Breakfast at Marlow & Sons

Marlow & Sons is where your local Brooklyn hipsters come to congregate in the morning. Moustaches, impossible haircuts, ironic t-shirts, liberal use of French swears in front of toddlers, $300 handcrafted leather bags, and a very cool barista who can make you anything – it’s got everything! But hey, if your first instinct is to dismiss it as a pretentious joint in an overwhelmingly gentrified neighbourhood, defer judgement till you’ve actually tasted the food. The menu is simple comfort food, but done very well and made with locally sourced ingredients. Martha Stewart even took a trip down there to get the recipe for their brick chicken, and that’s something, right? It’s also Dave 1′s (of Chromeo) restaurant of choice. Who wouldn’t trust the taste of a sexy French professor who once wrote a dissertation titled Theorizing the Pleasure of Reading in Eighteenth Century France?

We got the rhubarb scones, biscuit with egg and bacon, and poached eggs with polenta, shaved asparagus, and fiddleheads. We thought about prolonging our stay to get the lunch menu or coming back for dinner for the oysters, but it will have to be for the next time we’re back in New York.

Marlow & Sons
81 Broadway, Williamsburg, Brooklyn | Website | Yelp

La Colombe

Finding La Colombe was a happy accident. It was on my radar, but not on our must visit list. The SoHo site is all high ceilings with incredible light, the decor rather strange and the staff the tiniest bit unwelcoming, but it was still a nice little pit stop after a few hours of shopping. My cortado came in the usual glass, but I spotted tons of beautiful decorative cups around the tables.

The two top images were taken by Leo!

La Colombe SOHO
270 Lafayette Street | Website

Roberta’s

A lunch at Roberta’s.

We shared the Smoked Breakfast Sausage, the Treviso, and the Famous Original pizza with a runny egg as an extra topping. It all looked deceptively light, but I was pretty full near the end of it. While my loyalties are still with Pizzeria Libretto for the thin charred crust, Roberta’s pizza is something else. My guess is the tomato sauce. It was rich, complex, and most likely simmered for hours, and strangely reminiscent of something eaten during high school at a local pizzeria. Neither of us thinks it’s a bad thing at all. We just can’t explain what made it so good. Was it the taste of childhood and young adolescence? Was it a psychosomatic experience? (Can you tell I really like that word? Pychosomatic.) Do we project too much on food? Probably.

Their lunch menu also featured some very interesting plates we were eyeing, like the sweetbreads with lime and goat cheese and sweet potato hash. Regrettably, this is where we completely missed out! Their small plates and tasting menu have garnered a litany of praises, good enough to place Roberta’s on the Michelin’s 2012 Bib Gourmands list. And it all makes sense now. The treviso drizzled with a cheese we never heard of (Époisses de Bourgogne), presented without much fanfare and most likely straight out of their roof top greenhouse, is definitely something you wouldn’t see at your local dive bar. It’s no gastronomical wonder, but there’s enough thoughtfulness to hint at better things.

Well…then! Looks like we inadvertently forayed into Michelin territory. Not bad. Not bad at all. Perhaps next year I can convince Leo to put on a suit for Le Bernadin?

Roberta’s
261 Moore Street | Website

Abraço Espresso

Abraço Espresso is this effortless cool little coffee bar in the East Village that can barely fit more than three people at a time. There are no tables, no wi-fi, just a window ledge and a high bar and a bench outside for a short, lingering chat. On top of serving great coffee, they also offer a variety of housemade treats. For that morning we went with the ricotta scone and their famous olive oil cake; the recipe for the cake was published in Bon Apetit, but a quick search online has proven it to be rather elusive…

Abraço Espresso
86 East 7th Street | Website