The Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare

Booths line the dining room, and every seat is turned toward the cooking. Max Natmessnig and Marco Prins are in the kitchen for every service, close enough to the counter to talk a dish through as it goes out. Nothing happens out of sight.

The menu runs to twelve courses or more, seafood at its center and French technique over Japanese product, and it changes daily. A scallop arrives seared under caviar in a vin jaune sauce, with fig leaf oil.

Natmessnig was raised in Austria and staged in Lyon; Prins, a flower farmer's son from Holland, went into a kitchen at sixteen. They first cooked together in 2010 at Oud Sluis in the Netherlands, both later worked here in the restaurant's earlier years, and in 2023 they came back to run it. Their own histories turn up in the food, in white asparagus from one of their hometowns, fig leaves from a family winery, and a Belgian waffle under Hokkaido uni and shaved black truffle. The recipe for the waffle came from a grandmother.

The cellar is European, Champagne and Burgundy through the Rhone and into Germany and Austria, with a pairing poured alongside the menu and a non-alcoholic version at $185. Seatings run Tuesday to Saturday, two early and two late, and dinner takes about three and a half hours. It is $385 before tax, and the menu is served as written. Nothing is swapped out.