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This Is Not a Simple Green Salad
Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
When Third Falcon opens this week in Fort Greene, a dish listed on the menu as “greens of the moment” may cause diners to roll their eyes with Greenmarket ennui, but it’s almost certainly unlike any other salad served in the city. It is, as the name suggests, made with whatever lettuces, herbs and flowers are in season — currently, a wide plate fanned and stacked with purslane, chrysanthemum greens, sesame leaf, basil, and fennel fronds — that are mixed with cherry tomatoes that have been slow-cooked in duck fat, which in turn goes into the dressing with sesame oil and sherry vinegar. It’s finished with coriander and sesame salt mixed with grains of buckwheat that cling to the dressed leaves. The duck fat adds an invisible gamy layer that causes the dressing to adhere to your lips a little more than the average vinaigrette, while pops of seeds and grain crunch in every mouthful.
This is not the restaurant’s only unexpected use of animal fat — chef and owner Cali Faulkner crowns her roasted chicken breast with crab butter — but at its core, Faulkner says, “this restaurant is cooking fish and butter.” The menu leans into the seafood-and-dairy hallmarks of Breton cuisine, which she first developed an affinity for while working in Paris and taking the train to nearby Brittany on her days off. It starts with a raw bar serving oysters from the North Fork and local tuna crudo, plus langoustines with smoked sauce gribiche and prawns with kari gosse, a warm spice blend from the region. Camembert is mixed into the dough of shortbread-y “crisps,” and brioche will be made on-site, accompanied by imported butter from, yes, a large crock on display.
The long, narrow space on the corner of Myrtle Ave and Adelphi was previously a coffee shop. Faulkner, who designed the restaurant herself, has made good use of the dimensions by placing a 14-seat bar down the length of the room with tables on either end seating another 21. She sees the front as a more casual zone, reserved for walk-ins stopping by for a glass of cider and some brown-butter scallops, while the back is “a serious-meal-type situation,” where people might tuck into the $120 cote de veau for two. Besides the centrally placed falcon, the other paintings scattered throughout are bright and playful, which fits with the natural light streaming from the windowed doors and walls.
Faulkner previously worked at spots like Eleven Madison Park, Crown Shy and Verjus in Paris, but she always intended to open her own spot. When the chance came along, she chose a name that references both her own name (Old English for “falconer”) and her place as the third-born among her siblings. “It’s something that seems a bit more formal and then throwing ‘younger sister’ into it,” she says. The theme comes together with a painting of a falcon perched on a gloved arm that hangs on the brick wall between two golden sconces. “It was outside of a pub in the British countryside, and my grandfather was like, ‘I’ll take it!’” Faulkner says. “It’s on display once again.”
She clearly has fun with names. “Instead of olives” is, like greens of the moment, another fluid menu concept in which Faulkner morphs a seasonal item into a snackable starter served three different ways. Her first iteration is mixed dishes of pickled, marinated, and dehydrated tomatoes to nibble on. (It costs a very neighborly $8.) The menu’s other salad is made with a tangle of long strips of celtuce and green plum, with citrus-marinated wakame and roughly chopped pistachios.
Desserts will match the comforting cooking with a brûléed version of Teurgoule, the slow-baked Breton rice pudding, and a brown-butter-and-calvados ice cream that Faulkner calls “boozy and super-vanilla.” Buckwheat makes a return in the sticky toffee pudding, where it lends a softer texture especially suited to absorbing the dark caramel sauce.
Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
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