Hello, Sailor

The Brooklyn bistro exhibits the understated confidence of its famous co-captains.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

WHATEVER ITS STATED W neighborhood ambitions, it was inevitable that Sailor would become a beacon for restaurant tourists and Resy card-punchers; the lure of a returning champion is simply too irresistible. Here, she is April Bloomfield, whose name is synonymous with the rich, snouty eating of the 2010s. (Her specialty at the Breslin was a whole trotter, still novel.) Or at least it was until it became synonymous with the blind eye turned toward male misconduct in the pre-Me Too era. Her reckoning is by now well known. After a couple years cooking quietly out of the city, Bloomfield is back, not as the lodestar of a constellation of restaurants but as the clogs on the ground of one would-be local joint in Fort Greene, where her partner in the project, the well-known restaurateur Gabriel Stulman, lives.

If Sailor is an attempt to evade the spotlight, good luck. Bloomfield is too compelling a chef to go unnoticed. She doesn't look like the cook she used to be, her hair now cut high and navally tight, but her food has the burly finesse it always did. In her first cookbook-the one where she wears a whole pig draped over her shoulders like a mink stole-she called her style "anal rustic." I won't attempt to improve upon that.