Restaurant review: After a scandal, April Bloomfield sets a new course

Trying to bounce back from a career-ending catastrophe, April Bloomfield cooks the best food she’s ever made at her new Brooklyn restaurant. Sailor.

She has always found it easier to express herself in the kitchen than in interviews. When a New York Times reporter asked in 2018 how she let her former business partner, Ken Friedman, get away with behavior that several former employees said involved groping them and pressuring them for sex, she seemed at a loss for words.

Eventually, every restaurant she and Mr. Friedman owned was sold or closed. There’s no way to end 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, who was in her element in the kitchen and less so when dealing with the other responsibilities that come with owning restaurants.

Sailor, which opened in September, is owned by restaurateur Gabriel Stulman and his wife Gina. It is the most mature restaurant of his career, and Ms. Bloomfield’s as well. Starting with the Spotted Pig, probably the first gastropub in the United States, Ms. Bloomfield’s places blurred and sometimes erased the line between bar and restaurant. Considering that alcohol was almost always involved in the Pig’s worst events, the lines may have become too blurred.

But this collapse of differences had a major impact. Soon, people in Ohio, Texas and other places were wondering if they were in a bar with exceptional food or a restaurant with lots of people standing with drinks in their hands. One restaurateur who had to pay attention was Mr. Stulman, although the atmosphere at Joseph Leonard and his other Greenwich Village haunts was more “New Yorkers hooking up” than “backstage with the Rolling Stones.”

In any case, Sailor has two distinct sides: an 18-seat bar, where reservations are not taken, and a 20-seat dining room, where they do disappear within minutes of being offered. Which side you eat on depends on whether you’d rather hang out on DeKalb Avenue until the door opens on the day you want to eat, or hang out on Resy at 11 a.m. two weeks earlier. Neither half is rolling. People go there to eat.

Each table features lamps with brass bases, bright enough to help guests with low vision read the menu. A movable ladder, like in an old library, climbs to the higher shelves where wine is kept, or at least displayed. The bedding is white, the trim navy blue, the art nautical.

Ms Bloomfield’s understanding of her profession has deepened since the crisis. She is now one of the city’s most expressive chefs. She does not convey her ideas through bizarre combinations of ingredients or avant-garde techniques. She does this by delving into an ingredient until she finds flavors that no one else seems able to achieve.

I’ve always thought that celeriac is a two-speed vegetable: it goes straight from raw and crunchy to cooked and mushy. By poaching it into small cubes that hold their shape, Ms. Bloomfield finds a third speed: firm, yielding and soft enough around the edges to drink the dressing of melted butter and lemon juice.

There’s also a roasted fennel bulb, sticky with caramelized pan juices, topped with goat cheese and herbs – a nod and nod to Boursin.

Cooking this way is often called intuitive, which is stupid. Like any other skill, cooking improves by being responsive, attentive, and by remembering what you’ve learned. You really have to get to know your radishes if you want them to be as tasty as Sailor’s, which are tart yet still slightly crunchy after cooking in lambic.

They are also draped with guanciale. A generation ago, when American chefs seemed eager to outdo each other, hardly anyone served up the pork fat more generously than Ms. Bloomfield. (She called her first book “A girl and her pig.”) But these strips of guanciale are shaved so thin that you could read the menu through them. This isn’t the lard-slinging April Bloomfield of old, and the guanciale plays the role that olive oil plays in Sailor’s great radicchio salad—it blunts the vinegar. There is a new restraint in her cooking and possibly a sense of mortality.

Mrs. Bloomfield makes very little visible effort to spruce up the food. It just looks good, as delicious things often do. Some of her dishes are not far removed from farm cooking, although it is difficult to say whether the farm is in England (where Mrs. Bloomfield lived until she was hired for the Spotted Pig), or in France, or in Connecticut. There’s one called Toast with Green Sauce + Parmesan, which is basically a thick slab of roasted Pullman polenta drowned in chopped herbs with capers, anchovies and oil. Cheese has been grated over it, making it look like a Welsh rarebit with an Italian salsa verde. It could have been invented by a hungry cook standing in the light of an open refrigerator at midnight.

The main courses are not outright attacks on the human body, as they sometimes seemed in the past. There is a piece of cod, medium sized, patiently bronzed and given to you “in a soup with coriander sauce.” The soup tastes something like bouillabaisse. It is very good.

One evening there might be a juicy, pink pork chop with tender whole shallots in a syrupy brown reduction. On the other hand, you can find a pork shoulder steak, brined and smoked, but not hammy, and stewed with meaty green olives until it can barely hold itself together.

Every time you go, there is half a chicken roasted with herb butter under the skin. It sits in a cast-iron skillet with a tan pool of gravy, almost as sticky as jelly, and flaky roasted potatoes joined with big chunks of fried Parmesan. I ate this the night after Thanksgiving and became convinced that if everyone gave up turkey and had Sailor’s fried chicken just once a year, the country would be a better place.

Mrs Bloomfield’s desserts are renowned for their ability to evoke childhood memories of intense British character in people who have never been near Britain. The ginger cake with a generous dollop of whipped cream at Sailor is the latest example of this. But the profiteroles are a bit magical. The puff pastry crunches as you chew, and the sauce is not the usual chocolate, but a rich, dark caramel.

I have friends who don’t want to see Woody Allen’s films. I’m sure some people will feel the same way about eating at Mrs. 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 about cooking appealed to me. Celeriac root and radishes and potatoes usually don’t touch me. They did that at Sailor.

To follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok And Pinterest. Receive regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.