It had been a terrible day. I woke up too late and too anxious. The heat in my apartment stopped working. All I wanted to do was wrap myself in blankets and watch a bad action movie.
But I had a dinner reservation. Grudgingly, I trudged through whipping winds to Cafe Kestrel, a teeny, minimally adorned bistro that opened last summer in Red Hook, Brooklyn. As I stepped in, someone offered to take my coat. An amuse-bouche of warm, just-popped popcorn appeared on the table, followed by two cigars of fried halloumi, dusted in a sinus-awakening amount of Espelette pepper and shellacked with thick wildflower honey. I watched a server run a pot of tea and two mugs to a couple standing outside waiting for a table. My frosty mood melted as fast as the applesauce ice cream sundae.
A few weeks earlier, on a morning when the sun refused to come out, I found similar comfort in the cheery, electric-blue exterior of Cocina Consuelo, tucked off 143rd Street. Inside, this Mexican cafe felt as much Harlem as it did Puebla. Boisterous families squeezed into booths, tearing into plates of tortillas topped with Jackson Pollock-like splatters of salsa roja, hoja santa and an oozing egg whose yolk matched the wall color.
Only a few shreds remained of their croissant, from the nearby Bakery Mocana, which the restaurant fills with molten, glistening Cheddar and a crunchy swipe of salsa macha. Some children plunked errant keys on an old Kimball piano; others flipped through photo books arrayed on the stand. Was I at a restaurant or an auntie’s house?
These two dining rooms were cozy — a term now so inescapable that it has birthed an internet lifestyle (cozycore) and turned hygge (its Danish and Norwegian equivalent) into mainstream American lingo.
Yet for all that, cozy is increasingly hard to find in New York. The city is more crowded than ever. Technology is supplanting human servers and physical menus. Restaurants are becoming big-ticket amenities for billion-dollar office and apartment towers, while smaller neighborhood spots (the original cozy restaurants, one could say) are being squeezed by rising costs.
Cozy is often misunderstood. It’s not just about dim lighting and hearty food — it fulfills the original promise of a restaurant: to restore.
I considered my seasonal affective disorder basically cured when I tucked into the macaroni and cheese at Cafe Kestrel. Tiny tubes of canneroni were coated in a sharp, slightly loose sauce of Parmesan, Muenster and caciocavallo cheeses with freckles of pepper, like a vastly superior version of the boxed stuff. There are healing powers, too, in a chicken leg and thigh marinated in miso and crisped in a pan, then served alongside a sticky sauce of dates and pungent vadouvin, and buried under butter-glazed carrot coins.
The European-ish menu is not adventurous — it’s unfussy, elegant and even a little old-fashioned. The chef, Dennis Spina, who plied this unassuming style as the chef of Roebling Tea Room, an eclectic restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that closed in 2017, has no interest in chasing trends. He described his food to me as “what I assumed adults ate as a teenager.” Like the housemade pâté of veal, pork and chicken liver studded with chunky morsels of chestnut. That may sound adult to Mr. Spina, but to me, it tasted like a smoky bratwurst, balanced by a mustard-and-port-based Cumberland sauce that evoked ketchup. As with almost every dish at Cafe Kestrel, it looked simple, but it didn’t taste simple.
(Mr. Spina’s chief investor is his ex-wife, Amanda McMillan, who is also the managing director of the Four Horsemen, a Williamsburg wine bar that in some ways feels like the opposite of Cafe Kestrel: hip, youthful and dynamic.)
Cafe Kestrel’s unpretentious spirit also dwells within Cocina Consuelo, an all-day cafe where you can spend a leisurely morning lingering over a not-overly sweet cafe de olla; a quesadilla stuffed with gooey Oaxacan cheese and tart hibiscus that has been braised for 24 hours with onion, garlic and chipotles for a texture that resembles pulled pork. Evenings bring bracing aguachiles and a broiled duck leg coated in a clove-heavy mole negro that I wiped off the plate with tortillas so soft it seemed they might melt — all paired with Mexican wines and the occasional live music performance.
The chef, Karina Garcia, and her husband, Eduardo Rodriguez, the manager, ran a Mexican supper club in their apartment during the pandemic. They’ve channeled that dinner-party energy into Cocina Consuelo, which opened last summer with a menu rooted in the bright, distinctive flavors of Puebla and Veracruz — both places where Mr. Rodriguez grew up — and a splash of Ms. Garcia’s creative flair. She marries bone marrow with birria, salsa macha with Cheddar. And she has dreamed up one of New York’s best breakfasts: a sturdy masa pancake lacquered with honey butter and wearing a crown of stewed blueberries that tumble down the side.
Both of these restaurants seem to care most about genuinely connecting with diners. No one is trying to rush you out the door, or snatch away a dish before you’ve had the last bite. One night at Cafe Kestrel, a mother and her young son asked if they could sit at the bar and just share a side of macaroni and cheese. They were welcomed in. On stormy nights, Mr. Spina makes soup with whatever he finds in the kitchen.
At Cocina Consuelo, employees dote on diners like affectionate grandparents. One night, our server cleared the table but left the broiled romanesco cauliflower (whose charred crevices had soaked up every bit of a lemony salsa verde) and the roasted potatoes soaked in a chipotle butter I could have drank. She explained that she worried the vegetarian in our group hadn’t eaten enough, and offered another round of tortillas.
Even the decorations at both places are ad hoc and homey, like the parade of framed photos, records and plants filling the shelves at Cocina Consuelo, or the random assortment of posters at Cafe Kestrel. You’ll hear drinks described with phrases like “This is a big-boy wine.” Dessert may come in the form of a messy slab of cake, like Cafe Kestrel’s butterscotch-soaked apricot confection, topped with too much whipped cream — which, it turns out, is just the right amount.
On the flip side of those charms are a few inconsistencies. At Cocina Consuelo, dishes like the tortitas de calabaza, zucchini cakes dropped in guajillo broth, and a special of braised short ribs with guaje mole needed salt. And you’re not going to Cafe Kestrel for the steak, which twice tasted more of char than beef.
There are several restaurants in this city, staffed by armies of cooks dressed in custom uniforms, where the steaks are aged a month and the short ribs are salted with acute precision. Far rarer are those unassuming places that breathe new life into your day. There’s no formula for this. It’s not something that can be bought. But when a restaurant achieves it, as Cafe Kestrel and Cocina Consuelo do, the result can be priceless.
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