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  Chayon admits that people are still afraid at night. But he sees the seeds of economic revitalization. “It’s the next Williamsburg,” he says.

  Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was once one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. In the 1990s, artists and writers, attracted by cheap rents, created a small colony of first-wave bohemian gentrifiers. Soon after came the trendy businesses and then the young professionals. Before long, it was crowned a hipster capital. Williamsburg is now seeing multi-billion-dollar development, with a new Whole Foods, an Apple Store, and luxury apartment buildings sprouting like giant beanstalks along the East River waterfront.

  Chayon sees a similar process beginning on the South Bronx waterfront. “Already the gay community and a lot of artists are moving up here,” he says. I began to think the restaurant was less a symbol of sushi egalitarianism and more a symbol of a neighborhood in the midst of demographic change. Williamsburg got its first sushi restaurant in 1998, once it was already well into the process of gentrification.

  While Chayon and I sat chatting, my food arrived. The restaurant has a long list of healthy and affordable food options, including Lentil Soup for $5.95, seaweed salad for $5.50, and a salmon avocado roll for $6.95. After the long bike ride, I decided to splurge on a lunch special that came with two sushi rolls. First came spring rolls served with a shot glass of sweet-and-sour sauce. Their flaky texture was crisp and paired well with the gooey sauce. Next came a surprise—tuna bruschetta, made of crispy rice and potato, guacamole, and spicy tuna. It’s Chayon’s best-selling appetizer, and small wonder. Last came the sushi rolls, salmon avocado, and spicy tuna, which hit the spot on one of the first hot days of an approaching New York summer. At $12.45, this lunch special has to be one of the best sushi deals in town.

  Ceetay Asian Fusion is an oasis for South Bronxites who want healthier food options at prices only slightly higher than neighboring fast-food restaurants. But recent studies suggest that the solution to bad eating habits in poor neighborhoods must go deeper than simply bringing healthy options to the area. In 2010, the New York City government experimented with a tax subsidy program to bring supermarkets to poor areas, but a 2015 study deemed it mostly a failure; a new supermarket in the South Bronx neighborhood of Morrisania, just north of Mott Haven, had failed to change local eating habits in any substantial way relative to those in statistically similar neighborhoods. The researchers concluded that simply introducing wholesome food options is not enough to spur behavioral change and that a more concerted effort is needed to make it affordable and enticing. Perhaps that’s where efforts like Ceetay come in: restaurants that can make healthy fish dishes appealing in communities resigned to subpar options.

  Chayon, the sushi pioneer of Mott Haven, is now the father of a 10-month-old baby. He and his wife have since moved to Washington Heights, northwest of Ceetay at the top of Manhattan, but his life remains firmly rooted in the South Bronx. Every May 2, his wife’s birthday, they throw a block party for the community with free food and a DJ. Judging by his many stellar Yelp reviews, it’s a community that is growing to love Chayon’s food.

  “I never expected to find a place like this here in the S. Bronx… and I live here,” says Steven “IntrepidBronx” B.; “still, the food here is top notch, and merits the attention of the snobbiest foodies.” Steven gave the restaurant five out of five stars. Leslie L., after ordering Ceetay delivery, was beyond happy: “They delivered to the door!!! Not to the lobby… but to the apartment door! To many people that’s normal. But if you live in the South Bronx… that’s effing amazing.” Aida O. simply gushes, “OMG!!! This sushi is great! Nice to know that I can get quality food in my neck of the woods :).”

  Ceetay Asian Fusion may or may not change local eating habits—but the city is certainly better with it there.

  Noma Co-Founder Claus Meyer’s Next Big Project Is in One of Brooklyn’s Poorest Neighborhoods

  BY JANE BLACK

  From GrubStreet.com

  Food policy and sustainability are recurrent themes in Brooklyn-based journalist Jane Black’s deep portfolio. Here, she focuses on an inspiring trend: socially conscious chefs developing restaurants for underserved neighborhoods. Here’s how Danish culinary star Claus Meyer did it.

  Claus Meyer sees me as soon as he walks into the 3 Black Cats Café, a new coffeehouse on Belmont Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn. I’m easy to spot because I’m the only patron in the cavernous space. Still, he stops to talk to Ionna Jimenez, one of the three sisters who own the café, then persuades her to pose for a picture with him and his lieutenant Lucas Denton. He quizzes her about what kind of cakes she has today and how late the café is open. He wants to take some carrot cake home to his family.

  Meyer is the last person who needs to take dessert home. The Noma co-founder, who has called New York home for more than a year now, could easily pick up a few sea-buckthorn tarts at his bakery in Williamsburg or at the Great Northern Food Hall, which he opened this summer in Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall. Or he could have the pastry chef at Agern (which recently won three stars from the New York Times and praise from Adam Platt) whip up an extra goat’s milk cheesecake and sweet pepper sorbet. But Meyer wants to make an impression in Brownsville, and maybe even a few friends in the neighborhood. This winter, he will open what may be his most ambitious project in New York: a restaurant, housed in a former dollar store, run by and for the people of Brownsville, one of New York’s poorest and most troubled neighborhoods: “I had a dream how I would explain myself to my grandkids in 20 years,” he says when he joins me in a bright-orange booth. “I didn’t want to be only a businessman. I wanted to be a social philanthropist and also mentor people in the same way other people had mentored me.”

  Meyer, 52, is a culinary legend in his native Denmark. For years he had his own TV cooking show, and he co-founded Noma, which is consistently rated one of the best restaurants in the world. When he moved to New York last August, he was invariably described as “tall” or even “towering,” perhaps because we expect our Viking invaders, even culinary ones, to be giants. Meyer is, for the record, six-foot-two, and he is earnest—very earnest. He tells me that as he has gotten older he has realized that “what really counts are the number of people who have looked at you with tears in their eyes for what you have done for them.” Over the course of several hours, Meyer starts so many sentences with “the dream is” that I ask him if that is a direct translation from Danish. He pauses to think about it, then admits, slightly abashed: “No, I think it’s just me.”

  The chef has been idealistic for his whole career. He was the driver behind the New Nordic Food Manifesto, which in the mid-’00s shifted the culinary center of gravity from Barcelona to Copenhagen, from the modernist (hot potato foams) to locally rooted and environmentally sustainable (snails and moss). Eight years later, Meyer tried to do the same thing for Bolivia, working with NGOs to establish a national gastronomic vision and Gustu, a fine-dining restaurant in La Paz, to embody those principles.

  In Bolivia, though, Meyer decreed that his restaurant also would train and employ disadvantaged youth. And when that proved tricky—poor kids with no restaurant experience lacked the grace required for fine dining—he tacked, launching a network of affordable cafeterias to train students. The graduates are eligible to continue their studies at Gustu, which is now rated one of the top 50 restaurants in Latin America.

  Meyer’s big ideas aren’t limited to the food realm. Along with two friends, he recently invested in a second-division Danish soccer club, his home team as a child. Already, Nykøbing FC has graduated to the top division. “The dream is to take it to the champion’s league for 2025,” he says. “It’s as improbable as making a great restaurant in La Paz.”

  Compared to La Paz, New York might seem like it would be easy. But the city has frustrated Meyer, who would, if he could, be doing more than he already is—and faster. (Two more restaurants, still under wraps, are in development.) Locating at Grand Central Terminal has pro
ved a particular headache, as the city’s notoriously onerous building regulations are even more so in a historic landmark. Among his complaints: The food hall has reached its limits on electricity (“so if you want to use a food processor or put another lamp in so you can see your bread in the darkness, it’s impossible”) and bandwidth (“I have to fucking finance infrastructure just to take payments on credit cards.”) “I have been in the restaurant business for 30 years,” he says. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

  The Brownsville project, officially known as the Brownsville Community Culinary Center & Neighborhood Eatery, also has taken longer to get off the ground than Meyer had hoped. In part, it’s because Meyer and Denton are determined to consult community leaders at every step, building a restaurant that appeals to current residents, rather than the gentrifying hordes. But just negotiating a lease took a maddening six months, and Melting Pot, Meyer’s nonprofit that is backing the project, has struggled to raise funds. Brownsville may have the highest concentration of public housing in North America, but it’s still New York, and real estate, and everything else, is expensive. Meyer has assembled $1.1 million—more than the total to build and open Gustu—and he imagined (or perhaps dreamed) that when rich New Yorkers heard about the Brownsville project and his track record, the rest of the money would materialize.

  After coffee, Denton, clad all in black, gives Meyer and me a quick tour of the still-empty, dusty space a few doors down from 3 Black Cats Café. He points out where the 45-seat restaurant will be; when it opens it will be the only sit-down restaurant in Brownsville, and will include production and teaching kitchens and a café to serve fresh breads and coffee.

  Next, Denton whisks us off to a nearby church, where the first cohort of culinary students is training until the new space is ready. After greeting the students with a series of hugs and high fives, Meyer huddles with Mette Strarup, the Danish chef overseeing the culinary training. He wants an update on whether the kids have been paid: It had been a contentious issue, with Melting Pot proposing that trainees receive a small stipend and community leaders adamant that the kids have “skin in the game.” It wasn’t what Meyer’s people expected. “We have our ideas of how we want it to work,” Denton says, “but for it to actually work, we have to be flexible.” The trainees worked 30 hours a week for three months, but it was tough for the students: One is a single mom, another suddenly found herself with no place to live. When the first checks arrived that week, Strarup reports, 22-year-old Tameel Marshall did a victory lap around the kitchen.

  The students cook lunch every day, and in honor of Meyer’s visit, they lay a long table with wildflowers and sprigs of leaves, interspersed with green Post-it Notes stating “the plants are not edible.” On the menu: jambalaya, salad with a creamy lemon dressing, and a salted jalapeño hot sauce (Meyer is crazy about hot sauce). It’s the kind of food—what Meyer dubs “modern soul food”—that the new restaurant hopes to serve. As for what they’ll charge, that’s still up in the air.

  This was always the plan because, Meyer says, to appeal to residents, the food has to be of the neighborhood: familiar and delicious, but healthier than the fast food that dominates. His students agree. Once everyone has served themselves, Meyer asks each student to take a turn talking about—yep—his or her dreams for the program. Nkenge Wiggins, 33, the single mom, says that after working in a hospital, she hopes Melting Pot can help change the culture of Brownsville, its sedentary ways, and the reliance on fried chicken. “Well, not really fried chicken,” she adds with a laugh. “You gotta keep the fried chicken.”

  “I agree,” Meyer chimes in. However great his enthusiasm for social change, it’s good food that gets Meyer most fired up. Whether it’s the students’ hot sauce, which would be “goddamn amazing on a piece of cooked pork or chicken that is kind of bland, a little to the fatty side” or a modern version of oxtail he cooked at a Brownsville senior center that was “very intense, clean, very bright. Not muddy with all the fat in it, and packed with fresh ginger”—his years as a TV chef have given him the gift of letting an audience taste without ever taking a bite. “It’s not that I’m tired of winning Michelin stars,” he says with a laugh. “I do want to have three stars in the New York Times. But…” He stumbles, starting several sentences as he reaches for the right words. “It is correct to say this feels right. And it would feel very wrong not to try to do this.”

  The Last European Christmas

  BY MARINA O’LOUGHLIN

  From Bon Appetit

  Holidays brings out the traditionalists in all of us. But what if your traditions are boldly, proudly polyglot, as British travel and food writer Marina O’Loughlin’s are? And is there room in today’s super-charged political climate for such an inclusive approach?

  Brought up in Scotland, with an Irish father and Italian mother, I’ve never felt British—“Heinz 57 Varieties” was the family joke. And despite living in England for years, it’s painfully clear I’m not English. The UK’s recent Brexit has left me feeling more out on a limb. Who even am I? For those of us who came up along with the EU these past two decades, and who have long been grateful for England’s vibrant melting-pot heritage, the vote is little short of jaw-dropping.

  I always believed that my country rejoiced in diversity, especially when it came to eating. Even the traditional British Christmas dinner is a mongrel thing. There’s turkey, of course, originally from the Americas. Its trimmings: cranberry sauce, also American; brussels sprouts—well, the clue’s in the name; bread sauce, a carryover from medieval times and none more English, but spiked with exotic cloves. Christmas pudding, shimmering with Sri Lankan cinnamon and reeling from its thorough soaking in French brandy. And roast spuds, obviously; each year the mission to perfect them intensified. How much rosemary? Olive oil or goose fat? Eventually a mixture of the two was declared potato perfection.

  My family put its own spin on this menu, and it was at Christmas that our “foreign” roots came together in a joyful collision. The meal kicked off with brodo, homemade chicken broth that my mother beefed up like a true Italian with stock cubes. In its limpid depths bobbed croutons, basically cubes of eggy French toast, known forever as “cretins.” Nothing came from supermarkets. All roasts were ordered in advance from Vincent’s, the local “family butchers,” a phrase I’ve always found a little sinister.

  The least popular item was Dad’s Irish spiced beef—its meat crusted outside from a coating of weapons-grade spicing: clove, nutmeg, mace, black pepper. The roast was lurid pink inside from the virtually tasteless preserving ingredient, saltpeter—a potentially poisonous element used, among other things, for gunpowder. This dish was eventually christened Ralgex beef after the wintergreen-whiffy muscle-relief spray.

  We’d pass ’round the after-dinner torrone (Italian almond nougat, the most tenaciously sticky item known to man) and—as a Scottish touch—the addictive sugary fudge known as tablet. Occasionally, Mum would make a torta Montenegrina, a cake from her native La Spezia. This was a complex construction of architectural intricacy: layers of alcohol-soaked sponge interleaved with crema pasticcera, confectioner’s custard in chocolate and vanilla, finished with Italian buttercream meringue. The idea of attacking such a project still fills me with anxiety to this day, but my mother carried it off with unshowy aplomb. It was exquisite, sultry, even better on subsequent days when the custard stiffened and the sponge collapsed under the weight of the booze.

  My parents would serve all this to various waifs and strays—unlike today’s England, our doors were always open. There were singers for the Scottish Opera from Australia and Russia, thousands of miles from home, and religious-maniac maiden godmothers who imagined ecclesiastical skulduggery from anyone wearing purple socks. We were frequently up to 20 people at the lion-footed oak table.

  One year we decamped to a dilapidated farm in the Tuscan countryside; we could very easily, of course—there was no requirement for visas, something that’s now being threatened by a Eu
rope that’s understandably provoked. These days, with my father gone and my mother in no way up to the labor required, we congregate on the Isle of Bute in Scotland, where one brother has an old farmhouse.

  Many of our Pan-European traditions remain: the clove-studded bread sauce, the ancient recipe of stale loaves seethed in milk flavored with bay and more cloves. (This was something I found repugnant, with its creamy, pasty consistency, until one year I fell in love with it.) The brodo with “cretins,” the vat of Nonna’s pasta sauce—a reductive description for something that takes all day to cook—ever-bubbling for the children. But we’ve never been tempted into replicating the Ralgex beef, nor has anyone felt up to the work required to make the Montenegrina. Some things die; some things live on.

  Brexit—ugly word, ugly situation—shines a light onto these family holidays that helps me see them with new eyes. As our current unelected government is making some hugely alarming noises, striking fear that we should “name and shame” foreign workers and regulate the number of students from overseas, it makes me wonder: At what point during genealogy does foreignness kick in? Would my parents, in today’s climate, have even been allowed to stay? At the time of writing, the insanely convoluted mechanism to activate the actual severance hasn’t been triggered, and nobody, not least of which our government, is clear on when, or how, it will. It hangs over our heads like a noose.

  I don’t know what a Brexit-flavored Christmas would consist of, stripped of its elements from elsewhere. Ashes, I suspect. But the whole thing has had at least one positive side effect, a personal one. After years of not knowing where I belong, not understanding whether I’m Guinness or Prosecco, turkey and trimmings or torrone, I finally know who I am. Whatever happens to the rest of the UK, I am—and will always be—a European.