever you go there will be a half chicken roasted with herb butter under its skin. It is crowded into a cast-iron casserole with a tawny pool of gravy, almost as sticky as jelly, and flaky roasted potatoes that have been joined together with big chips of fried Parmesan. I ate this the night after Thanksgiving and became convinced that if everybody gave up turkey and just had Sailor’s roast chicken once a year, the country would be a better place.
Ms. Bloomfield’s desserts are known for their ability to bring on childhood memories of an intensely British nature in people who’ve never been near Britain. The ginger cake with a huge blot of whipped cream at Sailor is the latest example. But the profiteroles are sort of magical. The puff pastry crackles as you chew, and the sauce is not the usual chocolate but a rich, dark caramel.
I have friends who won’t watch Woody Allen’s movies. I’m sure some people will feel the same way about eating in Ms. Bloomfield’s restaurant. I went the first time because it’s my job, but I went back and chose to write about it because something in the cooking spoke to me. Celery root and radishes and potatoes don’t usually move me. They did at Sailor.
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