The Mango Lassie

One of the things Empanada Boy and I miss most about the Chicago dining scene is the prevalence of restaurants with bring-your-own-bottle policies. Thanks to the hellish process of getting a liquor license in the Windy City, tons of restaurants there are BYOB. This is not the case in New York where we often end up spending almost half the tab on wine or other beverages. But it is one major reason to patronize the French-Caribbean restaurant Kaz An Nou, a BYOB bistro in Prospect Heights. The restaurant is owned by Sebastien Aubert and Michelle Lane, a husband and wife team. Aubert is from Guadaloupe in the West Indies and Kaz An Nou means “our house” in the Creole dialect spoken there. We visited Kaz An Nou with Cousin Ketchup and Auntie Pasti a few weeks ago.

The wait to be seated was about an hour, primarily because we showed up at 8 pm, just as everyone and their mother were sitting down to eat. We started with appetizers, including a plantain gratin made with Emmental cheese and a beet salad with mango and goat cheese. The gratin had a nice texture, but I found the plantains made the dish a little too sweet. A saltier cheese than Emmental may have helped to balance it out better. The beet salad was more successful. The beets were cut into little cubes, making for greater surface area to hold the tasty dressing.

For my entree, I ordered the confit of duck leg, which was tender and juicy beneath a mango jerk sauce. The accompanying rice was unremarkable. Ketchup ordered the smoked jerk chicken breast with goat cheese, tarragon and honey sauce. The breast was not overdone, which is a feat in itself, but the refinement of the dish left out some of the fire, heat and flavor that I experienced at the roadside stands in Jamaica. Also, the asparagus accompaniment seemed oddly out of season, considering asparagus left the farmer’s market about a month before.

EB and Auntie Pasti ordered one of the more distinctive dishes on the menu, the agoulou. This is a burger seasoned with bold West Indian spices, avocado salsa and goat cheese. A fried egg can be added for an extra dollar. I tasted EB’s burger (with the fried egg, of course) and liked the West Indian spice combination very much. We both thought it was distributed a bit too unevenly through the patty, though. The meat was also cooked to medium, despite EB’s medium-rare request. Still, it was a pretty unique burger, and the sweet potato fries that came with it were excellent.

We selected two desserts to share. One was the spicy chocolate cake with coconut creme anglaise. This was tasty, although a little less chocolaty than I might have preferred. The better dessert was the awesome tarte tatin, which the restaurant serves still upside down (as tartes tatin are typically baked). This was truly delicious: light, but deeply flavorful. It was probably one of the best apple desserts I’ve had.

Kaz An Nou was a friendly, pleasant place to which I would gladly return. The food, while not perfect, was tasty and well-priced. It was served in a warm, welcoming environment, exactly the kind of neighborhood restaurant most people would want to have.

Kaz An Nou
53 6th Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11217
718.938.3235

Living in Brooklyn finally gives me a chance to visit all of the borough’s hipster, locavore, gourmet locales that publications like The New York Times have been breathlessly extolling for a few years now. One of these is Franny’s, a pizza place in Prospect Heights that is a mere five-minute bike ride from our apartment. In the spirit of these parts, Franny’s sources all of its produce, eggs and fish from local organic farmers, and its meat is sustainably raised. Needless to say, the coffee is fair-trade, the cooking oil is recycled and the restaurant runs on renewable energy purchased from the power company. But I had to wonder: Was the food as good as it was green? I met my friend Onion there last weekend to find out.

The word on the street is that going to dinner at Franny’s means a guaranteed wait in line for a table. Apparently that is not the case for a weekend lunch. Onion and I were quickly seated in the simple dining room with a view of the bar on one side and a view of the kitchen and pizza oven through an opening on the other. In addition to the seats at the bar, there are also tall chairs at a window counter, which offer a nice view of Flatbush Avenue and undoubtedly good people watching. We could see from looking around that the pizzas weren’t huge, so we started with two appetizers. One was crostini with wood-roasted pancetta, olive oil and beautiful brown Italian beans. The combination— salty, smoky, spicy, nutty and rich— was to die for, and the bread was chewy and light. Everything tasted fresh and vibrant. I was starting to see why the devout foodie pilgrims like this place.

Our second appetizer was roasted fennel with red onion, lemon and chilies, a flavor explosion. The fennel was tender under our knives, and it had depth and sweetness beneath its charred edges. The anise flavor combined with the other sharp acids was refreshing and bright. This dish had everything, and it achieved it all with very simple, fresh ingredients.

We had ordered a white pizza with buffalo mozzarella, ricotta, garlic, oregano and hot peppers, but had to wait another 15 minutes or so before it was finally came. It was beautiful when it did. The crust was puffy and bubbly, and the wedges of roasted garlic were scattered temptingly amidst alternating circles of the two cheeses. Our urge to devour the thing was slowed somewhat by the fact that the pizza didn’t arrive sliced (nor did those we saw being delivered to tables around us). We couldn’t figure out why that was the case, but we dutifully sawed away at it with our serrated knives. The crust was chewy and light, reminiscent of Chicago’s Spacca Napoli, and the toppings melded together like a symphony. I could see myself eating a whole pizza if I came back hungry.

Besides not being sliced our only complaint about the pizzas were the prices. Our pizza was $16, but some were as high as $20— pretty steep for a two-person pie. Still, I’m willing to pay those prices more than once for food as good as what we ate at Franny’s. Excellence and a clear eco-conscience both come at a price.

Franny’s
295 Flatbush Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11217
718.230.0221