In the wrong light, this approach comes from everywhere and nowhere. It’s enough to leave one pondering: What culinary ethos is Brassica channeling? The window mission statement says “French/American comfort plates,” but the influences extend far beyond, from Italy to Spain, Vietnam to Korea, the American South to old New England. Were the famously irascible Hazan still alive to sample Kean and Kruta’s version, she might try to put them in a double headlock.
It’s elemental - milk, wine, ground chuck, onions - and simmers for hours. Marcella Hazan, author of “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” and her legendary Bolognese recipe come to mind. A hefty dollop of liver mousse and embedded kale amount to stages six and seven of one seriously heavy rocket launch. No surprise, the egg-yolk spaghetti is rolled in house. Chicken stock, pork, and beef come later, and all of it cooks for hours. The chefs begin with homemade pancetta, then add and reduce large quantities of carrot juice and fermented pepper brine. The staff comes across as equally smart and upbeat they could just as easily be the customers they serve. Yet step through the door at night and it feels like you’ve joined a low-key party populated - on the evenings I was there, packed - with smartly clad millennials. The front window is lipstick-scrawled with Brassica’s mission statement, calling itself “a neighborhood joint.” During the day, it functions as a thriving coffeehouse and lunch spot, what was formerly Fazenda Cafe. Rubber-stoppered medicine bottles line one end of the bar, filled with herbaceous tinctures. Several dozen small abstract canvases colorfully adorn the back wall.
This Forest Hills space, wedged between a funeral parlor and the venerable Dogwood Cafe, has a loose, electric atmosphere. For five years they operated as a much-loved pop-up called Whisk, and before that logged hours in some of Boston’s finest kitchens, including L’Espalier, Rialto, No. It’s not like this is new terrain for the duo. If occasionally Kean and Kruta’s smash-mouth subtlety fails to pay off, very often it does. In turn, Brassica’s dishes are surprising, outsize, giant-flavored, D.I.Y.-ish, and ever courting risk.
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