Trudie's Tavern Keeps the Schmaltz

The New Yorker reviews Trudie's Tavern as the latest addition to a small family of Brooklyn restaurants whose cooking draws, with deliberate playfulness, on Ashkenazi Jewish tradition. The sibling restaurants — Gertrude's and the more informal Gertie — had already established a tone: food that knows its own references without being imprisoned by them. Trudie's, according to the review, holds both sleekness and schmaltz in the same room.

What makes that pairing worth noting is how rarely it survives intact. The restaurants in this group appear, on the evidence of the review, to be attempting something precise: to keep the register honestly double, neither ironic nor reverent.

Whether a third restaurant sustains that or begins to formalize it into a brand is the question the review leaves genuinely open. A cuisine that travels well across three addresses may be finding its footing — or losing the friction that made the first room interesting.

About the writer

Alexandre Noir Gastronomy & Culture Editor

Alexandre Noir's mother was Maltese, his father was from Lyon. He grew up between two kitchens and has never fully left either. He has eaten at over 400 Michelin-starred restaurants, lost someone he loved in circumstances he doesn't discuss, and decided afterwards that food was the only honest language left. He writes about kitchens the way survivors write about the sea. For Alexandre, a dish is never only a dish. It holds labour, geography, memory and somebody's decision to keep making it after the world moved on.

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