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Andrew Napolitano

‘I Leave it up to You’

October 20, 2022 By Andrew Napolitano Filed Under: Park Slope Eater, The Reader On Food

Trust the culinary process flow at Sushi Katsuei

Park Slope’s third street is beautifully incongruent. A double-wide thoroughfare, the street is lined by tall trees and some of Brooklyn’s oldest architecture. It ranks among the neighborhoods most picturesque walking streets, and yet it has neither the directional utility, nor the commercial purpose of busier streets like ninth.

A friend once told me that third avenue was built this way to fit the carriages of Park Slopes founding one-percenter, Edwin Litchfeild. This writer confesses he has not fact-checked that piece of local lore, but please feel free to pass it along to your out-of-town relatives the next time they visit.

And while you are parading your guests up third street, on a crisp Fall evening, professing the virtues of orange tree canopies and stately townhouses clad in Triassic sandstone, consider the building on the northwest corner of third and seventh where Brooklyn hides grand architecture of the culinary variety.

On the ground floor of this unassuming building, night after night, Brooklyn’s skilled sushi chefs sculpt and serve the best sushi in the borough. Sushi Katsuei is not ostentatious. It has none of the interior decadence or scale of its better-known Manhattan cousins. The interior is modest, clean and intimate. At first glance it might not strike your out-of-town guests as a gourmet eating establishment. But you should assure them to put a little trust in those men behind the counter. 

The Japanese word for a trained sushi chef is “Itamae” and it literally translates to “In front of the board”. They perform their art with such competence and skill, that they invite customers to watch them work.

Katsuei specializes in Edo-style Sushi, served to patrons in the Japanese tradition of Omakase. The format is a Chef’s choice tasting menu which literally translates as “I leave it up to you”. You walk into Katsuei, put your trust in their professional staff, and for that trust you will be rewarded. 

I realize it is a bold claim to say that they have the best sushi in the borough. Brooklyn has become a gastronomic jewel in its own right, and there is certainly no shortage of competent sushi restaurants serving high quality fish. 

My argument for why Sushi Katsuei deserves the title stems not only from the quality of their fish, but also from the manner of their service. It is true that when Katsuei’s Itamae serves you a single piece of Otoro, you will experience fatty tuna belly in its optimal platonic configuration. It will melt in your mouth, and it will ruin the average tuna for you forever. Still, there are more things to consider than simply taste.

At Katsuei you can be assured you are not only enjoying the highest quality ingredients, but that you are enjoying them in the optimal sequence, and with every ounce of value funneled into their preparation and presentation. Katsuei offers Omakase at an affordable price (relative to its peers) without sacrificing anything from the core experience. And now you begin to understand why they serve the best sushi in Brooklyn, because they offer what so few restaurants on Earth can: perfected cuisine, authentically experienced, at an attainable price. Nobu, for the rest of us.

The restaurant’s sushi bar is small, and if you want a seat there you will have to call ahead, but you don’t need to secure one of those coveted seats to enjoy their Omakase. Katsuei offers a variation to guests seated at tables, wherein their warm and intelligent wait staff carry out several pieces of fish at a time, and politely instruct patrons on the correct order to consume them. This configuration, though somewhat less traditional, lends itself wonderfully to intimate family gatherings, and is optimal for impressing your out-of-town relatives.

Like the prices, and the clean modest atmosphere, this adaptation further allows Katsuei to carry out its mission, while sacrificing no element of its art. The wait staff will happily transmit your giddy praise for each dish along to your Chef.

All the crowd favorites are present, and obviously perfect; uni, snapper, the best cuts of the tuna in three sublime acts, the perfectly prepared yellowtail, lightly seasoned with a few drops of citrus and a sprinkle of green onion. But it is the unexpected act that sets them apart; a succulent sweet shrimp that expands your concept of what sushi can be, or a cut of Mackerel, clean and bright like you did not know was possible. If you give them a chance, interrupt your evening stroll in the cool Fall air, the staff at Katsuei will introduce you to another dimension of this neighborhood’s intimate inner beauty.

Like the tree lined thoroughfare it sits beside, Sushi Katsuei was built to suit its own purpose; to invite the people that pass through it to experience Omakase in its purest joyful form. They are here to offer an accessible and broad avenue of entry to a bright Japanese culinary tradition. All you need to do is come inside, put your name down, and put your trust in them.

Filed Under: Park Slope Eater, The Reader On Food

Brooklyn’s Best: Winner

July 27, 2022 By Andrew Napolitano Filed Under: Park Slope Eater, Park Slope Life

I woke up to the smell of warm spring air blowing in through my bedroom window, and I fumbled for my phone on the nightstand. The snooze button had been running for 9 minutes already.

Under normal circumstances, sleeping in until 7:29 AM on a beautiful Saturday morning is ideal, but today I have an obligation, and I am already hopelessly late.

The night prior, I suggested to my fiancé that we would have freshly baked cinnamon rolls for breakfast, from our favorite local Bakery, WINNER.

For the past year we have had a love affair with this masterpiece of a Brooklyn bakery, but unlike most of their loyal customer base, we seemed to have discovered WINNER in reverse.

I remember when they opened in March 2020 just weeks before a global pandemic turned the entire world upside down and sent the whole city into a deep freeze. I remember passing there foggy glass store front windows on a chilly morning walk and seeing the bakers hard at work inside preparing loaves of bread for people I doubted would ever show up.

I remember turning to my fiancé and expressing sad concern over the unfortunate timing of the new local venture. 

Two weeks later I was eating my words. These would be the first of many things WINNER would have me eating in the years ahead.

Confident in the purity and quality of their art, the staff and owners of WINNER stood steadfast and the people of Brooklyn walked over every morning and stood 6 feet apart, in a line spanning avenues in length, to buy what they had to sell.

I have to confess that while I was very happy for their success, I was intimidated by the lines and did my not count myself along the stoic early morning brigade that came to the bakery‘s defense in the early months of the venture. 

Actually it was not until a little over a year later when they opened up a small restaurant next door, when I made my way over there and fell in love.

It turns out WINNER had not been the only inspiration Chef Daniel Eddy had for our neighborhood. In fact the success of the bakery had paved the way for a literal RUNNER UP to claim a prized spot in a cozy shell of a finished garage adjacent to the shop.

Far from its understated facadé, and diminutive moniker, the menu at RUNNER UP is anything but second rate.

“UNI TOAST. LOOK they have UNI TOAST.” My fiancé waves an Instagram post in my face. Its a post from Wilson Tang, owner of the world-famous Nom Wah Tea Parlor in Manhattan. “I think this is the bakery down the block from us. This is the bakery that YOU said wouldn’t survive covid! Now they have a restaurant, and they are serving UNI TOAST. We have to go!”

Within a few hours we were seated on a wooden bench, in an outside seating area, on a chilly fall evening. The tables around us were all warmly lit and buzzing softly with conversation. 

The waiter offered us each a blanket, a long ballot-style menu, and a pencil for marking it up.

We checked off a few standouts and the show began.

Salt Cod Croquettes, Sardine Toast, Roasted trumpet mushrooms cooked perfectly and marinated in miso beurre blanc made our eyes light up like we were in a Pixar movie.

The Uni Toast finally arrived, And it did not disappoint but by now everything we had eaten had already blown us away. The Uni Toast was no one-hit-wonder here. It was just one of many perfected small plates available to the lucky patrons of RUNNER UP. This place and the people behind it truly have something special at work in their kitchens.

The place was warm, wholesome, organic, like it always belonged to the neighborhood, but the food elevated far beyond even our snobby millennial expectations. In a neighborhood full of wonderful restaurants winter felt from the very first time like it was a cut above the rest.

And this is what I mean when I say we discovered WINNER in reverse. It was Danny Eddy’s exciting and vibrant menu at RUNNER UP that turned us into loyal bakery customers.

It’s just about the only reason I will hop out of bed at 7 o’clock on Saturday morning. The place is absolutely worth the line and wait. In fact, demand in the neighborhood is so high, they just opened up a pop-up shop in Prospect Park for the summer.

You can find them operating out of the prospect park picnic house, and who knows, maybe the new spot will shorten the line that currently runs down 11th St.

But for now here I am standing in line with my fellow Brooklynites on an unseasonably warm early spring morning, hoping I can make good on my word for freshly baked cinnamon rolls.

Filed Under: Park Slope Eater, Park Slope Life

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