Brooklyn on the Danube.
The restaurant is Viennese, and it's situated directly across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House, on Lafayette Ave. just off Flatbush. Stroll past the restaurant's door and you'll glimpse an enormous mirror in the entryway. Our initial fear was that, in trying to attract BAM patrons, Thomas Beisl had tried for Manhattan pre-theater ambiance. That wouldn't work here.
Though it's the only restaurant site in the immediate vicinity of the BAM complex, like any business on this block, Beisl must simultaneously cater to class-conscious ticketholders who are lost in Ft. Greene as well as Brooklyn regulars. Once inside, it became apparent that Beisl's proprietor understands this. Making the place look a bit fancier from the outside was shrewd, as the locals are bound to figure out, as I did, what's really going on.
To the right of the big mirror is a bar with only enough room for a few stools. To the left is an equally cozy dining room, dark wooded and casually well-lit. The servers are a pair of lithe young women with identical accents. The dinner menu conveniently includes desserts, a selection of bar plates and the wine list on the back. Studying its cover, I realized that the art-deco crest that also appears on Beisl's exterior sign is an image of a guy on a motorcyle, riding toward the viewer. How Brooklyn.
Vienna may be an international dining city, but Beisl focuses on the traditional. A lot of the fare is rather heavy, though there's fish for the hot months and steak frites and burgers available at all times. I found myself attracted to the Eastern side of the menu. When they made the migration to New York, many of these dishes became known as Jewish food; it's a welcome and rare chance to sample the native versions.
We started with cured salmon, chicken-liver pate and mushrooms. The gravlox ($9) was moist with fish oil, as it is in the bagelries. Its pillowy texture you only get when the stuff was very recently cured. Beisl's house-curing process also involves a touch of liquor and a generous sprinkle of fresh dill. Lox like this, complex enough to enjoy plain, is a wondrous thing.
The chicken liver ($7) was creamed smooth and served as a terrine flanked by cranberries. I prefer my chopped liver chunky and peppery, but this mildly fruity slab won me over. Every bite of rich fat melted in the mouth with a whisper of tartness, cleansing the palette for another. The mushroom dish was gebackene champignons, and we were a little disappointed when they arrived deep-fried, looking just like the workaday fungal pub snack. Though the mushroom flavor was much fuller than that, and the batter coating wasn't excessively greasy-plus they came with homemade tartar sauce-still: pub snack.
The wine list is all France and Austria, and some if not all in the latter category are worth checking out. Tement Sauvingnon Blanc from Steiermark is a crisp, dry summer white; Salomon Gruener Veltiner, from Kremstal, is your more elaborate, apple-y Teutonic type. Both are $8, as is the Riesling, FWG "Federspiel," which our server described as off-dry. In Viennese, that means sweet. As for reds by the glass, I liked the Syrah Mourvedre, from Languedoc, which is well-suited for feasting at $6 per glass.
Chicken paprika was a slight disappointment. It was basically a tomato stew, in which the chicken had been cooked soft. The seasoning seemed to have been lost somewhere. The dish was dramatically red, but tasted only tender and mild.
A special of red snapper, on the other hand, turned out to be a top-notch bistro plate. The filet was sauteed in olive oil and garlic until the skin browned, then anointed with smashed fresh tomatoes, onions, basil and black olives. The side was a hearty rice pilaf, its grains almost like barley, with artichoke hearts and white beans mixed in. Forkfuls of everything together imparted a sense of summer's bounty.
We ordered weiner schnitzel ($15) wondering if Beisl's version would be anything like veal Milanese. Instead, their take came off more Asian as Italian. Pork, instead of veal, was the pounded cutlet of choice, and the batter-frying was deep as tempura. The golden result is delicious, especially with the accompanying vinegary salad of cold cucumber and potatoes. This is not fancy food: It felt right and natural to eat my leftover schnitzel during the blackout the next day, cold.
Beisl offers some serious winter fare that might be worth trying, including pot au feu and lamb stew. Until the weather turns, the restaurant's desserts are heavy-duty enough. In true Viennese style, they are not an afterthought, but the major attraction.
Linzer torte with schlag ($6) featured raspberries in mad, peaking ripeness. The crust, though, was all refinement and sophistication: upright and firm, yet poised to waver like a violin note and let loose reverberations of cinnamon, butter and nuts. Schlag is whipped cream, and it was fresh.
Another dessert, Palatschinken (crepes with hazelnut paste and chocolate sauce, $6), was no less memorable. The crepe itself was perfectly moist, almost gooey; the dark chocolate was a bittersweet hot fudge. A companion judged the homemade hazelnut butter "the stickiest thing in the world," and indeed it should have been spread out in a thin layer instead of left hidden in lumps. That way, one couldn't end up with enough of it in the mouth to effectively glue the jaw shut. Dessert time at Beisl is a terrible moment to be so afflicted.