Borgo Shows Its Age

Stick around long enough and an enfant terrible becomes a prince becomes a king. Andrew Tarlow and his former business partner Mark Firth did as much as anyone to define “Brooklyn dining” in the 21st century: an artisanal burger, a carafe of carbonic wine, a little liver in a little jar. If it all seems a bit rote now, that’s a mark of their success. It was refreshingly edgy when these two Odeon bartenders founded Diner in still-remote Williamsburg on the cusp of the millennium. “I am actually not cool enough to go to Diner. Nobody I know is cool enough,” the Daily News critic wrote in 1999. She loved it.

The East River was the unbridgeable divide, and as the Marlow Collective grew (it now comprises Diner, Marlow & Sons, the reliably excellent Roman’s in Fort Greene, Achilles Heel in Greenpoint, a wineshop, a butcher, an events business, a commercial bakery, and an occasional fashion-and-leather-goods label), it remained in Brooklyn’s confines. (Firth left in 2008.) Now, 26 years in, Tarlow is crossing over. On a stretch of East 27th Street currently but probably not long to remain undersubscribed, he has opened Borgo in a double-wide space with a wood-burning oven, a back garden, and the original long marble bar.

But planting a flag in no-man’s-land, as Tarlow jokingly called the area earlier this year, is one of the only ways Borgo resembles the Diner or Achilles Heel of yore. What I love about Borgo is how little it seems to worry itself about being cool. As an aspiration, there is nothing wrong with that — I recently reviewed, and enjoyed, Bridges, a restaurant that seems hell-bent on being cool — but Borgo from the start has possessed an assured maturity. The tables in its two dining rooms are graciously spaced. The noise level is pitched at a slightly more accommodating din. A millworker friend I brought to dinner pointed out that even the wood used for the warm, lodgelike spaces, with their gentle archways and Quakerish simplicity, was pocked with visible knots, unlike the clean boards his clients pay extra for.

“Who are these people?” muttered his wife, who spent her salad days living off Havemeyer Street frequenting Marlow & Sons. There was one canoodling date near us but more three- and foursomes. Look closer and the same acetate frames of the past were in evidence, perched on faces a little fuller, the prescriptions ratcheted up a notch. They are older; we are older. Tarlow was circling the dining room every time I visited. His hair is more silvered than it once was, and so is that of Lee Campbell, who oversees the lovely Old World-leaning wine list. Jordan Frosolone, in the kitchen, a veteran of Hearth and Momofuku, is 48. “He’s not a young guy,” Tarlow once told this magazine. He has a house in Connecticut.

Restauranting is typically a young man’s game: hard on the knees, hard on the back, hard on working hours. But life doesn’t just end, and novelty isn’t always its own reward. The food at Borgo feels comfortable, lived in. The same beloved fava purée that is an unremovable mainstay of Roman’s is on the menu here with the same She Wolf sourdough. I was tempted to ding its inclusion for unoriginality, but who begrudges the National for playing “Mr. November”? Much of the menu, particularly the pastas, is appreciably Roman’s-esque, and so what? Fort Greene is two subway lines away at least. The most novel menu item on an early iteration was a saucer-size timballo, the Abruzzese showstopper that’s the region’s answer to lasagna. It alone seemed made for the purpose of attracting attention, but it was little where a timballo should be grandiose (remember Big Night?), beefy within and leathery without. By my second visit, it had disappeared. I didn’t miss it.

Why would I, when there’s focaccia, flatter than I’d imagined it would be, musky with robiola and fontina, and the most excellent skewers of veal sweetbreads, tender and charred in a glaze of coffee liqueur and lemon, whose bitter bass note and puckery bite shouldn’t work together but do? The beef-cheek ragù I’d enjoyed in the timballo has been repurposed, for now at least, into some cannelloni, but I didn’t find myself longing for meat at all in the sunchoke ravioli, strewn with frilled mushrooms, or the creamy al dente pumpkin risotto, whose orange surface concealed tiny, syrup-sweet pops of mostarda di Cremona, mustard-sharpened candied fruits.

The wood-burning oven roars to the fore for the mains, though here, too, the emphasis is on precision, not novelty. There is a roast chicken and a thick slice of roast lamb with prunes. I happily ate both before deciding my personal favorite was the ever-present branzino, whose flattened flesh and fire-crisped skin concealed a heady jam of onion, bitter greens, saffron, and pine nuts. We ordered the check with dessert and made short work of an excellent, simple slice of lemon tart. The Millworkers had to relieve the babysitter.

This is food that shows off without showing off, the more difficult path to pursue. Maybe that comes with age and wisdom. This takes nothing away from the great young chefs in this kitchen (Tarlow’s son Elijah is among them) and others, or the great young restaurateurs who push it all forward. But gray-bearded excellence is excellence of a special kind. God knows it’s hardly guaranteed.