At the Four Horsemen, the Food Catches Up to the Wine

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/dining/four-horseman-review-pete-wells.html

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In the fall, when I was supposed to be thinking about the best restaurants I’d reviewed over the year, I found myself thinking often and happily about a four-year-old restaurant that I’d never reviewed at all: the Four Horsemen, in Brooklyn. It had opened in the summer of 2015, and while I’d enjoyed it, gone back on my own and even suggested it to friends, I also thought the food was the least interesting thing about it.

In fairness, that was largely because other aspects of the place were unusually interesting. One of the owners is James Murphy of the band LCD Soundsystem, who, after getting New Yorkers to dance while articulating their discontent with the Bloomberg era, was looking for a second act. At the Four Horsemen, Mr. Murphy was responsible for the decision to pour natural wines and for the acoustic environment, which is as close to perfect as you could wish for in a small room full of people who’ve been drinking, some of them for hours.

In retrospect, the arrival of the Four Horsemen looks like a turning point for natural wine. In the early days, people who chased down unfiltered, unsulfured and un-futzed-with bottles from Beaujolais’s Gang of Four, Thierry Puzelat in the Loire Valley or La Garagista in Vermont were rare. These people were passionate in evangelizing for the winemaking practices they believed in, but their goggle-eyed radicalism could, at times, make you think of Bolsheviks with corkscrews.

The Four Horsemen wrapped the movement’s scruffy environmentalist and antiglobalist urges inside a sleek, cosmopolitan style that appealed to the kind of people who had dinner at 38-seat restaurants in Williamsburg. Just when apartment-design bloggers and Instagrammers had become obsessed with the warm, homey Scandinavian quality known as hygge, the Four Horsemen offered a hygge-rich environment, with burlap-coated walls and Opinel steak knives whose wood handles were the color of Christmas lights.

Diners who had aged out of late-night dance parties, like the ones where Mr. Murphy used to spin records, could drink a chilled Brouilly while listening to his favorite albums played through a vintage McIntosh preamplifier he’d bought on eBay. In one sign of its ability to appeal to multiple demographics, the Four Horsemen must be the first natural-wine bar to get a review in Pitchfork.

After a much-publicized opening, the compressed dining room in back and little horseshoe bar up front were packed whenever I looked through the windows on Grand Street in Williamsburg. The place didn’t need my faint praise.

It still doesn’t, but the food I’ve eaten at the Four Horsemen since a friend suggested we meet there in October has been more sharply defined than anything I remember having in the early days. Over the past two decades, a style of cooking coalesced in northwestern Brooklyn, made from seasonal and local ingredients but generally built along the relaxed, country-French and Italian lines first laid out by West Coast restaurants like Chez Panisse. Now I am inclined to think that the current keeper of the flame for this style is the Four Horseman’s chef, Nick Curtola.

A weekend lunch just before Christmas was one of the most satisfying meals I’ve eaten in a long time — thoughtfully proportioned, gracefully shaped, intelligently seasonal, quietly festive. The set menu, priced at $32, began with a delicious Waldorf salad, a phrase I’ve never used before. The celery was shaved to a translucent thinness and the walnuts were fresh enough to crackle, but the key to the whole thing was the mayonnaise, tart and lemony instead of sweet. There was also a potato gratin with a gold lid of baked Fontina and Taleggio on top that you could eat like a potato chip.

The centerpiece of lunch was pot roast. These words will not quicken the pulse of many diners born after the Depression, but the pot roast in question was not the stringy gray substance often brought out after church on Sundays, apparently to prolong the period of atonement. It was an elegant, restorative braise of boneless short-rib bundles, thoroughly browned but pink inside, with red carrots and white Japanese turnips in an opaque broth from which every drop of fat had been skimmed. This was, of course, a pot au feu traveling incognito, and the Four Horsemen’s by-the-glass list had a match for it, a cheerfully complex Beaujolais from Jean-Louis Dutraive.

The menu ended with a yellow ball of eggnog ice cream with rum-spiked caramel and a flurry of sugar-cookie crumbs, a dessert straight from the pastry chef at the North Pole. (In fact, all the pastries are Mr. Curtola’s.)

The Four Horsemen had been open more than a year and had experimented with brunch before Mr. Curtola settled on $32 set menus for Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Many of these lunch menus have themes. Others simply make sense together. Either way, they are a welcome change from other, preposterously expensive tasting menus that just present a long sequence of dishes without a common thread.

And the clarity of Mr. Curtola’s cooking now is a welcome change from what I ate in the early days, food that struck me as smart and artful but a little somber. Before opening the Four Horsemen, Mr. Curtola had cycled through some leading European kitchens, including Noma’s. Like a number of other local chefs at the time, he seemed to have fallen under the elegant but chilly spell of the New Nordic style.

But he also spent several early years working in the smoke-scented, California-Mediterranean kitchen of Camino in Oakland, Calif., and two more later in his career at Franny’s in Brooklyn. The forthright, rustic style of those restaurants appears to be reasserting itself now in the dishes on the dinner menu, which is à la carte. Other influences are poking through the fabric, too.

Peeled, cut-up satsumas are seasoned with sesame oil, cilantro stems, crushed Kampot pepper and pickled Calabrian chile, an electric combination that suggests Chinese cuisine without resembling it in the least. Leaning up against a mound of warm sushi rice, sea urchin and Spanish mackerel tartare are some toasted rectangles of nori, and if they remind you of rolling papers, you’re right: you’re being invited to make your own temaki. Coating the mackerel is a spicy mayo made with a home-brewed tribute to Sriracha.

Vinegar slashes its way through fat and creamy Maine mussels, an unexpectedly alluring cold antipasto. Red algae, more appetizingly known as dulse, is smoked and crumbled over the tuna tonnato, a long-running favorite on the menu, made by spreading the creamy tuna sauce under a sheet of raw yellowfin. Any charcuterie shop would be proud of the supremely smooth and delicately pink chicken-liver mousse.

The bread, dense and brown from house-milled whole wheat and rye flours, was good from the start.

So was the wine. Justin Chearno, who is both the wine director and an owner, imported almost all of it from France and Italy at first. Like the natural-wine movement itself, though, he has enlarged his map of the world. He now extracts bottles from Slovakia, Australia, Texas and Canada, among other exotic locations.

Some of the 650 or so wines on site are woolly and unkempt, others charmingly moody, and a few are models of propriety. Somewhere on the list may be one for you, but if you doubt it, you might ask about the unlisted beers. They’re pretty interesting, too.

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