How's the Hyssop?

Cafe Mado is a worthy return to locavore eating.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

LATELY, IT SEEMS like half the ingredients served to me in restaurants have more frequent-flier miles than I do: Wagyu beef with a Japanese passport, Australian ocean trout, tortillas made from milled-in-Mexico corn. I’m surprised there’s any room left in the Centurion Lounges of the world’s airports with so many groceries flying around.

At Cafe Mado, on the border of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights, the shortish menu stays closer to home. Ingredient fetishism is not unusual, but Mado’s “market section” takes it to the extreme. The roster is so changeable that the typical server soliloquy (“Can I walk you through the menu?”) here takes on the proportions of an aria. On a recent evening, our waitress spoke for so long as she itemized every leaf, fruit, and flower— I regret not setting a stopwatch, but it was easily over four full minutes—that I had to ask her how long it took to get off book.