Sauce on the side
Briscola Trattoria, Crown Heights
RESTAURANTS • First Person
Few restaurant archetypes incite hotter takes than The Great New York Italian spot: Via Carota, Roman’s, Rubirosa, Lilia, Rao’s, Emilio’s, Don Angie, Carbone. Hard to book and not for the faint of opinion, they elicit hyperbolic, irrational love (or hatred) in a way other species of NYC restaurant don’t.
Praise be, then, to the Italian neighborhood spots chilling to the side of these debates: Cafe Spaghetti, Il Posto Accanto, Lil’ Frankies, Gersi, and LaRina — all solid spots you shouldn’t have (too much) trouble getting into, bereft of the glitzy aura keeping their more popular contemporaries aglow, but just as (or more) beloved by those who get it.
Opened in September, Briscola Trattoria joins the ranks of this second cohort. It’s the sister restaurant to LaRina, which slowly and steadily built a devoted following of its Fort Greene neighbors and fans from elsewhere with regional Italian crowdpleasers, some truly excellent house focaccia, and a hip list of natural wine. Nestled in Crown Heights, newer sibling Briscola is just as fun, casual, and delicious, if not more so. It’ll leave you jealous of the real estate choices of soon-to-be regulars.
Helmed by LaRina’s chef, Silvia Barban — a Top Chef alum from northern Italy — Briscola is a callback to a specific stripe of trattoria, rustic with a few playful touches of late-century kitsch. If it feels a little shaggy, good — that much better for you to be surprised at how seriously wonderful it all is. Lit by orange pendant factory lights and candles, the dining room starts when you walk in, running from tables at the sidewalk-facing windows to a four-seater bar in the back fronting the kitchen, with a smattering of wood two- and four-tops dotted throughout. Though drafty, those clutch windowside tables are the ones you’ll want to request.
From that bar in the back emerges classic Italian cocktail work and then some: a Casoni spritz, a pitch-perfect Negroni, and the lesser-seen Campari Shakerato, usually a one-ingredient cocktail shaken to the point of aerated lightness, here with a boozy bolt-on of gin. To the bar’s left in the back of the room, a rack stocking a bottle list with plenty of natural wine, a sharp, au currant by-the-glass selection, and house red and white, delightfully available by the glass and (medium or large) carafe.
The menu tallies 11 antipasti, six pastas, and two secondi. We started with a buttery, wispy carpaccio all'albese topped with a layer of olive oil-slicked mushrooms and verdant, crisp zucchini blossom frittelli, as well as an extra order of the house focaccia (the first shows up on your table gratis; you’ll want more). All three were excellent. Also fleeting, bordering on ethereal — at least when compared to the very substantial center of gravity on the latter half of the menu — Bomba di Silvia for two, handily among the city’s most exciting and iconic Italian dishes to come along in a minute.
It’s a combination of southern Italian sartù di riso and its northern Italian cousin bomba di riso — both dishes where risotto and baked pasta meet in the middle, neither of which you’ll find much of in New York, let alone outside of Italy. At Briscola, a cake of baked tomato-carnaroli rice is presented to you with mini meatballs and tomato sauce spooned atop; inside, mozzarella, peas, and more meatballs and tomato-carnoli await. A looker, it isn’t, but it is quietly celebratory, dramatic, and delicious.
More aesthetically pleasing is the carello dei dolci, the rickety, comically large desert cart that can barely navigate between tables. Our waiter wheeled it over and explained the various cakes and tarts on it, along with the one dish that wasn’t: tiramisu, which we ordered. Even if it didn’t come off the cart, it was sublime, requiring no glitz nor glam to accentuate its glory as much as simply needing to know where to look. –Foster Kamer
→ Briscola Trattoria (Crown Heights) • 20 Columbia Pl • Mon-Thurs 530–930p, Fri-Sat 5-10p, Sun 5-930p • Reserve.