e a t e r y R O W

COLONIE

• 127 Atlantic Avenue

• Brooklyn, NY 11201

• (718) 855-7500 •

Uniqueness, by its very nature, is rare, and most restaurants are not. From fast food chains to Chinese takeout spots to diners to Italian restaurants to French bistros to dive bars, the thing that they all have in common is that the one over here looks like the one over there which looks like the one over thataway. Colonie is part of a newer version of this carbon copying, a subset of American dining that I will call Modern Brooklynian (some might call it Portlandian, but I don't live on that coast, so I won't). Modern Brooklynian is organic, or local, or both. If possible, it has an open kitchen where the chefs and the customers can size each other up. There is, of course, raw brick, lightbulbs with exposed filaments, and copious usage of fonts taken from a Music Man era barbershop window. The beer is craft, the cocktails are served in coupes, the fish is served with its head. 

This is by no means putting down this style of restaurant. In fact, I love this kind of restaurant. To me, they epitomize a kind of urban dining at its best. Typically not run by superchefs who spend one day a week in the kitchen and the other six on the Rachael Ray Show hawking a line of Chinese-made cutlery with their name stamped on it, they actually care to make your experience enjoyable. The customers are locals or, at the very least, not tourists. The food matters at places like these, not the show. You eat, you laugh, you have a good time. For some people, they like the comfort of an Olive Garden. I like the comfort of a Modern Brooklynian restaurant like Colonie. But as I imply, Colonie is not unique. There's a Colonie in just about every neighborhood. They just aren't called Colonie. There's No. 7 in Fort Greene, Fort Defiance in Red Hook, Front Towards Enemy in Astoria, The Penrose on the Upper East Side, the now-closed-but-I-loved-it Goat Town in the Village. The list goes on. Doesn't mean it wasn't good.

Pike's girlfriend, Agnelle, happens to live just down the block from Colonie and when they asked if I was interested in going with them one day, I didn't hesitate. Like most Modern Brooklynians, Colonie fits the visual bill. Brick, open kitchen, yupster architechts in plaid, fish with the head still on it. We started with half a dozen Oysters. Colonie regrettably only sells these in groups of six, so we each got two. I would have liked to have been able to order nine. First world problems. It's hard to give a restaurant credit for something that they had no hand in beyond sending someone down to Oyster Mart, but these were extremely good. Robust and very smooth. Don't ask me what kind they were, because I not only don't remember, I never even paid attention. I'm not a food snob, I just play one on the internet. After that Pike and Agnelle both ordered the Squash Soup, a pureed butternut squash soup made with creme fraiche, sage, and hazelnut. They said it was good. I didn't get around to stealing any sips. My appetizer was the Winter Citrus, a salad of sorts made from rye berries, grapefruit, whipped goat cheese, and mint. It was amazing. I absolutely did not see this dish coming and it was the highlight of the night for me. Who knows how healthy it was, but it was light and refreshing and colorful. It would actually be a great summer dish. I can't recommend it enough.

For her entree, Agnelle decided to try the Blistered Duck Egg with mushrooms and wheatberry. Agnelle, Pike, and myself have something in common. When we see something on a menu that strikes us as unusual, we become very very tempted to order it. Some friends of mine are less adventurous. Unusual food = steer clear. Not us. In this case, the three of us debated. Who would order it? Do you think it's any good? What does blistering even do? In the end Agnelle grabbed it. To boil blistered duck egg into lay terms, it's basically an over easy egg, described in a fancy way. "When you pop the yolk," the waiter glowed "the yolk runs over the mushrooms and creates a delightful sauce." Salesmanship. I wasn't very impressed. Raise your hand if you know what duck egg tastes like. Raise 'em up. ... No one's hand is up. You're all wrong! It tastes like egg. In this case, egg over mushroom. I wasn't very impressed. My choice was the Rainbow Trout with fennel. It was served whole, sans organs or bones and was very good. Very light. Cottonball soft. If you like our fish as fishy-less as possible, this is what you want. It was a wee bit bland, thanks in large part to the fish being served whole, rather than as a filet served in a sauce, and the skin was somewhat like armor plating. It was easy enough to reach underneath and scoop out the goodies, but trying to gnaw through nature's chainmail wasn't my idea of a good time. I would still get it again, but I'd be cognizant of what I'm getting. Pike ordered the Bavette Cut steak, which was delicious, served with french fries and side salad mostly there to add color to the plate. Very tender, very flavorful, perfectly made. Few know that it's actually a less expensive cut of meat than flank steak. Pike won the entree portion of the competition.

In addition to our meals, we ordered one additional item from the "small" section of the menu, the Brussels Sprouts. First, I don't know why this was in the small section. It was huge. It was a bucket of brussels sprouts. Second, they stunk. Don't waste your money.

Whenever they come here, one of the things that Pike and Agnelle like to get is a dessert of Fresh Doughnuts. They're little doughnut balls filled with caramel custard, sitting in caramel custard, and dusted with sugar. Fresh doughnuts are always hard to pass up and I'm glad that we didn't. If Colonie does one thing well, it's getting me to describe their food as "light'; this is no exception. Be careful though. Eat these the wrong way and you'll get some doughnut love on your shirt.

DOUGHNUT PLANT • 220 West 23rd Street • New York, NY 10011 • (212) 505-3700 x220 •

Chocolate, wine, even pizza. These indulgences at the very least come with the paper thin veneer of having at least something healthy about them. Antioxidants or vitamins or calcium. You can fool yourself into thinking that they aren't so bad. But there's nothing healthy about a doughnut. The best thing that can be said about a doughnut is that at least it isn't a macaron. But other than that, it's sugar, filled with berry flavored sugar, covered in a glaze of sugar, with little sugar pellets peppered on top. In a world where we get seemingly endlessly barraged with foods that can give us cancer or heart disease or ulcers or just kill us outright, in a world where spinach might have salmonella, your whole grain burrito might have listeria, or your carrots might have e coli, eating a doughnut is like giving the middle finger to anxiety. It's a giant "suck it" to that coworker of yours who boastfully says "I haven't eaten at a McDonald's in, like, five years." And thus did I go to Doughnut Plant, New York's doughnut factory mini-chain, which offers up wacky flavors, rather than focusing on the kind of stuff everyone else makes. 

Doughnut Plant is not Krispie Kreme, or even Crumbs. Those companies over-extended themselves, only to have been stretched so thin that by the time the next inevitable diet craze swept through, they'd be sucked like a leaf along in its wake. Instead, Doughnut Plant has a handful of locations in NYC (and a couple in Japan) and mostly sells to one-percenter supermarkets like Citarella, and fancypants bodegas like Dean & Deluca (let's be honest, that's what they are). Doughnut Plant also can't be losing money being hitched to Shake Shack.

Like I said, Doughnut Plant has has a bunch of NYC locations. I ventured into the Chelsea one and promptly... did not get a seat. There ain't too many tables in this place, and what few there were were all taken. I placed my order and gazed around. Eventually I noticed that if you squeeze past the napkin thingamajigs, there's a bench hidden over by the window. I plopped down, pulled out a New York Times crossword and indulged. One cannot get a handle on a doughnut shoppe by eating only one kind of doughnut. So I got nine. One for then and there, eight for later. Additionally, I got a cup of the worst iced coffee of all time, which I donated to the storm drain upon leaving.

Above, you will see one of Doughnut Plant's signature square doughnuts (they invented square doughnuts for some reason). Vanilla Bean & Jam. It's like a normal jelly doughnut, but rather than one big pocket of jam that squeezes out onto your lap if you eat it the wrong way, this one has a filling that magically works its way through the entire square loop without evidence of a filler hole. It's hard to beat a classic, and this version was one of the best of the lot of nine. Oh Lord, was it sweet. I got a cavity after just three bites. Bring some Wet Wipes, because that sugar glazing will get all over your hands. Another square doughnut, the Peanut Butter & Jam is literally a peanut butter and jelly sandwich turned into a doughnut. It's amazing, and if you like PB&Js, you'd be remiss to pass on this option. Likewise, if you like creme brulees, the Creme Brulee doughnut is a complete clone of the French dessert, right down to it's hard shell sugar top. Incredible. The last of the doughnut remakes was the Coffee Cake doughnut, which tasted just like a coffee cake, right down to its espresso aftertaste.

Much larger than the standard cake doughnuts is a line of "yeast' doughnuts, much softer and fluffier than the others. I decided to try an old standby, Vanilla Bean, a standard glazed. "For the traditionalists," the menu says. And yes, it fills that roll. It was definitely fluffy. Not bad, but hardly unique from what you might be able to get elsewhere. Traditional. Yummy, but traditional.

Manhattan Cream, their version of the Boston Cream (sorry Yankees fans, Boston wins this time), and the Wild Blueberry, which they say is made from "fresh greenmarket" blueberries, were the next two that I tried. The Manhattan cream was spongy and elastic. It fought being bitten into or cut. Rather than biting through the chocolate frosting and cake to have it erupt a flood of cream (creme?) it... didn't. There was a little something inside, but really, imagine taking a Boston cream doughnut, mashing it up into a paste, then reshaping it back into its proper shape and turning it into rubber. Everything was happening all at once and, sadly, the whole was less than the sum of its parts. The wild blueberry was good though. A good, solid blueberry doughnut. I liked it. I'm not really sure what more anyone can say.

Finally, Doughnut Plant has a few Japanese locations, and the menu reflects that somewhat, with four Japanese-inspired flavors. I tried two, the Yuzu cake, and the Black Sesame Cream. The yuzu was a light, lemon flavored doughnut that didn't really break new ground, and was quite pleasant. The black sesame, on the other hand, is definitely an acquired taste. You have to reeeeally like bittersweet sesame paste. I should have gone with the green tea flavor.

Doughnuts at Doughnut Plant average $3.75 each. Some a little less, some a little more.