For his first Manhattan restaurant, elegance and timelessness replace the Brooklyn hipness that powered his previous places.
For his first Manhattan restaurant, elegance and timelessness replace the Brooklyn hipness that powered his previous places.
When the Brooklyn restaurateur Andrew Tarlow was scouting sites for his new restaurant, he wasn’t focused on location. What he was looking for was good ghosts.
The space he eventually chose for Borgo, on East 27th Street in Manhattan, had excellent ones. It wasn’t just that the building had what real-estate agents call good bones — rooms that were big but not cavernous, a large garden out back, a working fireplace and a wood-burning oven. It was the palpable feeling that those rooms, which once housed the long-lived Pugliese restaurant I Trulli, had been well used and well loved during the previous quarter-century. And Mr. Tarlow said he wanted to steward it through the next one.
That’s exactly what he’d done in 1999 with his first restaurant, Diner, refurbishing an old Pullman dining car beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. When it first opened, eating at Diner was like a raucous dinner party in an artist friend’s loft. Packed wall-to-wall with hipsters, the scene was buzzy, the music loud and the farm-to-table menu concise enough to be scribbled, ad hoc, onto the butcher-paper-covered tables.
The spirit of Mr. Tarlow’s dinner party still hovers at Borgo, more than two decades and several restaurants on. (Mr. Tarlow also owns Achilles Heel, Marlow & Sons and Roman’s with his wife, Kate Huling.) It’s just that the vibe has mellowed, the boisterous thrum settling into a convivial hum.