By: Danyelle Freeman
August 12 2008, Daily News
 
Brooklyn's James has a homey feel

Sunshine for News

It's 1 a.m., do you know where your chef is? If you're a regular at James you do. He's on the roof in his garden, among his herbs, weeding, watering, unwinding. It's the end of a long night in the kitchen at the corner of 605 Carlton Ave. and St. Marks Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

Bryan Calvert, the chef, has a short commute. He lives just above the restaurant and just beneath his rooftop garden - 600 square feet of mint, sage, rosemary, thyme, chamomile, oregano, lovage, lavender and basil. Sooner or later, they make their way downstairs. Some go to the oven, to the grill, into the drinks, and others simply perfume the room..

In other restaurants, such a wealth of herbs could mean a plateful of shrubs, a culinary potpourri. But in Calvert's kitchen, each herb plays the part he assigns it. The rosemary never upstages the lamb. The lovage never outshines the potatoes.

Calvert's a talented young chef. He worked at Union Pacific and Bouley before becoming a private chef for Annie Liebovitz. But at James, he's created a genuine, neighborhood restaurant.

This doesn't necessarily mean the food is modest. I adored several things on the menu. The sautéed skate is elegant, a golden fan that conceals perfectly lovaged potatoes surrounded by a tangy caper and sherry sauce. There's no better canvas for fresh herbs than a blank chicken. And the roast chicken at James is a minor masterpiece, crispy, tinged with lemon thyme served over couscous.

Let me say a word in praise of the shrimp - or really in praise of the sunchoke puree beneath them. I could've eaten the puree without the shrimp. It was nutty, sweet, and it had taken a hint from the garlic confit. And that spinach salad - it was an anthology of textures. Chewy nubs of roasted, marinated shiitake mushrooms, toasted pine nuts, and crunchy bits of parmesan tuille, dressed in a balsamic vinaigrette.

Where there was trouble, it had less to do with the dishes themselves than with their temperature. What should've been hot - sautéed brook trout - came out room temperature. What should've been room temperature came out frigid, which is not the way you want your heirloom tomatoes to arrive. This may be nothing more than a growing pain, something that will be worked out.

One thing is already perfect, the feel of the room, the sense of invitation. The neighborhood is quickly figuring this out. The bar is a block party of sorts, a gathering of neighbors - a hipster couple, a young man in a Florent T-shirt, a businessman with a glass of red wine in one hand and his briefcase in another. They come for the tin ceiling and the wide mahogany bar as much as they do for the James' Revenge, made with rye, bitters, Cointreau and fresh kumquat juice.

This is a bar I'd like to call home. I'd park myself and order what should be Calvert's signature dessert - a char-grilled slab of lemon almond pound cake with homemade rhubarb sorbet. If we were all really lucky, we'd all live right around the corner from a place like James.

Shaken and Stirred
Well, It’s Not Champale
By JONATHAN MILES
Published: August 3, 2008

COULD Champagne replace beer as Brooklyn’s quaff of choice?

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

Now there’s fighting words. But bartenders in this venerably beery borough seem, increasingly, to be reaching for a heavy-bottomed bottle of Champagne, rather than a long-necked bottle of beer. Not that they’re pouring it, unaccompanied, into delicate flutes — Brooklyn’s gentrification hasn’t swung that far yet. Instead, they’re mixing it into the high-minded cocktails that have come leaping across the East River with the recent incursion of Manhattan-style cocktaileries, and yes, also into beer.

Witness the Champagne Cup, a mixture of brandy, Benedictine, maraschino liqueur and Champagne, at the Jakewalk, a Carroll Gardens wine, cheese and cocktail bar that opened in the spring. Or the Grand Dame at Quarter Bar, which opened last summer on Fifth Avenue in South Slope; in the Grand Dame, oranges and cherries are muddled with sugar and orange bitters, then shaken with bourbon, strained, and topped with a float of dry sparkling wine. At Botanica, which opened last week in Red Hook, the Champagne, along with absinthe, is going into an opalescent, Hemingway-inspired drink called Death in the Afternoon.

And then there’s James, a Prospect Heights restaurant that opened last month on the corner of Carlton and St. Mark’s Avenues. With just 30 seats at tables, and 15 seats at the bar, James has a charmingly compressed feel, with a pressed-tin ceiling and walls mostly unadorned save for the mustachioed visage of James Calvert, a 19th-century Harlem restaurateur and ancestor of one of the owners. James’s owners, the husband-and-wife team of Bryan Calvert and Deborah Williamson, devised a compressed cocktail list, too. There are five drinks on the menu; Champagne figures into three of them.

“We like easily quaffed drinks,” Mr. Calvert said. “Nothing too heavy, and nothing too sweet. With Champagne, you get that nice dry effervescence.” That effervescence shows up in James’s Ginger Fizz, in which ginger-infused vodka meets ginger beer, mint and Champagne, and in the Framboise Royale, a simple mix of crème de framboise liqueur and Champagne. But the drink that grounds the restaurant in the new, cork-popping Brooklyn is the Black Velvet.

This is an old drink. Traditionally a 50-50 mix of stout (Guinness, almost invariably) and Champagne, it’s reported to have been created to honor the passing of England’s Prince Albert in 1861. “So it’s got that Old World feel,” Mr. Calvert said. “And we wanted something beer-based, which, in Brooklyn, seemed appropriate.” James veers from the standard recipe, however, by melding the Champagne with a Belgian ale, Leffe Brune, rather than a stout.

It’s a pleasing variation, with the ale’s malty sweetness — its flavor evoking the scorched top of a crème brûlée — bringing a new, lighter dimension to the old pub standard.

If James’s Black Velvet is any indication, beer and Champagne can coexist just fine. Especially, perhaps, in Brooklyn.

BLACK VELVET Adapted from James

4 ounces chilled Leffe Brune (or any Belgian ale)

4 ounces chilled Champagne.

Pour the Leffe Brune into a Champagne flute. Allow the foam to settle slightly, then top with Champagne and serve.

Yield: 1 serving

Serve Well. An Ancestor Is Watching.

By Steven Kurutz
Published: July 27, 2008, New York Times
Bryan Calvert, left, in his restaurant with his cousin Tom Calvert. - Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

HANGING on a wall at James, a new restaurant in the ground floor of an apartment building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, is a captivating painting of a nattily dressed man whose dark eyes seem to be watching the diners. His swept-back hair, pale complexion and handlebar mustache suggest a turn-of-the-last-century British provenance, as does the inscrutable expression.

Since the restaurant opened in June, patrons have been asking the owners, Bryan Calvert and Deborah Williamson, about the man in the portrait and wondering why it hangs in so conspicuous a place.

Naturally, there’s a story to tell.

The painting was hung by Mr. Calvert, a chef, and his wife, Ms. Williamson, an events producer, who live above the restaurant. When the previous tenant, another restaurant, announced it was closing, the couple decided to open their own place (Mr. Calvert had cooked at Union Pacific and Bouley Bakery, among other spots). And in designing the space, they incorporated elements of Mr. Calvert’s family, which has deep roots in the city.

The man in the portrait is James Calvert, Bryan’s great-grandfather, an English horse groomer who came to New York in 1880. Settling in Harlem, James worked as a private cook for a wealthy family and then opened a restaurant, which closed after only a few years because, according to family lore, his partner ran off with the profits.

He later returned to being a private cook and died in 1931, at the age of 69.

Much of what is known about James comes from Bryan’s cousin Tom Calvert. A police detective in Nassau County, Tom Calvert has spent several years going through family papers and examining census and genealogical data to piece together a Calvert family history.

For Bryan Calvert, the parallels between his life and his great-grandfather’s were compelling. Like James, Bryan worked as a private chef in New York (in his case, for the photographer Annie Leibovitz) and now he, too, was opening a restaurant. He decided to name the place after his ancestors, and his cousin redoubled his efforts to uncover more family history.

Tom Calvert found several photographs of James, including a picture of him as an old man on his stoop in Harlem. The original of the image that hangs in the restaurant was too fragile to be restored, so a copy was commissioned from a Brazilian artist who works out of a tiny studio near the Brazilian Consulate and dresses in a three-piece suit, like a 1930s gangster. “He did a beautiful job, ” Tom Calvert said.

The most revealing discovery was a notebook kept by James’s wife, Annie, an Irish immigrant who met her husband when they worked as domestics in the same household. The book is yellowed by age and contains layers of writing, making it nearly as hard as hieroglyphics to decipher, but its pages, a mix of the prosaic (coal receipts) and the poignant (a listing of the names and birth dates of Annie’s children, interspersed with the deaths of three of them), offer a window into the couple’s day-to-day life.

A recreated image from the notebook is delivered to diners with their checks; another element that pays tribute to the past is a drink (rye, Cointreau, bitters, sweet vermouth and kumquat juice) called James’s Revenge.

“That’s the tragedy of it, that he lost the restaurant,” Bryan Calvert said, adding with a wry smile, “As part of this, we’re going to track down the family of his former partner and sue them.”

July 13, 2008
Good Eating Prospect Heights
A Tasty Density

By Kris Ensminger

(718) 942-4255; 605 Carlton Avenue (St. Marks Avenue); $$; Article: 6/25/08.
Seasonal American food with European influences, like fava bean ravioli with morels, is what Bryan Calvert knows best. Mr. Calvert, the chef of this brownstone restaurant with vintage décor, worked at Bouley and Union Pacific. Main courses include pine nut and rosemary-crusted rack of lamb with summer bean stew, and a grass-fed beef burger with Cotswold cheese.

Visit NYtimes.com

Tuesday, June 24, 2008,
by Daniel Krieger,
Eater Inside: James

Opening up in the old Sorrel space tonight, we present James, a little Prospect Heights stunner from Bryan Calvert (former chef at Union Pacific and Bouley) and his wife Deborah Williamson. As seems to be de rigueur with any halfway ambitious new restaurant these days, James has pressed tin ceilings, exposed brickwork, a sleek dark wooden bar, and some designer chandeliers. As for the food, the owners say it will be a "a seasonal-American restaurant with old-world European influences," and of course they're offering an gussied up cocktail list. We're not expecting any critics to trek out here just yet (though remember Richman hearts Brooklyn), but it will most likely be an immediate hit in the neighborhood.