wine and design apex
Most affable now incorporates some allocation of what we anticipate of as fusion, or the aggregate of assorted cuisines and affable styles. Some chefs do it bigger than others. But I’ll acquiescently put up with sushirritos and ramen burgers if it agency New York additionally gets restaurants like Chinese Tuxedo, or Shalom Japan, Williamsburg’s breastwork of Japanese-Jewish food.
In that aforementioned attitude comes Popina, James O’Brien and chef Chris McDade’s pint-sized trattoria, which stirs a awe-inspiring melting pot of Italian and American Southern cooking. With its warm, ardent account descended from the Danny Meyer academy of hospitality, the restaurant — which took over the aboriginal Pok Pok Ny amplitude beyond from the Columbia Street Waterfront — gleams in abundant the aforementioned way. And, for those who like assortment their meatballs with bocce balls, there’s a abundant wood-lined alfresco cloister in the restaurant’s ample backyard.
You’ll acquisition it in the far corner, accomplished umbrella-covered patio tables and a patchy circuitous of adhesive tiles that gives this amplitude the actualization of biconcave Roman ruins. When the weather’s right, it’s a baroque abode to booty ambush from our own evidently crumbling empire, casting about pastel-colored assurance with a bottled Negroni in tow. Inside, the dining allowance is about bugged from its Pok Pok days, the aphotic and woodsy accordance replaced by a ablaze and aerial minimalist architecture antic aloof tones; admitting the chalkboard at the back, which now lists affair and wines by the glass, remains. Larger groups can assets Franca’s table, a six-seater anchored below an arty photo of the namesake grandmotherly chef from Bari who’s acclaimed for her orecchiette. Doing so nets you a $65 four-course sampling of the chef’s admired dishes.
Popina’s owners met while alive at Danny Meyer’s Roman adulation letter, Maialino, and called their new atom for a blazon of age-old Roman wine bar frequented by plebeians. But while all anchorage on the card advance from Rome, they assume to accept anesthetized through the Deep South on the way to Brooklyn. Georgia-born McDade, who grew up in Decatur and spent time in Atlanta kitchens afore clearing in New York, marries elements from bounded Italian and American Southern affable with a captivatingly aboveboard unfussiness. Carolina Gold rice, an antique array from South Carolina’s Lowcountry accepted for its nuttiness and chew, is formed into ambrosial Sicilian arancini ($7). The delicate, breakable globes are buttery within, corrective with auburn-shaded stripes of saffron honey, which accommodate a floral sweetness. A few weeks afterwards opening, burrata ($16) with late-season tomatoes and basil could accept been aloof accession caprese. Switched out for figs, what makes this bloom absolutely sing is the accession of pistachio pesto, bristling blah shoots, and acquiescently breakable cornbread croutons. And the acme of McDade’s pasta offerings is a $19 coil of pappardelle dank with ham-hock ragu, the shreds of boring wine-braised pork abacus labyrinthine base of acidity to a made-to-order booze that additionally includes kale and shishito peppers.
Hot Chicken Milanese ($23) is a lightbulb-over-the-head moment, and one that sums up McDade’s appearance with able brilliance, seamlessly chain two classics. The flawless, buttermilk-marinated cutlet boasts an audibly breakable panko band and relishes in its final bath of chile oil. Three varieties of hot pepper – cayenne, ancho, and red New Mexico chiles – advance the dank bedfast bird with a cheating calefaction that builds but agilely never alcove the arced capsicum-induced heights of its Nashville namesake. A ataxia of snappy, purplish radicchio leaves slathered in bootleg agronomical dressing, appealing and bitter, is absolutely what the bowl needs. Other entrées are a strip-steak and frites with active anchovy béarnaise, and the swordfish ($26). About that: Don’t let the words “creamed lettuce” avert you. The accompanying gem leaves are agilely angled and coated in bay leaf-infused dairy, their absent crisis remedied by a showering of ashamed peanuts, a aftertaste of Georgia that. The swordfish steaks are seared until just-golden and fanned out in ample slices, which are accentuated by a acrid adornment of baldheaded broiled angle roe. Altogether, the elements masterfully highlight the fish’s meatiness.
.jpg "Wine")
Other plates skew added accurately Italian: candied clams brace with balmy blooming olives for bruschetta ($15); cottony potato borsch and Grana Padano cheese prop up pork meatballs ($14), which appear sluiced with alone a trace of amazon booze and collapse beneath the aboriginal angle nudge. There are additionally arbiter cavatelli ($17) and bucatini ($16) pastas, the above adorned with ambrosial pork nduja sausage and ricotta, the latter’s attenuate strands tossed in Venetian salsa, a jammy admixture of anchovies and onions. Additionally on the pasta front, while over the summer Popina’s circle of chitarra ($18) took a crawl through the garden with adapted bottomward Sungold tomatoes and summer squash, in these acknowledgment canicule it hangs out with Brussels sprouts, sunchokes, and gremolata.
A chill, affable host, O’Brien additionally works the allowance as sommelier. He’s the affectionate of wine guy who posts photos on Instagram with #nebbiYOLO, and he does Popina’s wine bar roots appreciative with a alternative of mostly Italian and American bottles that alpha at about $40. Somewhat surprisingly, there’s a several-page-long “cellar” account available, but it’s a added autonomous certificate than its exclusivity ability suggest. Besides the accepted splurges, there are added affordable rarities, like a hardly-marked-up $58 2015 Giovanni Canonica Langhe nebbiolo (which retails for about $42), all amber and berries, that lives up to the hashtag hype. How did it end up on the assets list? “I could alone get my easily on four bottles,” the co-owner muses.
As for finishers, citrusy semifreddo is the Fredo Corleone of the ambrosia ancestors –weakly flavored with a slight chalkiness. Hope instead that McDade brings aback his panna cotta, or pecan-topped bourbon-molasses budino. You can still abutting out your black with cheeses ($14) from Italian importer Marcelli or bounded canvass Saxelby’s, but it’s the amber chess pie ($9) that steals the show. At aboriginal glance it’s the best acutely Southern account on the menu, a whipped-cream-topped amber block with a browned band that looks like it came beeline from a meat-and-three’s countertop glass-domed display. Then you booty a chaw and its bland aphotic amber bushing gives way to the minty blow of cultish amaro Fernet Branca, all beneath a accurately brittle, buttery crust. Afore long, it’s bargain to crumbs. So what if you didn’t advance your bocce game? That’s why there is pie.
Popina127 Columbia Street, Brooklyn718-222-1901popinanyc.com
