The Best Broth Comes From a Butcher Shop

The last time I made a beef broth from scratch, I came to regret the decision: I started in the morning, roasting beef bones in a hot oven to caramelize them before adding them to a pot of water so they could simmer throughout the day. Periodically, I’d skim off the foam and add water back to keep the liquid level even. Then, hours after I’d begun, I strained out the heavy bones to get my broth, at which point I hadn’t even started the real recipe I’d wanted to make: French onion soup.

I love to cook, and I’m not opposed to a project — for lasagna, I make the pasta from scratch and grind the meat myself — but broth is such a drag. Better to leave it to the professionals. Something like a stock for cooking is one thing, but the broth I’m after, with just a few weeks left before warmer spring weather, is unadulterated, rich, and warming and tastes of little more than the hours that it’s simmered. (Okay, some mirepoix is fine, too.)

Yes, there are businesses that specialize in just such a thing, but the white-washed chains tend to focus more on add-ins and subscription programs. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I’m personally not interested in turmeric and coconut milk, or even the dubious wellness-speak that tends to pepper the menus at these places. Instead, I go straight to the source: a butcher shop.

A nose-to-tail purveyor of local meats is the ideal broth hookup, not only because they can likely tell you exactly where their animals were raised — as in the actual farm — but because the broth is made as a matter of course to reduce waste. “We get between two and four cows a week, and every single bone is used,” says Jade Hennessee-Golden, a butcher at Williamsburg’s the Meat Hook. She estimates around two pounds of bones go into every quart of her shop’s beef broth, which runs $12 — not as cheap as a jar of bouillon, but better in every way imaginable.

In Park Slope, Winner Butcher sells its unseasoned meat stocks for $10 (they also have their own flavored soups, like a gelatinous tonkotsu and a gingery “drunken chicken” broth fortified with shaoxing wine and peppercorns). I also enjoyed diluting their pucks of beef demi-glace with boiling water for something closer to instant soup. Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market sells demi-glace, too, plus to-go cups of the “broth of the day” for $5.

Even the narrowest shop, like Prospect Butcher Co. in Prospect Heights, will have multiple varieties of broth stacked in the freezer. My favorite was barnyard broth, $14, which was boosted by the distinct flavor of the lamb bones. It also sells $6 cups of “hot sippin bone broth,” made from the previous day’s leftover rotisserie chickens and spiced with star anise. I think of it as an amuse-bouche: Even through a lid, it’s aromatic with a gravy-like depth.

The real goal is to, ahem, stock up, so a bunch of frozen quarts can be stacked into your own freezer. I was stuck at home with a cold the other week, and I could just grab what I needed from my own supply without having to worry about shopping, cooking, or even really doing many dishes. The hardest part was waiting for the frozen block of broth to heat up on my stove — essentially as much work as I would have had to do for concentrated soup from a can. I suppose I could sacrifice a quart or two from my own supply for egg-drop or a quick bowl of pastina, but I usually just take it straight, in a mug with a wedge of lemon, like a hot cup of tea.

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Frenchette Bakery Is the Right Kind of Musuem Café

Museum food is a hit-and-miss proposition. On one side of the divide stand museums like the MoMA, whose Danny Meyer–owned, Thomas Allan–run restaurant has secured its Michelin stars many years running; on the other, the eh-okay sandwich bar at the Met. Between the two, the Whitney has erred toward the MoMA side of the occasion. When it moved down to the Meatpacking District, it took its restaurant, the Meyer-led Untitled — reliably good and appreciably Greenmarket-y, a modest cousin to Union Square Café — with it (while Ignacio Mattos’s Flora Bar moved into the space it vacated after the uptown museum became the Met Breuer).

Untitled moved out of the Whitney for good in 2021, and this past fall, the increasingly imperial team of Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr opened an outpost of their Frenchette Bakery in the space, which has been accented with a new acquisition — Rashid Johnson’s New Poetry, a gridded-steel sculpture in the form of a shelving unit stuffed with ceramic planters, greenery, books, and TV monitors, which extends through the museum’s plate-glass front to the sidewalk outside — but otherwise unchanged. (Museum admission is still not required.)

A Whitney Frenchette can’t insist on the decorum the original Frenchette does. I had my first lunch there, after a visit to Calder’s Circus, with a 3-year-old; our waitress, unfussed, sailed over with a box of crayons for the paper place mat and a kids’ menu. The menu leans on salads and pizzas designed to spook neither children nor tourists: turkey and cheddar with dijonnaise, roast beef with horseradish, plain pizza (not even margherita; it’s just marked “plain”). But while he ate a dutiful slice or two of plain, Godson Ben was a convert to big-kid fare. “Yum yum,” he declared, slurping spoonfuls of his mom’s russet-colored ribollita, though carefully avoiding a few scattered beans. Thereafter, with a small finger pointed in my direction, he demanded half of the housemade sourdough roll from my tuna niçoise sandwich, undeterred by its briny caper mayo.

Back another day for an adults-only meal, I was even happier. A small selection of lightly ambitious pastas and entrées comes from Frenchette alum Angela Zeng — grilled arctic char with mussels in an (Ellsworth) Kelly green watercress broth, duck confit with white beans — and in all cases, they are significantly less expensive than their equivalents at Frenchette Père. But the most exciting offerings, as befits anywhere with “bakery” in the name, are the baked goods.

Regulars at Frenchette Bakery in the small, former Arcade Bakery space are familiar with Peter Edris’s einkorn country loaf and olive-studded Provençal fougasse, as well as its laminated viennoiserie. With the greater space available here, executive pastry chef Michelle Palazzo was able to add composed desserts. At the table next to mine, a couple poring over folding subway maps shared a chocolate mousse, cut with crème fraîche chantilly cream, while one farther than that, a Goth with hand tattoos split what may be the longest eclair I’ve ever seen — éclair suprême, says the menu — with her friends. (“The eclair looks quite big, but it’s very fluffy,” the waiter assured us.) Undecided between a tarte au citron and a pistachio Paris-Brest, I got both. Under an onion dome of bronzed meringue dusted with lime zest, Palazzo snuck not only a tart lemon curd, but the excellent surprise of minced grapefruit and orange. Her Paris-Brest is piped with pistachio cream, not the pallid, princessy pastel of the usual pastry palette, but a deep, boggy, almost khaki green that only a true glut of nuts can provide.

Photo: Hugo Yu

Bar Contra Will Be a New Destination for Modernist Drinks

In the lobby bar of a high-end Manhattan hotel on a recent evening, Dave Arnold had a question, and nobody had an answer. He was curious about some white froth that sat on the surface of a satsuma margarita. He had ascertained that it was vegan, but neither he nor his companions — the chefs Fabían von Hauske and Jeremiah Stone — could figure out what was in it. The three flagged down a server, who also didn’t know. She committed to asking someone at the bar who might. By then, though, Arnold had already moved on to more pressing lines of questioning: Do you ever accidentally staple yourself? What’s the wine that, when someone orders it, you judge the most? Don’t you think caper berries are just … too big?

The three had gotten together to talk about Bar Contra, which will open this spring in the Orchard Street space that housed von Hauske and Stone’s popular tasting-menu restaurant Contra for the past decade. They’ll serve a menu of one-bite snacks, and Arnold will handle the drinks. The night was also a reunion: Sixteen years ago, von Hauske was Arnold’s intern when he ran the technology department at the French Culinary Institute. (Stone worked in the school’s nearby commissary kitchen.) Von Hauske’s first task was to purchase a duck from a live poultry shop on 126th Street. Arnold wanted to run it through a vintage press donated to the school by Daniel Boulud. Together, Von Hauske and Arnold would go on to distill vodka with canned pumpkin purée, turn potatoes into ice cream, and churn deodorized cocoa powder with freeze-dried tomatoes to make “ketchup chocolate” that, Arnold recalls, “everybody hated.”

Arnold left the FCI to open Booker and Dax, the cocktail laboratory in the back of the original Momofuku Ssäm Bar. It was as much a place to grab a drink as it was a showcase for Arnold’s interests; he still remembers the crestfallen expression on the face of his first customer, who chanced in and ordered a vodka tonic. “Give me 15 minutes,” he told her. “I just have to get out the carbonator.” Quickly, the bar found its fans, who still remember it — as well as Existing Conditions, which Arnold opened with Don Lee afterward — as a place where perfectly clear liquor would taste viscerally of fresh banana, Thai basil was was extracted with liquid nitrogen, and the art on display was a stark photograph of Arnold, shield in hand, facing off against a flamethrower. Along the way he became known as the bartender who would caramelize sugars in rye cocktails by impaling them with a 1,600-degree nickel-steel-alloy poker.

The theatrics weren’t surprising to anyone who knew that Arnold had gotten his master’s degree in performance sculpture. He regularly put on productions about “expressing autonomy over machines.” (A 1998 New York Times review describes one of the works as “a big welded-steel treadmill … a brutal Rube Goldberg–like contraption in which giant metal hammers threaten to clobber the runner who slows down.”)

In 2013, while Arnold was super-chilling Champagne coupes with liquid nitrogen at Booker and Dax, von Hauske and Stone opened Contra, where the $55 tasting menu was an antidote to Manhattan’s stilted fine-dining restaurants. They followed it up with Wildair and opened or consulted on a number of other projects, such as the Tusk Bar at the Evelyn Hotel, Ray’s Bar in Greenpoint, and Jac’s on Bond.

If there is still a market for real culinary ingenuity in the era of sandwich-flavored cocktails and TikTok sauce explosions, it will arrive in the form that these three have earmarked: à la carte and affordable, with the potential for shock and delight. This city is thick with men who threaten to “do something different,” but Stone, von Hauske, and Arnold are among the few players in the city who could actually pull it off.

Photo: Hugo Yu

They know what they’re trying to avoid: “We don’t want it to be conceptual, and we don’t want you to wait for an hour to get a drink,” says von Hauske. They also know that there’s a fine line between a bar that puts on a decent show and a gimmick. “A good story gets people through the door,” Arnold acknowledges, but they don’t want Bar Contra to be a place where drinkers are bogged down with technical jargon or long-winded descriptions of how certain drinks came to be. They firmly believe that everything they serve should taste good and make sense on its own terms.

So, what will they serve? Some version of homemade Dippin’ Dots isn’t out of the question, but they say they’ll remain in R& D mode until the last possible moment. “The menu is gonna happen like this,” Arnold says with a snap. “We’ll make something fun,” Stone says.

In the lobby bar, Arnold never did get any answers to his question about the foam. Instead, as they continued to debate Bar Contra’s eventual shape, von Hauske ordered a Sazerac, Stone ordered Cynar on the rocks, and Arnold got a glass of Champagne and when it arrived, maybe for the first time, he had no questions at all.

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The Timeless Egg Dish Taking Over New York Menus

The most Instagrammed restaurant dish in the city is a $19 serving of two boiled eggs. They are halved and set face down before being blanketed with downy mayonnaise, a sprinkling of trout roe, and snips of chive. They are on the menu at the Far West Village brasserie Libertine, and they are not even the most opulent or expensive eggs in town. The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg serves a single egg, cut in half, on a bed of diced kohlrabi, cloaked in a marbled mixture of mayonnaise and squid ink, punctuated with small mounds of Osetra caviar. It costs $25.

Both dishes are revisionist oeufs mayonnaise, the old-fashioned bistro favorite that is, at its most economical, a one-bite, deconstructed deviled egg without the paprika. “It’s eggs on eggs,” says Jake Leiber, who runs Le Crocodile with co-chef Aidan O’Neal. “There’s something amazing about being able to make a dish with one ingredient.” Over the years, fans have bemoaned oeufs mayo’s struggle to make it big Stateside, but at this moment, a New Yorker on an egg hunt can order versions at not only Libertine, the Four Horsemen, and Le Crocodile but Le French Diner and Frenchette, too. Earlier this year at the Ha’s Đặc Biệt pop-up at Gem Wine, Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha served a version topped with pork floss and fresh chiles. “Everyone’s oeufs mayo is different,” says Leiber. (Le Crocodile’s eggs — $12 for three halves — are marinated for several days in soy sauce and mirin and covered in mayo spiked with yuzu and cava-vinegar “mayonnaise chaud” that’s emulsified over gentle heat before chilling to serve.)

A cynic could interpret this recent eggsplosion as a way to pad menus with a high-margin assemblage of precooked eggs and pre-batched mayo. But for chefs, the retro standby has become an industry handshake and a challenge to make something interesting with a dowdy blueprint. “We’re trying to be creative; we’re trying to do something a little different,” says Four Horsemen chef Nick Curtola, who, along with his junior sous chef Dylan Takao, has offered a number of seasonal oeufs mayo incorporating ingredients such as fava beans, butternut squash, and charred leeks.

One factor working in oeufs mayo’s favor is that pretty much every version of the dish goes well with wine: “In the last ten years or so, there’s been a ton of wine-focused restaurants popping up,” Curtola points out. The dish “fits those early days of trying to mimic some of the neo-bistros in Paris, as well as some of the natural wine bars of the early 2010s.”

Photo: Hugo Yu

In France, those bistros are going through their own oeufs-mayo renaissance. In 2018, the Association de Sauvegarde de l’Oeuf Mayonnaise started hosting annual world championships for chefs who believe their oeuf mayo is the best. One winner from 2019, the €2.50 rendition from Bouillon Pigalle in Paris, went on to become the most-ordered delivery item in France. In the ensuing years, the championship has brought oeuf mayo to an international stage and fostered a friendly sense of competition among chefs who are trying to put their own stamp on the dish.

Libertine chef and partner Max Mackinnon tells me that oeuf mayo has been a permanent fixture on his menu since opening last year, in part because it’s something he orders any time he sees it on a menu. “For whatever reason, it’s caught on with different chefs,” he tells me. “It’s simple, but not always easy.”

The mayonnaise, like the eggs, is theoretically straightforward to make but offers room for flexibility, personalization, and obsession. Mackinnon insists on making the restaurant’s mayo himself. His recipe — anchored with garlic, Dijon, and Savagnin vinegar — gets thickened into a stiff emulsion before he whisks in cold water to loosen the mixture so it will drape elegantly over each egg. “It can look right when you do it, then when you go back half an hour later, it’s too set or too thick,” he says. “You have to find that balance and do it a lot to develop a feel for it.”

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