Parish Hall

Parish Hall Restaurant, 109A North 3rd St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

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New Year's Eve at Parish Hall

We'll have a 3-course prix-fixe menu for New Year's Eve, featuring some of our favorite winter dishes. $65 gets you dinner, a glass of sparkling wine, and a beautiful evening in a room full of happy people. Make reservations now!

Here's the first draft of the night's menu:

First

Roasted squash salad

mixed greens, burrata, croutons

or

Parsnip and lobster bisque

thyme, maitake mushrooms

or

Beef tartare

parsnip chips, beet, smoked garlic aioli

Second

Strip steak

kale chimichurri, braised shallots, horseradish gougeres

or

Quail

parsnip puree, shiitake bread pudding, gremolata

or

Duck

roasted duck breast, black pepper spaetzle, pickled mustard seed

or

Golden tilefish

garlic cream, clams, braised cabbage

Third

Flourless chocolate cake

preserved strawberries, whipped cream

or

Farro pudding

crispy farro, poached quince

or

Apple fool

with pecans, raw honey, and rosemary

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On December 11th, we ran a special prix-fixe menu featuring game--because it's hunting season, and we're stuck here in the city. It was a delicious tour of the fields--or, as we took to calling it among ourselves, a dinner of bunny, bambi, and bird. 

We started with a rabbit terrine, layered with shiitake mushrooms and served with a bright parsley sauce and sharp house mustard.

Next up, venison sausage with acorn flour gnocchi, sunchokes, and sage.

Then we served dry-aged squab with rosehip jelly, tarragon "sponge", and salsify. 

Dessert was walnut oil cake with wild cranberry sorbet and lemon thyme.

We'll do it again soon--sign up for our email list if you want to know what's up next! 

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We've done a lot with Wellness in the Schools over the years, from providing food at their annual gala to running the marathon for them. But the best moments are when we get to go into a school and hand out food to school kids ourselves: even something slightly exotic (and spicy) like lima bean salad with pickled onions, chili paste, and celery can get kids excited and begging for more. (And, to be fair, it can get more than a few of them to stick out their tongues and gag in that charming and dramatic way universal to all schoolkids).

Our partner school this year is PS84, just down the street from us in Williamsburg. We're looking forward to a winter full of hungry, eager-to-learn kids.

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Our special Halloween all-goat dinner was understated and delicious, a nice counterpoint to the half-pound of candy we all ate the next day.

If you missed it, stayed tuned: we'll do more of these special-menu dinners in the weeks to come. 

[parishhall]

Another week, another goat!

We're hitting the last few days of GOATOBER, and looking forward to our big Halloween whole goat blow-out dinner that YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS!

Our goat this week comes from Sunny Acres Farm, which is just down the road from our own Goatfell Farm. Here's what they have to say about themselves....

We are a multi-generation farm located in upstate New York.  The farm has been in our family since 1897, and has evolved through the years from a dairy and market crop farm in its early years to a beef and dairy goat farm during the 1970s, '80s and '90s.  For a brief time, we operated the farm primarily as a market hay farm, but found that we truly missed being involved with raising animals, especially goats!  In 2002, we purchased our first two Boer doelings, and welcomed their kids in January 2003...and today our herd, including breeding does, breeding bucks, and kids, numbers over 100! In the past three years, we have begun transitioning from Boers with the addition of Kikos to our herd.  The herd now includes three Kiko bucks, as well as a number of purebred and percentage Kiko does and doelings. 

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Every year we close the restaurants for a day or so and haul as many folks as we can up to Goatfell Farm, our small farm on the northern edge of the Catskills.

We spend the time treating ourselves to the kinds of food we try to serve our customers: simple, delicious, well-loved. We get to know each other a little better. We stay up late around a fire, sleep in tents, in hammocks, in the barn, then get up in the morning and set the farm up for winter. 

We just got back from this year's trip. We're excited about the people we work with, the work we do, and the food we cook. We got some dirt under our nails and some dirt on each other and we are ready to clean up and get to work.

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Goat of the Week!

As we approach Halloween and our Wholly-Goat Halloween Dinner! we're working out recipes & testing dishes that help us understand just why goat is one of the world's most popular meats. There's not much more delicious than a well-raised goat well-prepared.

In the spirit of transparency and honor, we wanted to share what our friends at Heritage Foods USA had to tell us about the goats we're featuring this week from Asgaard Dairy in upstate New York.

"Asgaard, which means 'farm of the gods' in Norse mythology, is the name given to the farm by its founder Rockwell Kent, a renowned artist, writer, and farmer. Rockwell established the farm as his home in the early 1900s. David and Rhonda Brunner, the farm's current owners, arrived in 1988.

"Today, Asgaard Farm and Dairy is a family owned and operated farm that produces farmstead cheeses and other dairy, meat, and poultry products for the local community. The farm is set on 1,500 acres of fields and second growth forests in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. The Brunner's have a boisterous herd of registered Alpine and Nubian and Saanens goats. The farm is focused on growing the number of Saanens, which are loved for their mild temperament and steady milk production.

"The Brunner's goat program has expanded since last year to include multi-species rotational grazing, where the goats, cows and chickens rotate through the pastures, each preparing and cleaning the field for the next. In addition to pasture grazing, the goats also browse in the woods - foraging for food in the woods as nature intended. It has taken a lot of work to develop this system, but the the Brunner's are pleased to see the results in both the production and health of the goat herd."

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This Week's Goat!

Heritage Foods USA works with a variety of small farms to provide us with goat all through October. This week, our goat is from Consider Bardwell Farm, makers of great cheeses (their Rupert is an old favorite of ours). 

Here's what Heritage has to say about Consider Bardwell: 

"Consider Bardwell Farm is the first cheese-making co-op in Vermont, founded in 1864 by Consider Stebbins Bardwell himself. The farm spans 300-acres across the rolling hills of Vermont's Champlain Valley and easternmost Washington County, New York. As part of the "No Goat Left Behind" project, farm manager Peter Brooks is raising male bucklings on a 5-acre rocky hilltop pasture that is covered in wild honeysuckle, buckhorn, sumac, and locust saplings. The goats are allowed free-range access to pasture and an open barn. They roam about scampering along stonewalls and rock ledges.

"The goats are Oberhasli, a dairy breed developed in the mountainous regions of Switzerland. They are brown, with hues between light tan and deep reddish brown and black spots. Oberhaslis have a friendly, gentle disposition and they are known as active and hardy goats."

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We're not going to say you're too old for Snickers minis and orange-and-black candy corns. But you can do better with your Halloween this year. 

Join us for a whole-goat dinner at Parish Hall at 7:30 on Halloween. Five courses of beautiful, well-raised goat from the farms of Heritage Foods USA, drink pairings if you want them, and your Miley costume if you insist.

Order tickets online: http://whollygoat.brownpapertickets.com

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Fall is settling in at the Greenmarket. Pears, apples, squash, celery. But there's still enough of summer clinging to the days that the trees are as green as a southern cemetery.

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Our first (annual!) Farm Dinner last weekend was all we could have hoped: blessed with perfect weather and an abundant harvest, plus a beautiful pig from our neighbors at Old Field Farm. We fed old friends and people we’d never met, watched the sun set over the Catskills, wallowed in the music of Rachel Brotman & Lora-Faye, drank plenty of Brooklyn Brewery beer and Finger Lakes wine, and lit up sparklers when the night was up.

We were incredibly lucky to have James Abbott on hand to take pictures. As you can see, it was a magical evening. We’re looking forward to doing it again next year, or sooner.

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Buckwheat: Threshing & Winnowing, a set on Flickr.

When we planted buckwheat at the farm, we thought of it as nothing more than a good cover crop, something to keep weeds from filling in unplanted areas of the field and to add some good, bulky organic matter to the soil. But a meeting with Glenn Roberts—the grain wizard behind South Carolina’s Anson Mills—got us thinking about it differently: why not see if we could make our own flour from this quick-growing crop? Here’s phase 2 of the experiment: threshing and winnowing the seed.

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We’ve just about hit the high point of summer, when everything’s coming ripe and we’ve managed to catch up on the weeds that proliferated during the rain & drought cycles of early summer. 

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The Field House puts iconic spring flavors together and sends them off to play: strawberry syrup, made from strawberries we grow at Goatfell Farm and pure cane sugar; rhubarb bitters; a sprig of mint from our windowbox. It’s brightened with lemon juice, given a healthy jolt of demerara rum, and shaken, strained, and drunk out of a chilled coupe.

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Early summer at the farm.

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High drama: our chef putting the lid on a patty melt and giving it the loving squish that makes it the best burger this side of Mars.

See more about the city's best burgers at First We Feast.

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The little chicks we got from the preschool across the street from Egg are growing up fast. Too fast.