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Industry City, a sprawling waterfront complex in Sunset Park, has transformed itself in recent years into a hub for small businesses and tech startups, and it’s a great place to dine. The lower floors of its half-dozen central buildings are filled with kiosks and food courts. You can find great noodle soups at Ramen Setagaya, fresh tofu and gourmet sushi at Sunrise Mart, charcoal pizza at Table 87, and some of the best burgers and sandwiches in town at Ends Meat, a butcher shop that serves whole animals. Industry City has less to offer for dinner, though. As offices and furniture stores close at the end of the workday, so do the restaurants that serve them. Still, a restaurant called Confidant opened in March in the flagship Building 5, right next to Innovation Alley, a dramatic pedestrian walkway that connects several of the central buildings. Confidant is one of the first full-service restaurants in Industry City, and was announced as a dinner-only restaurant when it opened.
It was a bold, almost arrogant promise. Industry City developer Jamestown was also the driving force behind the Chelsea Market redevelopment in Manhattan in the early 2000s—a single building, not a sprawling mini-city, but a compelling proof of concept for reviving underutilized industrial architecture with office space and a vibrant array of street food stalls. But what surrounds such a development is as important as what’s inside. Chelsea Market is fed by a seemingly endless stream of tourists and visitors drawn by the High Line and the meatpacking industry, while Industry City, on a strange edge of Brooklyn, is effectively an isolated island, cut off from Sunset Park by the dark fortress of the BQE overpass and the many lanes of Third Avenue that run beneath it. The vast campus hovers almost haphazardly between the highway and the harbor; Along with the scattered businesses that line Innovation Alley and enough artists’ studios to give leasing agents a decent story, it’s also home to a Brooklyn Nets training facility, a Costco with a suburb-sized parking lot, and the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal prison that currently houses Sam Bankman-Fried, Luigi Mangione, and Diddy. To succeed as a full-fledged dining destination in this strange, self-contained universe, a restaurant needs to have the irresistible pull of a neutron star.
Chicory salad with crispy wild rice pieces.
Confidant chefs and owners Brendan Kelly and Daniel Grossman are friends and former roommates who met as cooks at Roberta’s, a pizzeria in Bushwick, in 2018 and went on to work at acclaimed restaurants like Gage & Tollner and Per Se. They’ve made the most of Confidant’s boxy concrete space, filling it with wood and leather, soft lighting, and velvet curtains. The menu is an example of the kind of high-low, global mix we commonly think of as New American: satisfying, creative dishes punctuated by moments of chef-driven technique. Dishes like thinly sliced mortadella dusted with fennel pollen or deeply savory slices of house-made tuna prosciutto—a pink fish made even pinker by a splash of beet juice in the dressing—are both clever and
Sourse: newyorker.com
