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You’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. Midway through a recent meal at Ilis, a new, dramatic tasting-menu restaurant run by the Danish chef Mads Refslund, I looked up from a piece of carmine-red bigeye tuna loin, mirror-glazed in stone-fruit vinegar and only barely cooked, atop a square of kombu, and wondered, for a moment, exactly where I was. I knew, of course, that I was in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint, but there was something about the evening that was disorienting, that smacked of elsewhere . Much of this could be attributed to the sheer size of the space, a cavernous former warehouse with wood-beamed ceilings and exposed-brick walls. Loungey sofas and oversized dining tables form a narrow perimeter around a centerpiece open kitchen, where a phalanx of cooks moves in focussed rhythms. Some of the feeling, I suppose, I could credit to the cumulative effects of a sumac-and-rum cocktail, followed by a zingy combination of Genziello (a gentian limoncello), grapes, and navy-strength gin. “I feel like we’re in Mexico City,” one of my companions said, unprompted, in an extraordinary act of psychic synchronicity. “Lisbon,” another corrected. “Definitely not New York,” the third agreed. Ilis 150 Green St., Brooklyn ( Tasting menu $195-$295. ) The placelessness that suffuses Ilis is also, I suspect, part of the design. Much has been made of Refslund’s involvement with Noma, the ultra-influential Copenhagen restaurant that became famous for turning hyperlocal, often bizarre ingredients into bite-size, highly specific documents of the natural world outside the restaurant’s doors. There’s a bit of Noma’s DNA at Ilis, in the audacity of its creative ambition, and the reverence it has for cooking as a form of art. But where Noma, at least in those early years, was all about anchoring the ephemerality of food in concrete notions of place and time, Ilis seems to be committed, body and soul, to abstraction. “Mads loves the idea of using part of an animal as the tool to eat it,” a chef-cum-server said, as she […]
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