We Need More ‘Weird’ Food
In an era of shrimp cocktail, one restaurant makes the case for snail ice cream.
The owners of Honey Badger describe their small, Prospect Park–adjacent dining room as an “avant-garde restaurant with a secret undisclosed menu that changes daily.” Dinner starts at $195 per person and courses might come dusted with dehydrated deer blood or stippled with a parasitic fungus that turns ants into zombies. An optional water pairing is available for another $70 per person, with samples from an aquifer in the Appalachian Mountains, a melted iceberg in Labrador, and “George Washington’s spa.”
When I sat down for dinner on a recent night, there was no preamble or explanation before an amuse-bouche trio was set before me. It included a violently sweet honey-fermented baby acorn, a tiny curl of vegan hickory-nut cheese coated in ash, and a flower bud called Spilanthes that caused my mouth to buzz and burn and fill with saliva for 12 minutes while “Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof blared, inexplicably, from the wall speakers. The somehow-not-psychedelic flower set the tone for a strange and exhilarating meal in a ten-seat room a few blocks from where my grandmother had grown up wondering if her grandchildren would one day become doctors. The ingredients and culinary traditions spanned kaiseki, new Nordic, and at least four continents. Ice cream made from slipper snails was served within a chain of their still-connected shells, which I had to pull apart like magnets to get to the dessert. There was a lecture from co-owner Junayd Juman about Al Gore’s apparent campaign to ban amaranth.
The restaurant has been open for seven years but has never received a formal review (except for a 179-word write-up from the Infatuation). Despite appearances, Honey Badger is not an elaborate bit. Juman, who was born in Trinidad, studied as an industrial designer before teaching himself to bartend and cook and eventually launching a catering company. He opened this “wild-to-table” restaurant in 2017 with his wife, Fjölla Sheholli — who was born in Kosovo and learned to forage and preserve from her grandmother out of necessity during wartime — to showcase ingredients from along the Eastern Seaboard. “I am not a chef,” Juman told me. “Chefs are full of egos; I’m a craftsman,” he said. “I like creating art, and the palette is your mouth.”
Chatting with the two of them is a bit like AirDropping your brain into the Portlandia pilot. When I asked their pronouns, Juman said he was a tree, and Sheholli told me she was a rainbow. Even still, the depth of their appreciation for the earth is boundless and charming and occasionally moving, even as the closing chords of “Matchmaker” trumpet through their temple to Mother Nature, with foraged bivalve shells cemented into the walls.
Sometimes, Juman and Sheholli’s experimental creations pay off, especially when they call in ingredients from the First Nations’ cuisine Juman learned to cook from his mother, who grew up near an indigenous community. A single ring of braided onion grass was battered in ghost-rice flour before being fried, and it paired shockingly well with algae-spiked mayonnaise and a dusting of powdered crab brain. Technique can be similarly impressive: A miniature lobster-stuffed croissant displayed perfect execution of a laminated dough. It quivered momentarily before exploding into buttery shards the second I cut into it. Cordyceps, a fungus that grows on mountain insects, provided a balanced salinity and crunch to another version of puff pastry shaped like a log on which they were perched. The snail ice cream, I promise, hit the spot.
Other times, as with a dashi so salty I wondered if I was being pranked, or a one-centimeter gritty clam dumpling that tasted of old seashells, I began to understand why no restaurant critic had wanted to touch this place. But I also couldn’t stop thinking that within the context of 2024 — when $20 “au poivre” hot dogs are commonplace, influencers go bug-eyed for mozzarella sticks, and a wealthy diner can easily spend $300 on a dinner of shrimp cocktail and smashburgers — Honey Badger forced me to engage (and at times wrestle) with a relatively boundless definition of “consumption.”
It’s not the type of “fine dining” that connotes French-inflected fuss (in both plating and service), and it certainly isn’t the type of experience that might naturally attract a finance bro with an unopened set of Modernist Cuisine — though maybe it should. In a city where the patronage model has long propped up culture — from art to religion to politics — perhaps those who can comfortably afford to, and who have a stated interest in pushing us out of the nostalgic chophouse resuscitation we’ve been comfort-eating through in New York City since the pandemic, should become patrons of ambitious cuisine.
“Avant-garde” cuisine, the way Juman and Sheholli seem to be using it, draws the natural comparison from visual art to a certain subset of fine-dining restaurants that defy categorization. It’s not solely new Nordic, nor kaiseki; it doesn’t play by any existing rules, and it carries out bold experiments just to see what happens. Honey Badger is also not the only restaurant to take this approach.
Take Ilis, the intrepid, newish spot in Greenpoint from Mads Refslund, which critics have suggested might not be achieving its intended goals. The lukewarm appraisals are not completely without merit. On a recent evening, some extended dish-selection theater involved a man wheeling a cart of ingredients to my table, then moving ingredients that corresponded to our selected dishes into a wooden box, then asking if I wanted to take a picture of that wooden box. A zucchini that got circumcised tableside to become a straw literally did not function as one.
But conch served in its shell with a creamy potato mousse and dusted with green-tea powder was eerily reminiscent of my favorite Marcella Hazan tuna-pecorino-parsley pasta sauce. Thinly sliced mushrooms served on spinach on top of a piece of crispy seaweed smelled and tasted exactly like sour cream and onion potato chips. A perfectly ripe cherry tomato I was instructed to squeeze onto a fresh oyster suggested mignonette could be rendered completely obsolete come August. A side-by-side tasting of fresh tuna sashimi and tuna that had been aged for five months was both captivating and propaedeutic.
Were the hits worth enduring the misses? A few years ago, I might’ve dismissed both Honey Badger and Ilis completely. Comparisons to The Menu are inevitable, and these particular menus are exorbitant, making one wonder how much of that money goes toward funding the expansive crew of cooks stuffing PEI mussels into pig bladders as they were at Ilis, with the rhythm and gravitas of the prisoners in the opening scene of Les Mis.
Provocative restaurants like Ilis, Honey Badger, or more casual ones like Foxface Natural, have the potential to finally bust us out of our current era of clickbait cuisine — when the algorithmic overlords make it incredibly easy for two women with ring lights to sink a restaurant’s reputation and earning potential with a four-minute video unless they are served food that, by their limited definition, “fucks” — if only we’d let them.
Ilis is certainly not for everyone. I would not tell my younger sister to prioritize whimsy and challenge if she saved up for months to afford a single night out, and I certainly would not point her toward Honey Badger’s $70 water tasting. (It did include glasses of water that tasted perceptibly different, but it’s possible to achieve a similar effect by double-fisting bottles of Topo Chico and Pellegrino at varying temperatures.) I would also not send my husband, who has no interest in intellectualizing what he eats. Honey Badger is a restaurant that will almost certainly make diners uncomfortable at times. But for anyone who loves to debate, who appreciates a bit of wildness, who really, really loves food, then, it might just be the place.
Refslund told me that when he was getting ready to open Ilis, a friend advised him to add a cheeseburger to the menu to maximize appeal. “I’m not saying that chicken parmesan isn’t delicious,” he told me, “but why would I want to cook another man’s recipe?” He held out against the burger, but he did add chicken stuffed with miso butter in a nod toward familiarity. When I had it, I found it to be subtle and inoffensive — but it was still, several bites in, chicken. Well before I’d finished, my mind began to wander to other things: the conversation of the table beside us; an oversize painting hanging on one wall. Before I knew it, I was daydreaming, about Cordyceps and deer blood.
Related