when you want, where you want.
Pitt’s Is Country Couture
Photo: Hugo Yu
When Jeremy Salamon, of Agi’s Counter in Crown Heights, opened a second restaurant, I would not have guessed that the standard-bearer of Hungarian Jewish cooking’s party-of-one revival movement would go so goyische. Salamon had just published Second Generation, a cookbook devoted to keeping alive the traditions of his grandmother, Agi, who survived Holocaust-era Budapest. At Agi’s, Salamon makes dill-feathered nokedli soup and warm Hungarian crêpes known as palacsinta using Agi’s own recipes, plus Ashkenazi American staples like borscht and chopped liver (the menu calls it chicken liver mousse, but we know better). And then in January, with his boyfriend and partner Michael Herman, he opened Pitt’s, with country-club fare like shrimp cocktail and chops. The restaurant, in the old Fort Defiance space in Red Hook, seemed like an act of defiance itself, with the striped awnings and carrot-print wallpaper of a Dodie Thayer fantasy. Wainscotting. Peggy Lee on the stereo. French-fried onions and powdered ranch on the menu. Farblunget!
When I went to Pitt’s back in February, it was, despite being perched nearly on the Ikea rim of Red Hook, packed. But I didn’t get it. New York was pulling out of a stretch of supper-club faddism, restaurateurs with gourmet bona fides pushing pandemic comfort food to its illogical conclusion, midwestern Masonic Hall fare at New York City prices. I’d already had enough upsold shrimp cocktail to last a lifetime. “It looks like a children’s book in here,” my sister-in-law whispered as we were ushered into a windowless back room, with a clubby, rec-room bar and the carrot wallpaper. The shtetl seemed very far away.
But restaurants, like the rest of us, have seasons, and summertime seems to agree with Pitt’s. Not because it’s especially light; of four entrées, only one isn’t red meat, and that one is a catfish amandine so lavishly brown-buttered it tastes like pastry and so thickly topped with slivered almonds it resembles a cake. The menu nevertheless retains a picnic-basket charm that complements the lengthening days and the tree-lined sidewalks of Van Brunt Street. A meatloaf tea sandwich — pâté, really, with pork liver and belly — served cold on squishy triangles of crustless white bread with a sidecar of pepper jelly was cool and perfect when washed down with an $8-on-Wednesday martini, the kind of pairing that’ll kill you, happily.
By now, you will have heard the thick southern twang that vibrates through Pitt’s menu. Salamon comes by it honestly — his other grandmother is country-club-going Arlene, whose plates decorate the walls and at whose North Carolina home he spent summers. (In later years, he cooked in the Research Triangle, too.) So fried onions are “tobacco onions,” and veal sweetbreads are cornmeal-crusted; a wedge salad features green tomatoes. There’s pimento cheese made with Gouda.
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
The way to think about Pitt’s and Agi’s is less as two sides of one chef’s biography and more as one expression of his M.O.: commitment to the bit. He’s an enthusiast, firm in his convictions, and, as Agi’s unexpected Hungarian renaissance indicates, a pretty good evangelist, too. Southern cooking doesn’t need as much introduction to the wider population of New York diners as Hungarian does, and Salamon uses this built-in knowledge to his advantage: The world he has built in Red Hook is, if anything, even more elaborate than Agi’s. Even the toilet-paper holders, a carved bear and carved horse, are hunting-lodge kitsch.
In the cold dark of February, this put me off. As May turned to June, I warmed up. Pitt’s shtick may be a bit, but it isn’t a joke. Salamon swaps the beef in his patty melt for lamb, for a more sophisticated gaminess, and drags perfectly tender steak through a veg-patch swath of lovage-infused butter. I didn’t love the pimento gouda, but I did the homemade fried saltines served with it, and a cold salad of confit mussels with tomato dressing didn’t remind me of any country restaurant I’ve ever been to — just this one.
It’s the rare meal at Pitt’s that doesn’t end with head pastry chef Goldie Flavelle’s pancake soufflé, served with maple syrup and salted butter and to be ordered, like La Grenouille’s before it, at the beginning of the meal. It’s treated with all due pomp and circumstance, arriving tall, bronzed, and gorgeous, steaming mightily. It’s IHOP couture, a quirk that works, and it makes you believe in shtick. The only thing that could improve it, the ultimate commitment, would be for Pitt’s to take it to its logical conclusion: Open on weekend mornings and serve it for the shtickiest meal of all, brunch.
Pitt’s
Kid-Friendly
Pitt’s has a small dedicated children’s menu for “Tiny Pitts,” featuring pimento grilled cheese, “rabbit patch greens,” and even a “kid-tail” pandan mocktail.
Shaken, Stirred, Named
Pitt’s cocktail menu is courtesy of Ben Hopkins, who mixes smart and names cute. Want a “Red Hook Pinball Museum”? The menu won’t tell you what that is, but I will: It’s a take on the Red Hook cocktail, with rye, añejo tequila, sweet vermouth, and Maraschino.
Entertainment Included
Wednesday nights through the summer, Pitt’s will feature free live music (along with those $8 ’tinis) starting at 6 p.m.
More Reviews