Tables for Two Tango: Helen Rosner's "Foul Witch"

Photo by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Foul Witch"

This is the second post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Rosnor’s deeply sensual “Tables for Two: Foul Witch” (December 18, 2023).

This piece does not start promisingly. Rosner describes Foul Witch’s neighborhood: “feels neither hip nor interesting.” She says, 

The restaurant, too, is oddly short on ambience: the long, narrow, high-ceilinged dining room is like a hallway to nowhere; the rough brick walls and exposed ductwork make the space feel unfinished, rather than artfully gritty; the open kitchen, built into the back of the space, has a startup-garage haphazardness, eschewing any aesthetic grace.

So far, so meh. But the next lines surprise and delight:

Thank goodness, then, for early winter sunsets, and low interior lighting, and food so fascinatingly delicious that you don’t care where you’re sitting to eat it. Every meal at Foul Witch begins with a complimentary portion of bread and butter: a wedge of crisp, oil-slick focaccia; a length of sour baguette, bien cuit; an enormous dollop of yolk-yellow butter, soft as cake frosting, salted like the sea. It’s a struggle not to finish every bite, which would be strategically unwise, given what’s to come. 

Wow! Food so fascinatingly delicious that you don’t care where you’re sitting to eat it – can restaurant praise get any more effusive than that? As a matter of fact, yes. Rosner is just getting warmed up. Here’s her next passage:

Foul Witch is ostensibly an Italian restaurant, though it is seemingly unconstrained by any known definition of that cuisine. The wines are global, and err on the side of bizarre. I was enraptured, one evening, by a Slovenian pinot grigio that my server described (accurately) as “entirely un-green.” On another visit, I fell hard for a gravelly Ryšák, an uncommon Czech blend of red and white grapes. The food, meanwhile, is luscious, almost libidinous; Mirarchi’s motivating principle seems to be the pursuit of suppleness and surrender. For an appetizer, pale rounds of pawpaw, the custard-like North American fruit that tastes like the tropics (and which ought to be a star on far more menus), are served at the bottom of a small, deep bowl, bathed in cream, beneath an obscene, slumping scoop of Golden Kaluga caviar. Tortellini, soft and curvaceous, have a velvet filling of veal sweetbreads; they swim in a golden broth made strange and beautiful by a butterscotch splash of Amaretto. A tender filet of wagyu, grilled over charcoal, comes with an earthy, almost animal, sunchoke béarnaise.

That “The food, meanwhile, is luscious, almost libidinous” makes me smile. Rosner is a voluptuary. Her review of Foul Witch is one her most voluptuous pieces. Dig her conclusion:

What unites the menu is a concentrated sensuality. Even the kitchen’s more pointed preparations, with piercing flavors that break up the menu’s otherwise relentless rolling softness, are almost unnervingly alive: a needle-sharp salsa verde dressing a plate of yielding Sorana beans; an anchovy-drenched celery salad, the vegetable sliced lengthwise into curling tentacles. Often, when restaurants are called “sexy,” that means sleek-lined and hard-edged; the food at Foul Witch is sexy, not in the way of a fast car or a low-slung couch but like actual sex: a physical indulgence, a sinking in, an embodied experience of pleasure.

That last line is one of my favorites in all of “Tables for Two.” Rosner is a brilliant carnal writer.