Industry City, an enormous waterfront complex in Sunset Park, has in recent years reinvented itself as a hub for small businesses and tech startups, and it’s a terrific place to find yourself in need of lunch. The lower floors of its half-dozen-ish central buildings are dotted with kiosks and food courts. You can find gorgeous noodle soups at Ramen Setagaya, fresh tofu and exquisite sushi at Sunrise Mart, coal-kissed pizza at Table 87, and some of the best burgers and sandwiches in the city at Ends Meat, a whole-animal butcher. For dinner, Industry City has had less to offer. As the offices and furniture outlets go dark at the end of the day, so, too, do the restaurants that feed their inhabitants. In March, though, a restaurant called Confidant opened in a prime storefront of Building 5, right alongside Innovation Alley, the grandiosely named pedestrian pathway that connects a handful of the central buildings. Confidant is one of the first full-service restaurants in Industry City, and it opened with an assertive statement: dinner service only.
It was a bold, almost hubristic promise. The Industry City developer Jamestown was also the force behind the early-two-thousands renovation of Chelsea Market, in Manhattan—a single building, rather than a sprawling mini-city, but a compelling proof of concept for the rejuvenation of underutilized industrial architecture with office space and a zingy constellation of street-level food offerings. But what’s around such a development matters just as much as what’s inside. Chelsea Market is fed by a seemingly endless flow of tourists and visitors drawn by the High Line and the meatpacking district, while Industry City, out on an odd edge of Brooklyn, is effectively an island, cut off from Sunset Park by the dark fortress of the B.Q.E. overpass and the many lanes of Third Avenue running beneath. The giant campus floats almost placelessly between the highway and the harbor; along with the scrappy businesses that surround Innovation Alley, and enough art studios to give rental agents a decent story to tell, it also contains the Brooklyn Nets training facility, a Costco with a suburb-size parking lot, and the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal prison currently home to Sam Bankman-Fried, Luigi Mangione, and Diddy. To succeed as a full-service, sit-down dinner spot in this strange, self-contained universe, the restaurant needs to have the irresistible pull of a neutron star.
A salad of chicories with crispy bits of wild rice.
Confidant’s chef-owners, Brendan Kelley and Daniel Grossman, are friends and former roommates who met as line cooks at Roberta’s, the Bushwick pizzeria, in 2018, and have gone on to work at renowned restaurants including Gage & Tollner and Per Se. They’ve made the best of Confidant’s boxy concrete space, warming it up with wood and leather, soft lighting, and velvet curtains. The menu is a model of the kind of high-low, global-pantry mishmash that we tend to call New American: enjoyable, creative preparations, punctuated with moments of cheffy technicalism. Dishes such as thin-sliced mortadella dusted with fennel pollen, or ultra-savory slices of house-made tuna prosciutto—the pink fish made even pinker by a bit of beet juice in the cure—are both intelligent and satisfying, the sort of snacky starter that goes beautifully with a glass of something minerally and slightly weird. A hunk of bread, made in-house, may be dear at ten dollars, but it’s soft and sour and complex, with a lovely dark crust; I laughed out loud, delighted, when I saw that the butter served alongside was a tangle of spaghetti-like extrusions, soft and salty.
A marvellous prawn potpie sports a towering cloche of glossy, golden puff pastry; the texture of the filling is more like that of rich seafood bisque. A half chicken is a crisp-skinned pleasure, and a gorgeous dry-aged steak (sourced from Ends Meat) is cooked with precision, though the chefs hide its funk and complexity under too many frills and garnishes: compound butter, and grilled scallions, and garlic confit, and a shaving of horseradish. Kelley spent time cooking at some especially fancy restaurants in Copenhagen, and the city’s influence is felt in Scandi-inflected dishes like a salad of roasted beets and white anchovies, or an unexpected composition of potatoes and apples—the former warm and roasted, the latter cold and raw—under a snowfield of horseradish cream. That dish is clever, for sure, but it’s served in an oddly gargantuan portion, and its playful clash of textures and temperatures wears out its welcome after a bite or two. Proportion, subtlest of all sins, seems to be Confidant’s recurring weakness: I adored a multilayered salad of chicories with alliums and crispy bits of toasted wild rice, except that the itsy-bitsy share plates provided to eat it on were comically small, tinier than the pink-and-green leaves of radicchio they were meant to hold.
A “mushroom chopped cheese,” on the new daytime menu.
It may have been inevitable that Confidant would cave to the circadian rhythms of Industry City and introduce lunch service. A new daytime menu, which débuted a few weeks ago, features a brief and pleasing selection of sandwiches and salads, plus an apparently obligatory grain bowl and a few larger dishes. I’m particularly fond of what the menu calls a “mushroom chopped cheese,” though without the name I doubt I’d have made the connection with the bodega classic, since this sandwich is very much its own thing: a seeded segment of baguette, spread with surprisingly spicy chipotle mayonnaise and piled with buttery sautéed mushrooms and a melty blanket of American cheese. At lunchtime, too, I found myself often disoriented by portions and proportions: the smashburger (quite good!) is smashburger-size, which is to say somewhat petite; it hovers, small and solitary, on the white expanse of a dinner plate, which despite its standard size seems as vast and empty as the steppes. I hoped to rescue the burger from loneliness with a side of coleslaw (vinegary and caraway-studded and excellent), but that came in its own vessel, and was so plentiful as to be nearly an entrée salad on its own.
This question of balance could be easily resolved with a little rejiggering and maybe some new plates. But the bigger question, of the restaurant’s magnetism, seems harder to tackle. Were Industry City an actual neighborhood, Confidant would be a lovely neighborhood restaurant, maybe even a great one. The desserts—made by the pastry chef Mariah Neston, who is worth paying attention to—are jazzy and sophisticated and fun. There’s a black-and-white mille-feuille featuring crackly chocolate dentelle cookies rolled into cigars and stacked with layers of vanilla and chocolate cream, and an exemplary coconut cake at lunchtime. But there’s a coherence to the place that’s missing, an absent layer of polish. Kelley and Grossman have no shortage of ambition, but they seem to be confining their attention to each individual dish, rather than expanding their vision to take in the way the dish is served and eaten, or indeed the scope of an entire meal. At lunch as at dinner, Confidant is not quite the restaurant it seems to want to be—a statement and a draw, a place that has gravity in both senses of the word. ♦
