A friend of ours, while talking about getting together for a recent meal at Park Slope’s Al di La, told me that her mother had once accidentally referred to the restaurant as ‘La di Da’ and had yet to live it down. It’s a telling solecism, because nearly ten years after the restaurant opened its doors for the first time, it can be still legendarily hard to snag a table there–and this is Brooklyn. Thanks to lots of favorable press, Al di La has become so popular that husband and wife team Anna Klinger and Emiliano Coppa still have to turn away prospective diners during almost every single service. And yet, the locals don’t seem to mind much. Every time we go, we find ourselves wondering: For what other Brooklyn restaurant would diners cheerfully wait an hour, an hour-and-a-half, or more in order to eat a meal?

The wait derives largely from Al di La’s egalitarian no-reservations policy–whether you’re a celebrity, a luminary, or even an old friend of Anna’s, prepare yourself for a wait–either outside Al di La’s crowded Fifth Avenue doorway, or at the Al di La wine bar around the corner (the two rooms connect via the very busy kitchen). And if waiting for a la-di-da table in the main dining room, with its brick walls and red-and-white circus print drapery gets to be too much, diners can opt to eat from the full menu in the wine bar itself. As an added bonus, eating in the wine bar offers access to a wine list that extends beyond the Italian-only selections of the main dining room.

But we are the sorts who like a table, and still, the wait is worth every minute. Almost everything we have ordered at Al di La, over many visits, has been both remarkable and remarkably consistent. A few items even make you sit up straight and take notice: for instance, the swiss chard and ricotta malfatti (pictured left, $13), a crowd-pleaser that has been on the menu for years with good reason. These soft, slightly chewy gnudi are simply emerald mounds of cheesy, doughy pleasure, made all the more enjoyable by a light sauce of sage and brown butter. Truffle and ricotta tortelli (pictured on Flickr, $18) demand equal attention, with their sweet sheep’s milk ricotta and strong but not overpowering hit of black truffle shavings. Rounding out our favorite pasta dishes is an gnocchi special made with a beef cheek ragu (pictured on Flickr, $15) so savory it seems purpose-built for a glass of hearty Sangiovese and a mopping-up with some of Al di La’s sturdy bread.

While favorites like the malfatti, the beet and ricotta ravioli, and the braised rabbit and polenta are deservedly year-round menu residents, certain specials also earn their more seasonal places on the restaurant’s rota. Chief among these are the cichetti (pictured top, $14)–Venice’s version of tapas–which can include anything from tender roasted octopus to a wonderful baccala with pickled onions and fried polenta wedges. The frequently changing side dishes are also a treat: on our most recent night, an order of unprepossessingly named ‘greens’ (pictured above right, $5) yielded a hot pot of of savory, soft, creamy cranberry beans (borlotti beans) and nearly greaseless broccoli rabe.

Main dishes are nearly as good as the starters. A recent special of wild striped bass (pictured above, $26) shines brightly with a supple, moist texture and sides of nutty sautéed Jerusalem artichokes, green garlic and oyster mushrooms. A plate of calf’s liver (pictured right, $15) is prepared in a traditional Venetian style with reduced red wine and balsamic vinegar, allowing the deep, ferric richness of the liver to play against a sweet and acidic background. And here too, fried triangles of creamy polenta make a very welcome re-appearance.

If there are any small disappointments at Al di La, they come at the end of the meal, for the desserts, while quite good, are less original and exciting than the breathtaking pasta, ravioli and gnocchi. An apple galette dusted with with powdered sugar and crowned with vanilla ice cream is refreshing, but something we’ve seen many times before. A trio of gelatos is restorative, but with the only the most predictable flavors: vanilla, hazelnut, and chocolate. All perfectly lovely, just not quite as magical as anything the restaurant makes with cheese or basil.

Still, eating at Al di La is almost always a great experience, with a consistency and quality of cooking matched by few other restaurants. Al di La’s seasonal variations on its Venetian and Northern Italian theme have held up so superbly–even evolving into more perfect versions of themselves over the course of a decade–that it is no surprise that half of Brooklyn seems to show up at the restaurant for every meal it serves. And if they do have to wait an hour or two once they arrive, a few bites of Anna’s malfatti ought to make them forget all about it.

Al di La Trattoria, 248 Fifth Avenue (at Carroll Street), Park Slope, Brooklyn, 718-783-4565.

Durian is a hard sell, we know. Any fruit that tastes like a cross between a banana and an onion, with a smell like a natural gas leak is doomed to be an acquired taste. Nevertheless, on the other side of the initial cringing and nose-wrinkling lies a creamy fruit pulp that, in a single ingredient, perfectly straddles the sweet-savory boundary. And given the recent trendiness of salt-sweet hybrids, we figure it’s just a matter of time before chefs start holding their noses and reaching for a few of Chinatown’s hanging mesh bags of spiny durian.

Before that happens, we would like share a product we found recently that might help ease your palate gently into the world of durian: Rhinoceros (no affiliation with Marc Ecko) brand Durian Flavour Sting Cookies. Ridiculously inexpensive at $1.99 for a 9.5 ounce bucket (at Hong Kong Supermarkets in Manhattan and Sunset Park, Brooklyn), these little Vietnamese cookies are made with whipped tapioca starch and are pressed out into long, meringue-light shapes, then baked. The ’sting’ in the cookies’ name comes from their prickly surface markings–not from any sort of hidden heat or shocking surprise. The bumpy treats are perfect to set out in a dish at the end of a dinner party, and because their durian aroma is very subtle–the predominant flavor of the cookies is sweet coconut cream–it is easy to eat six or seven of the spiny little snacks before you even notice the nuances from the durian. And when you do, the aromas are soft and tempered by the sweetness and richness of the other ingredients. No sting here whatsoever, no matter what the label says.

Think of Oaxacan food and molé comes immediately to mind–that rich, unctuous sauce of pulverized dried chiles, sesame seeds and a bevy of fragrant spices that Mexican cuisine deploys over everything from meats and poultry to eggs. Molé oaxaqueno, a dark version made with pasilla and chilhuacle chiles and, often, chocolate, has the reputation of being like Mexico’s take on Guinness ale–its color often verges on black, and it tastes so strongly that people tend to love it or loathe it. So when our good friend Dolin suggested brunch at Chiles & Chocolate, a wisp of a Oaxacan restaurant in Park Slope, I was excited to try their version of authentic Southern (Mexican)-style molé.

Imagine our surprise, then, to discover that the restaurant, despite a menu that features a full complement of three distinct varieties of molé at lunch and dinner, leaves the spicy sauce out entirely at brunch. Molé with eggs is fairly common across Mexico, so it is a bit of a mystery why it’s missing here. Still, with or without spicy, dark sauces, breakfast choices are numerous at Chiles & Chocolate, ranging from a sweet, Mexican-style French toast (’Oaxacan Toast’, made with a sweet, brioche-style bread, eggs, cinnamon and chocolate) to omelets, eggs, and tortillas. One option, the Huevos Divorciados (’Divorced Eggs’), sounds like an inauspicious meal for a date, but turns out to be rather more tame: two fried eggs, one with green salsa and one with red.

Dolin ordered the Omelet de Nopal (all breakfast items are $9), a thin, three-egg pocket hiding a ragout of cactus, epazote, sweet peppers and chiles. Too bad, then, that the exotic ingredients failed to stand out in this well-prepared, but rather unexceptional dish. If we hadn’t known that this was a cactus omelet, we might have taken the ragout for a green pepper sauce. Even the epazote, a Latin American herb with licorice and parsley flavors, lost itself in the mix of other ingredients. Given their subtle tastes, we think it makes more sense to put these ingredients on top of the omelet, where the blander (and fattier) eggs cannot kill the exotic ingredients’ nuances. In the end, what should have been a signature dish fell as flat as the tortillas being lifted off the tortilladora.

My Torta de la Manana was a hearty layering of soft panini triangles with scrambled eggs, green chiles, rice and beans, and a choice of chorizo, ham, bacon or mushrooms. This was excellent while it remained hot, and the Oaxacan cheese provided a needed counterpoint to the heat of the chiles and the savory eggs, but because there was so much food on the plate, it cooled and quickly lost much of its vitality as the tortillas grew flaccid. Worse, the dish was unforgivably dry and practically cried out for some sauce. Molé, anyone?

Two other specialties make a trip to Chiles & Chocolate worthwhile. The first is Mexican hot chocolate, which can be ordered with cinammon and almonds ($3) or laced with a pleasing hit of chipotle ($4). Portions are small, so order two if you are thirsty, especially if you go an a particularly cold day. Also worthwhile is the guacamole chapolin ($8), which can be ordered with chapolines (fried grasshoppers) for a dollar extra. This may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the little critters do provide a crunchy contrast to the smooth and creamy guac.

It is fair to point out that Chiles & Chocolate is exceptionally small– the restaurant occupies a slice of 7th Avenue so narrow that it has fewer than 10 tables, including one so close to the door that customers must step around it when entering. Still, the restaurant’s focus on unusual ingredients compensates a bit for the close quarters, and we do like seeing how owner Robert Lopez’s mission to introduce a New York audience to Oaxacan food seems to be paying off in accolades from Park Slope locals. Just don’t accidentally refer to Chiles & Chocolate as “Mexican,” because printed on the menu is a disclaimer that his is no Mexican restaurant. Rather, he insists, it is distinctly and proudly Oaxacan. And as long as we get a little molé at brunch, we are happy to play along.

Chiles & Chocolate Oaxacan Kitchen, 54 7th Avenue (between Lincoln Place & St. John’s Place), Park Slope, Brooklyn, 718-230-7700

Eggy sweet breads are some of our favorite baked goods, and winter is their perfect season. We kicked off December with plenty of challah at every Chanukkah dinner we attended, and then worked our way through December with saffron-scented Swedish lussekatter, or Saint Lucia buns, in celebration of Christmas. And two days from now, on January 1st, we will have the Greeks to thank for another fine winter treat: vasilopita, also known as Saint Basil’s bread. We bought our $10, foot-wide vasilopita from Bay Ridge Bakery, an excellent, mostly-Greek operation on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. Their New Year’s bread is based on the same dough as its superb, everyday sweet, braided tsoureki, which looks and tastes nearly identical to a sesame-sprinkled challah.

Tradition has it that the person who makes or buys the vasilopita must re-enact one of St. Basil’s feats of generosity by inserting a coin into the sweet bread right before cutting into it, and in turn, the person who finds this little New Year’s treasure in his or her slice is supposed to be blessed with good luck throughout the following year. If this whole ritual sounds familiar, it should: It shares the same origins as the tradtion of both hiding a bean inside a Twelfth Night pie, as well as placing a minitature toy baby inside a King Cake during Mardi Gras. No matter what holiday bread or cake you’re eating though, one thing remains the same: look before you bite!

Bay Ridge Bakery: Classic Patisserie, 7805 Fifth Avenue (at 78th Street), Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, 718-238-1779.

Anyone who has tried baking a Thanksgiving pie from scratch knows that making a decent pie crust is a real accomplishment. Everyone has their stories of failure–our worst involves a misprinted crust recipe from the first edition of Baking Illustrated that ignited a raging ovenside argument. That particular November battle led to tears, a fit of stressed-out dough throwing, and a vitriolic letter to Christopher Kimball (sorry, Chris!), which in turn led to a quick correction to future editions of the cookbook. Despite all the dangers, we return to our food processor every year for another round of pie-making–all because, in the end, a fresh, homemade pumpkin pie is an unbeatable holiday treat. Not to mention the inescapable fact that, even after sampling pies from bakeries across Manhattan and Brooklyn, we have never found a pie that did not taste conspicuously boxed.

That is, until last week, when we got a chance to nosh on Belli’s maple pumpkin pie ($20) with pecan brittle and vanilla bean whipped cream. Belli is owned and operated by Roberto and Monica Bellissimo. Monica’s name might be familiar from her stint as pastry chef at David Burke & Donatella and Jovia. Her experience is obvious from the very first taste of her pie; biting into the flaky, short crust, I recognized the pastry instantly as double-baked, not to mention so fresh that I could almost hear the oven closing in my mind’s eye as I chewed. The filling, a seductive custard of organic pumpkin, eggs, cream and maple syrup, was spiced traditionally (ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace) with just a hint of black pepper that gave the pumpkin a zippy aromatic flavor. Better still, the high-note aromas and tastes were echoed again in the quenelles of whipped vanilla cream topping the pie. Despite our skepticism about the pecan brittle, we ended up loving the crunch it contributed to the pie–we could even envision a version of the pie covered completely with broken shards of the caramelized confection. For now though, Belli offers six other varieties of Thanksgiving pies, all priced between $20-25, each of which can be hand-delivered anywhere in New York City for $5 with two days lead time. So if you predict a hoilday tantrum on the horizon, you still have one day left to reserve a pie–one good enough to claim as your own.

Belli, 543 Clinton Street (at Clinton & Nelson Streets), Brooklyn, 646-701-7047.

3 things we’re loving this week:

1. Taking advantage of the last of this season’s heirloom tomato crop. Our favorite use by far is in a simple, open-faced sandwich consisting of thick slices of tomato, fresh basil (still thriving in our outdoor stairwell containers, amazingly), sea salt, and cracked pepper, all layered atop a yeasty slice of Sullivan Street’s pizza bianca con pecorino ($2.25 per slice).

2. Barry Glassner’s frustrating and provocative The Gospel of Food: Why We Should Stop Worrying and Enjoy What We Eat, a sociologist’s perspective on eating, nutrition, and social dogma. And while we only agree with about half of what Glassner says–the rest can be a bit bourgeois and elitist–the book challenges just about everything you have learned about food. It will either give you ammunition for your next cocktail party debate or an aneurysm as it works you up into such a lather that you end up screaming at Glassner in abstentia…or both.

3. The seasonal maple latte at Brooklyn’s Gorilla Coffee. Combined with the smoky flavors of their custom roasted beans, the maple and full cream milk bring to mind campfire breakfasts of bacon and eggs–just without the chilly night spent in a wet tent.

HungryMom called this afternoon just as we were starting to feel a little peckish. “I know neither of you will approve, but I just ate lunch for $1.50!” she proclaimed. “Hang on just one second,” HungryMan retorted, “You know we love an inexpensive meal as much as anyone. The real question is: Was your lunch a good one?” HungryMom paused, polled her two dining companions and replied, “Just so-so. But what do you expect?” She had a point.

HungryMom’s Costco repast got us thinking about the calculus of the cheap lunch and wondering: If a person had $5.00 to spend in any restaurant in the city, where could s/he get the maximum bang for the minimum buck? If filling up is the primary goal, we’d place our bets on Prosperity Dumpling or Lomzynianka, but what about raising the bar from HungryMom’s ’so-so’ to a more ambitious ’superb’? Very quickly we both agreed that banh mi was the only solution to this culinary version of Fermat’s last theorem. So which among the city’s dozens of Vietnamese sandwich shops would we head to with our lonely fiver? That’s an easy one: Ba Xuyen. And within minutes, HungryMan and I were on the D train to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, stomachs rumbling from all of our theoretical noshing.

That neither of us gave a second thought to taking a 40-minute subway ride for lunch is a testament to Ba Xuyen’s indisputably first-rate sandwiches. Made on thick lengths of baguette so crisp that pieces of the glossy outer crust shatter with every bite, these banh mi are filled generously and served just barely warm. On our visit today, HungryMan opted for the traditional banh mi (pictured above, in foreground, $3.50)–a sandwich filled with pork cold cuts (our favorite is the heady grilled ham), tangy shredded daikon and carrot pickle, paté, and cilantro. I opted for the unusual tuna banh mi (pictured above, in background, $4.25), as I had only ever eaten the delightful sardine version previously. Both of our sandwiches were excellent, even with my tuna salad veering dangerously close to an onion overload. That said, we both firmly agree that the Ba Xuyen classic banh mi deserves to be listed as #1 on the restaurant’s menu–it is the best sandwich in the shop, and very possibly the best in the city.

And I will admit–even though HungryMan stayed true to the price limit for our lunchtime scenario and drank a can of winter melon tea ($0.75), I cheated a bit on our five dollar lunch, choosing to sip on a durian shake ($2.50), much to the chagrin of HungryMan, who sat nearby complaining that it smelled like I was eating a banana next to a natural gas leak. If you are a durian fan, it is hard to resist the temptation of a café that makes its blended drinks from chunks of aromatic fresh fruit, since so few establishments are willing to cut the durian themselves, let alone store it in an airtight container in their refrigerator. Better still, Ba Xuyen doesn’t skimp on the durian, which makes this shake one of the best bargains in the shop. Sure, we may have spent an average of four times as much as HungryMom did for her lunch, but in terms of gustatory bang for the buck, Ba Xuyen is a supernova.

Ba Xuyen, 4222 Eighth Avenue (between 42nd and 43rd Streets), 718-633-6601.

For many Manhattanites, Midwood, Brooklyn seems so far away that it might as well be on another continent. In fairness, the neighborhood, which is home to a quirky assortment of Orthodox yeshivas and Chinese and Pakistani groceries, can be a good hour from midtown on the Q train, and not much more convenient if you’re driving in Brooklyn’s stop-and-go congestion. Even with two good friends to distract us last week, our car ride, punctuated by treacherous traffic circles and near-misses with Access-A-Ride vans, was near 25 minutes from central Park Slope. But the promise of arguably New York City’s best pizza kept us seatbelted and moving slowly towards our destination: Di Fara Pizza.

Purveyors of among the most talked-about pies in Gotham, Di Fara (or Di Fara’s, depending on your mood) is one of those magical places that elicits wistful sighs from New York pizza aficionados. The pizzeria earns such near religious devotion because it does pretty much one thing: crank out pie after pie from the restaurant’s deck oven. Dominick DeMarco, the owner and sole pizzaiolo, is renowned for working slowly and deliberately, often ignoring bothersome interruptions like telephones and customers as he makes each pizza by hand and to order, with little to no help from others in the shop. Each topping is added individually, and small steps, including adding a few final few snips of basil off a fresh bunch, grating grana padano and splashing a bit of olive oil on a slice or a pie, are taken with care, and never rushed. Attention to detail (not to mention the casual indifference to patrons) has resulted in not only deservedly famous pizza, but infamously lengthy lines. As word of Dom’s doughy miracles has spread, two-hour evening and weekend waits have become all too common.

But these days, if you have heard anything about Di Fara, it is probably that it was shut down for several weeks early this summer by the Department of Health as part of the Department’s program of stepped-up enforcement following the Greenwich Village Taco Bell Department of Health (DOH) fiasco. As part of a negotiated re-opening settlement with inspectors, Dom was forced to don a plastic protective hat and gloves, and to keep the doors and window to his diminutive storefront closed while cooking. The good news is that the new rules haven’t changed the quality of the pizza; the bad news is, without the ventilation from the window, the smoke and heat inside the shop are now nearly intolerable, particularly during New York’s steambath months of July and August. After ten minutes waiting for a pie, you half expect to see a betoweled Bette Midler emerge from the crowd and start singing to the crowd.

Despite the steam and interior haze, my dining companions Vince and Ms. Fribbles had hardly any complaints about their experience–and neither did I. One problem we did find was that our thin pizza had slightly too much char on its crust. Indeed, much of the crust was inedible and black. This was a surprise to us all, as Dom’s most frequent movement in the open kitchen is his constant shifting and lifting up the bottoms of his cooking pies to check for even doneness. Can we chalk the blackened crust up to the tactile distraction of his DOH gloves? Regardless, a little char is a minor quibble with pizza this good. His sauce was as sweet and addictive as always–a happy multiplex marriage of canned and fresh San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, oregano, and no doubt a secret ingredient or two. The cheese, a combination of fresh mozzarella, buffalo mozzarella, and parmesan, melted effortlessly around and into the sauce. Of course, Di Fara’s offers a panoply of toppings but really, why clutter up a classic?

Di Fara’s also produces a deep-dish, Sicilian-American style pizza in addition to the thin Neapolitan, and we decided to experiment by ordering one of these square pies with porcini mushrooms, one of Di Fara’s special toppings, ones Dom claims to import (in grand Gotham quasi-legit tradition) himself, and that he can be seen fishing out one-by-one from a large jar that sits on the kitchen’s back counter. The square pizza requires almost twice the preparation time as the Neapolitan pie, as the shell must be pre-baked, but like everything else at Di Fara’s, it worth the wait. We won’t be the first to say it, but Di Fara’s square pies are better than the round ones, with their chewy, spongy interior and crunchy crust. Textural contrast doesn’t get any better than this, and given that these pies are accompanied by a richer sauce than the round version (rumors have it that the square pie’s sauce is simmered with pancetta), it is not hard to nominate Di Fara’s Sicilian-American pie as the best square in the city. For us, though, what made the dish transcendent were the mushrooms, left totally uncooked, then added after the pizza emerged from the oven, imparting the whole dish with a distinctive marinated bite.

Unexpected touches like the zingy tang from that marinated porcini mushroom illustrate the upside of DeMarco’s attention to detail. And Dom makes Di Fara what it is: a true New York gastronomic institution that provides a glimpse of a true artisan at work, even if he does begrudgingly wear rubber gloves–and less often, the hat–as he grinds cheese and pokes pies. Sure, it might be a trek for a lot of New Yorkers, but with the Q train stop directly across the street from the shop, there is no excuse not to bring a book to keep you occupied while you queue, eat a slice or two, and then collapse in a happy pile as the subway doors close behind you.

Di Fara Pizza, 1424 Avenue J, Midwood, Brooklyn, 718-258-1367.

At the turn of the twentieth century, there were more chestnut trees in American forests than there were maples. Then, in the span of a few decades, nearly every single chestnut was killed by a fungal blight–suddenly there was not only a shortage of the tree’s hard lumber, but also nothing left to, as the song says, roast on an open fire. Today, practically all chestnut products you find Stateside are imported from Europe or Asia, despite a small, unstable resurgence of the chestnut population. Every time a new crop of wild chestnut trees comes close to maturity, it gets struck down again by persistent fungal spores. It therefore seems fitting that we would sit through our worst meal of the year to date at a restaurant named for this iconic yet diseased tree.

Things seemed disordered from the very start. We were seated in the nearly empty dining room and asked for our water preference as we opened our menus. We had no hint that this would be the last time we spoke with our server for the next twenty minutes, even as he stood nearby, enthusiastically completing a crossword or Sudoku puzzle at the bar. None of the classic hints that we were ready to order seemed to work–we closed our menus, perched them precariously on the edge of the table, shuffled our feet, cleared our throats, and just as we were finally ready to call the man over (something we both believe to be rude in most situations), the restaurant’s other server arrived, bearing the bad news that a dish two of us wanted had ‘just sold out one minute ago.’ But rather than complain that our orders really ought to have been taken fifteen minutes earlier, we just nodded and made alternate choices. We were determined not to let even this extreme example of sluggish service phase us, as we had been told by reliable friends of ours that everything on the menu was wonderful. Chestnut’s redemption, we figured, would come from the food.

Our companion Jay and both I ordered the artichoke and feta salad (pictured above, $8), a full-on disaster of taste combinations. The salad was at once far too salty and too oily, with any sweetness from the artichoke masked by the sharp feta and the arugula. With each bite we were reminded not only of the artichokes’ bitterness, but of the sad fact that we could not taste even a hint of the microgreens. HungryMan’s gnocchi and guanciale ($9) appetizer was, unfortunately even worse. The dense little gnocchi on his plate appeared to have been sautéed in a few gallons of olive oil and pork fat before being served, transforming them into slick little rubbery lumps. Yet we could see the promise in this dish–with lighter gnocchi and a more parsimonious pouring of the olive oil, this could become a hearty first course. As it was, it looked and tasted like something made on a camp stove in Minsk.

Mains offered no relief to HungryMan–his date-stuffed pork chop on white polenta ($22) featured a mammoth slab of flavor-free pork that had been cooked long enough to aquire the texture of a piece of balsa wood. He struggled to eat a quarter of the portion, unaided by the unforgiveably lumpy polenta. When he finally put his fork and knife down and muttered, ‘What a waste,’ I looked up and nodded, as I was at that moment fighting with a tough slice of quinoa stuffed squid (pictured on Flickr, $8), trying to decide whether or not to ignore my hunger and give up completely. I chose instead to pick a few more forkfuls of the grainy, underseasoned stuffing out of the calamari and pour myself another glass of wine.

Jay, on the other hand, sat munching away happily at his braised oxtail papardelle ($19), and after tasting a few mouthfuls, HungryMan and I could both see why: against all odds, his pasta was spectacularly good. The beef was rich, moist and yielding, and the pasta were precisely al dente–exactly the right texture so that they matched the give of the meat. Divine stuff. All three of us sat, puzzled at how such a top-flight dish could come from the same kitchen that produced dry and lumpy polenta and goopy, overlubricated gnocchi. We had plenty of time to ponder this mystery, as our server left us for another twenty minute break, even after we made it very clear that we had finished our meal. Undaunted and more than a little intrigued by the disparity among our main dishes, we made the decision to order dessert.

True to form, Chestnut delivered a selection of cookies that were mostly mediocre or mealy, and one that was phenomenally good. The two almond spritz cookies (shown here in the extreme foreground) were the only saving grace of the $7 dessert, but they were so fantastic that they tipped the balance on this dessert well into the positive. Not so the chocolate budino (pictured on Flickr, $7), a traditional Italian custard pudding. Our server described this dish as ‘like a molten chocolate cake,’ when she ought to have called it a desultory tepid lump of chocolate-flavored Jell-O that oozed water and smelled strangely of saffron. Nothing about this dessert was pleasant, and it sat nearly entirely uneaten as the three of us fought over the last remaining almond cookie.

As we paid for our agonizingly long meal, we overheard our absentee Sudoku-solving server tell a nearby table that ‘another new restaurant is opening across the street. They’re like weeds in this neighborhood.’ And he has a point: Smith and Court Streets are at the very heart of Brooklyn’s burgeoning restaurant scene. At the same time, it has taken Brooklyn a few hard-fought decades to establish itself as a legitimate home to excellent food. Those new eateries that appear so quickly under the canopy of the well-established old guard benefit from the borough’s newfound culinary reputation, while at the same time influencing its equilibrium with every dish they prepare. Chestnut’s criminally poor service and substandard cooking do nobody, especially not the neighborhood, any favors. So for the sake of this urban ecosystem, perhaps it is time to cut down this chestnut to keep its blight from spreading.

Chestnut, 271 Smith Street (at Degraw Street), 718-243-0049.

Williamsburg’s Dressler restaurant is named after Martin Dressler, the eponymous antihero of Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 rags-to-riches, and back-to-rags novel. Dressler, a cigar store owner’s son who manages to make it big in the world of New York hotels in turn of the century America, finds big city success to be anything but unalloyed. Among other things, the book is a cautionary tale about the emptiness of ambition and aspiration, especially in New York, where the city’s ethos pulsates to the beat of success and money (see also Elizabeth Gilbert’s perceptive Eat, Pray, Love).

Martin Dressler is an appropriate namesake not just for a restaurant fitted with a steel-and-tile, new industrial age interior, but for Williamsburg as a whole, which continues its awkward evolution from the epicenter of hipsterdom to a more diverse neighborhood where people in suits are as accepted as those in trucker caps. Of course, gentrification has its costs as well as its pleasures: unaffordable condos and a declining bohemian sensibility may count among the former. But Williamsburg’s burgeoning restaurant scene certainly compensates for some of this. In the vanguard of the movement is Dressler, squeezed in among a row of nondescript, grimy storefronts just off the Williamsburg Bridge. From its very entrance, Dressler seduces with its details: filligreed ironwork and black-panelled lightboxes frame long mirrored walls, original multi-hued parquet follows underfoot from front to rear, and magnificent coffered ceilings hint at Victorian era elegance. The feel is fin-de-siecle Vienna meets Parisian boudoir.

And very much like the decor, the food is elegant and dreamy, unhurried and prepared with an obvious careful attention to detail. Our starters were both excellent on the evening we took photographs, full of unexpected turns and unusual preparations. Take our fried artichoke and salsify appetizer ($9), technically a special that night, the dish is really a recurring guest star on Dressler’s menu–prepared in the Roman Jewish style, the artichoke petals upturned, fried in olive oil, and served on a plate protected by squares of butcher paper. Here’s the kicker: these were every bit as good as the Carciofi alla Giudia that we ate in Rome in 2003. The salsify root was an excellent addition to the dish, with its toothsome interior and crunchy tips, but the artichokes were appropriately the stars, tender and meaty at the same time, brightened up with a squeeze of fresh lemon. It is true that fried vegetables can sometimes be a cheap trick–who doesn’t like the taste of fried food, after all–but fried artichokes often fall flat in the wrong hands, as our recent meal at Centovini proved conclusively. At Dressler, on the other hand, the artichokes were about as close to perfect as either Nosher or I could have imagined.

Our other appetizer, the smoked salmon (pictured above, $10) turned out to be a surprise. Not that there wasn’t salmon here: there was, but it appeared atop a delightfully crunchy potato pancake, or galette, and nestled in underneath layers of herbed creme fraiche, baby arugula and frisee lettuces. If you squint, you can see a passing resemblance to traditional Danish smørrebrød, minus the dill and caviar. Dressler encircles its own miniature tower of home-smoked fish and greens with a liquid crown of truffle vinaigrette, which lends this starter a complex acidic overtone.

Entrees are nearly as good as the appetizers, delivering on both taste and creativity. There’s a pan roasted halibut on the menu served with springtime fava beans and sugar snap peas; there’s lamb and pork on the list too, but oddly, only one beef entree and, at $30, it is the most expensive item on the menu. What made it worth the price was that the dish was a double-header: a small cut of aged rib eye, grilled to order, and an impossibly tender and wonderfully fatty short rib, braised until nearly molten. A bordelaise sauce glistened under the dining room’s soft lighting, and a tart onion jam and small mound of steamed spinach provided both balancing flavors as well as a wisp of evidence that I was getting my allowance of vegetables in the bargain. My only complaint was that the portion of horseradish mashed potatoes, so critical to balancing the intensity of the meat–in particular the rib eye–was pityingly small.

Nosher’s wild striped bass ($24) was more modest in portion than my extravaganza of beef, but no less flavorful. Flaky and silky-tender, the bass played well with the crunch of the accompanying endive, braised yet still retaining a satisfying firmness. This entire dish represented a superb marriage of flavors: bittersweet endive, salty-sweet tomato, lightly oily and crisp skin, not to mention the olive and basil quenelle made up of an aromatic half-pesto, half-tapenade.

Closing the meal we opted for a final, intense meditation on chocolate: the deconstructed peanut butter cup ($7). Renditions of peanut butter and chocolate have become so common on dessert menus of late as to be a little bit passé, yet Dressler managed to surprise us once more, this time with a milk chocolate foam and a light peanut brittle ice cream under a carapace of dark chocolate. Moreover, the Dressler version is a true equal partnership of tastes, with peanut butter flavor coming through every bit as intensely as the chocolate. We did find the chilled chocolate wafers to be a bit too thick to break without a considerable amount of pressure–we both were pleased we had kept a butter knife handy. But otherwise, we found the dessert to be a lovely combination of savory and sweet, and an excellent conclusion to our meal.

Service at Dressler is proficient and unrushed, a noticeable feature in the small, often-crowded space where beautiful people–many of whom arrive in taxis, ferried across the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan–abound. It is undeniable that the place still has a city-wide buzz about it, even a year after its opening. If Dressler’s owner Colin Devlin had in mind to create an eatery with a primarily local clientele, we worry that perhaps his restaurant has suffered a fate similar to that of its namesake in Millhauser’s novel. Ambition might just have made Dressler too good to stay local. But let us also be the first to say there could be far worse fates.

Dressler, 149 Broadway, between Bedford and Driggs Avenues, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-384-6343.