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Top Chef season two winner Ilan Hall’s new Williamsburg eatery—with its industrial speakeasy vibe and “nose to tail” menu choices—is a shot in the arm for jaded local foodies

by matt Scanlon

Given the challenges a restaurant owner and/or kitchen head is presented with: a mercurial and often unreliable staff, malfunctioning equipment, impossible hours, and a highly unpredictable customer base—the wonder isn’t why head chefs are so often possessed of such generally poor temper, but how anyone on Earth can do the job at all without having the disposition of Sadaam
Hussein and Cleopatra’s love child.

At least as far as celebrity chefs are concerned, histrionics are as often as not part of a conjuring—a lurid but largely media-overstated fame ingredient. That said, from Gordon Ramsay’s notoriously infective-strewn and standoffish management style to Mario Batali’s frequent and noisy defenses of his oversized ego to Tribeca-based Marc Forgione dressing down a server so badly that New York Times writer Ron Lieber was prompted to intervene— there’s clearly occasional justification for approaching executive employees wearing white with caution.

All of which makes Ilan Hall so unaccountable. The winner of the second season of Bravo’s long-running Top Chef arrived for our interview at his new Williamsburg restaurant The Gorbals smiling, slightly apologetic (he was all of five minutes late), and clutching a helmet (“I ride a Vespa,” he said. “It’s great to just live ten minutes away.”) A native of Great Neck, his father is from Glasgow, Scotland, his mother from Israel. After attending the Culinary Institute of America, he was working as a line cook at Casa Mono on Irving Place in Manhattan when he applied for the cooking competition show. While winning wasn’t a magic carpet ride to further success, the notoriety helped fuel Hall’s first restaurant, The Gorbals, in downtown Los Angeles. Named for an area on the south bank of the River Clyde in Glasgow, the eatery became famous not only for its often unexpected menu choices (in which haggis, braised lamb neck, and pig head played occasional starring roles), but also for an impromptu, after-hours cooking competition in which chef guests would square off against each other—events which ultimately resulted in Esquire Network devoting a TV show to them, entitled Knife Fight. Hollywood celebrities like Elijah Wood, Bijou Phillips, and Jason Lee found themselves drifting in and out of The Gorbals, on camera and off, in part because of Hall’s disarming nature, as well as the restaurant’s shabby-chic locale in the basement of the once opulent Alexandria Hotel. The LA eatery closed late last year (though Hall is planning a new one), but by that time the 33-year-old had decided to go bicoastal in opening the Williamsburg location, at the top of the building that houses Urban Outfitters. Esquire shot the newest series of Knife Fight there, and production wrapped just days before we sat down with Hall in the dining room.

Industry: How exactly does a person manage to star in a television show and run a brand-new restaurant? You don’t seem particularly insane…
Ilan Hall: [Laughs] The question you should ask is how do you run a restaurant and be a father [Hall has a four-year-old boy]. The show for me is amazing. I love it because it’s an extension of the restaurant and an extension of me, and it’s just me and my friends having fun. It’s funny, because I speak to other clubs, and they’ve done things like this as well. For instance, at [The] Mercer Kitchen, they did a fun cooking battle competition—only we did ours with leftovers. In LA, every once in a while a chef would stay late and drink and we’d mess around. It would be like five minutes…what we could make with the stuff we were tossing. It was fun, and a way of burning off some steam after an intense service.

Industry: Did you bring a similar air of unpredictability to the Brooklyn menu?
IH: My food here is a bit more refined than it was in LA; it was a bit more rough and rustic there. It’s still weird, though, and still aggressive. In LA, we were very offal-heavy…tons of nose-to-tail stuff. I mean, we had a haggis burger on our opening menu! I was crazy when we first opened, it was almost like your first album, when you want to get everything down, and in some ways it worked in others it didn’t. As the business formed, I learned that you have to listen to your customers and find out what they like, and more importantly what they don’t. Without losing your dignity, you have to be willing to adapt and mold.

Industry: How did you find the space here? This stretch of North 6th Street is so hot.
IH: I’ve done a bunch of things with Urban Outfitters in the past…some of their regional meetings, for example, and my wife has worked there for almost 20 years. One of the executives contacted me and spoke about consulting on a café in New York, and so I looked at this building and said, “Wow, I used to shop across the street at Tops [on the Waterfront] when I did personal catering”… and my friend has lived here in Williamsburg for his entire life, as did I at one point. So I said to them, sort of flippantly, “Let’s do a restaurant,” and they responded “Really?!… You’d want to do a restaurant?” F*** yeah I did. It was an opportunity to come back where my family is and where my friends I grew up with are. My parents live in Great Neck, my sister lives in East Williamsburg, and my grandma still lives in Forest Hills…same apartment where my mother grew up.

BK WINDOW SPREAD

Industry: And the design? How did that come about?
IH: It was really me and Urban Outfitters in tandem. A beautiful space, and I love the industrial nature of the design, but it’s hard sometimes being a few floors up, where people don’t see you right in front of their face. Whenever you don’t have street frontage, you’re already putting up a roadblock, but word is getting around.

Industry: Can you really be a successful city chef these days and not be something of a social media ham? Are cooking quietly and success mutually exclusive?
IH: Sure you can, and New York’s actually one of the places where you certainly can. One of the things I love about the city is that you can have a restaurant that opens up quietly and gets customers just because of the sheer number of people who will walk by. It can be completely successful and completely under the radar. It’s quality that brings people in and makes them stay. I’m in a different position; I have a television show and was on a really large competition show, so I sort of have to be out there in the media. In this day and age it’s silly not to, because free promotion is free promotion, after all, but I have a hard time with social media sometimes. It’s tough.

Industry: What do you imagine life would have been like without Top Chef?
IH: Oh, I probably would just now be trying to open a restaurant. I would’ve stayed at Casa Mono for probably another year or two, and would likely have traveled a little bit more in sort of a career prep way…would’ve gone to Spain for a little while.

Industry: What gives you a particular charge out of cooking these days?
IH: From our menu? Oh, one is definitely the beef tongue. I had a sous chef in LA– he wanted to do a beef tongue dish and had this confit beef tongue idea that was sort of sloppy and wet and gross, and I realized that was the reason why people are put off by tongue. I kept thinking, though, how can I do it in a different way? So I thought of grilling…giving it a hard sear and really focusing on it as a piece of meat. It’s braised first, which makes it super tender, and held in fat so it’s slightly confit’d, then grilled. We do it with Romesco sauce—a Spanish-style meat sauce with tomatillo peppers and almonds. A very simple dish, prepared in a very clean way, and just delicious. I feel like it’s cheating on our grill, though because the thing is just too good. Stuff that you cook on a wood-fired grill is amazing. We serve it with some seasoned croutons with a little citric acid and lemon zest. The whole dish…lots of Umami.

Industry: Umami?
IH: You know…the fifth taste. [A Japanese word, often translated as “savory,” and used as an additional sensation category to the four basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty.]

Industry: Any unexpected favorites among Brooklyn customers?
IH: I don’t know if it was unexpected, but the Banh Mi Poutine (thrice-cooked fries, with hoisin gravy and kewpie mayonnaise) has been big. It might have something to do with the winter we just got through, but people are crazy about it.

Industry: Any coming menu changes?
IH: We’re actually going through a change right now, back to more spring stuff…lighter things. We are also working on a menu for our roof. I’m also planning to have some sort of completely onion-focused dish. I have something of an onion obsession. For example, we are going to feature a burger that was on the LA menu, a dry-aged burger with seven preparations of onion, from the toppings to the bun. It’s nuts.

Industry: And how is business…how was the winter?
IH: It was tough, but winter was tough for Tom Colicchio, for Batali, for everybody, so I didn’t take it personally. But now we have a rooftop open and the weather’s good, and last weekend was amazing. I’m going to keep the roof going as long as it’s nice, and the menu there will be customized for the space… a little more finger foodie.

Industry: It has to be daunting though, thinking of what a city with so much diversity—a borough with so many restaurants—will respond to…
IH: It is, but competition is part of what fuels me. I’m able to jump on an L train or just walk down the street and go to 30 restaurants that inspire me. And tasting different things is easier here, and I’ll think, “Yeah, I’ve got to do something that’s as good as that…I need to decode that.” And even though most people are friendly with each other in the industry, there is a healthy competition, of course, and I kind of like that…like the scrum of being in the middle of Bobby Flay Tweeting a bad review of my restaurant—that sort of ongoing conversation, both good and bad. This is my home; it inspires me.

The Gorbals
98 N 6th St. / 718.387.0195 / thegorbalsbk.com