Houseman’s Ned Baldwin Opens Zoli in Bushwick

More than a decade ago, long before Google and Disney moved to the neighborhood, Ned Baldwin opened Houseman and drew a devout following to a small residential block of Greenwich Street in Hudson Square. From the start the room felt well lived-in, and Baldwin’s regularly changing menu in those early days pulled inspiration from Prune, where Baldwin had worked as chef de cuisine for Gabrielle Hamilton. “She does something that I find really compelling, that I try to match or at least do my own version of at Houseman,” he says. “Her menus were intelligent and informed and thoughtful and unpretentious, and a little funny. I was really moved by that.”

Over the years, Houseman has become the site of many family dinners and attracted a devoted group of regulars. Baldwin, the kind of ingredient-loving chef who lights up when he gets a particularly excellent delivery of mushrooms or spring onions, has also been known to set up a grill for impromptu sidewalk parties whenever he gets fish — he’s a keen fisherman — that excites him. Barbara Gladstone, of Gladstone Gallery, is an investor. Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson each live nearby as do Lonti Ebers and her husband, Bruce Flatt. In 2021, Ebers established Amant in Bushwick to support working artists through gallery shows, residencies, and commissions. “We’re taking risks and showing stuff that other museums or institutions in the city aren’t ready to show yet,” says Nick Pilato, its executive director. (A show from Kim Gordon and Bill Nace is currently on display.) Amant now encompasses five buildings, one of which — around the corner from an ice-cream-truck garage, in a former takeout-container warehouse — is the home of Baldwin’s second restaurant, Zoli, which opened this week.

As a genre, “museum restaurants” can take many different forms. With Zoli, Baldwin has a space to explore his sense of what “museum food” should be. “Cooking for artists isn’t making artistic plates,” he says. “Artists understand what confident execution is, and a sense for makers who have a confident sense of themselves.” Baldwin, who holds an M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale and worked as an artist for years before becoming a chef, adds, “When I consume art, which I do all the time, the last thing I want to do is sit down to a meal that’s screaming itself.” His goal is simple, honest food — a protein with a little sauce, for example.

A plate of monkfish demonstrates the pared-down style Baldwin employs at Zoli.
Photo: Canal House

Working with two other chefs, Danny Roberts (formerly of Altro Paradiso) and Aimee Li, Baldwin will change the menu all the time, one day to the next. “What kind of food do I want to cook? New York food,” says Baldwin. With people moving here from so many different places, it’s inevitable that this city’s food is a global mashup and constantly evolving: “We have a very chaotic food tradition — this is an extension of that, to be honest about who we are, we’re in New York.”

A plate of spicy marinated dandelion greens, quickly blanched and combined with what’s essentially a quick kimchee — chile, garlic, and soy — is one of the many small dishes on the menu, reminiscent of banchan. “I don’t think we’ve made it the same way twice,” Baldwin says. He’s tinkering with a wood-fired oven and a plancha for crisp-skinned butterflied fish and chicken that Baldwin says will rival the famous roast chicken at Houseman. Fish will always play a big role on the menu, in dishes in the vein of roasted monkfish with ras el hanout beurre blanc and little-neck clams with douchi (fermented black beans) butter and Thai basil. Fermented ingredients appear throughout and instead of serving nonalcoholic cocktails, “We’re pushing to make kombuchas that have the complexity of maybe a simple wine,” Baldwin says.

An entire second kitchen on the top floor was initially designed for prep but will be able to host chef residencies, “hopefully in perpetuity,” per Baldwin, in an area that will also serve as a private dining room. Amant and Baldwin worked with GRT Architects, which gave the space enormous windows that open to the street and immense skylights that fill the large room with natural light. A wide, wooden staircase zigzags up through the center of the restaurant to the private dining room and open-air bar with a mezzanine along the way that’s home to six seats with a bird’s-nest view into the kitchen. Everything is anchored by an apocalyptic aquarium installation by Pierre Huyghe that was commissioned for the space; it’s the only artwork on display. The interior walls were built using three types of cinder blocks (rough hewn, smooth, and what Pilato calls “a sort of corduroy”), from floor to ceiling, that have an almost honeyed color, giving the room a sun-drenched warmth contrary to the industrial materials. “We wanted everything to be honest and sort of perpendicular to itself,” Pilato says. “The material is the material, and it’s not trying to be anything else.”

Lobster pasta.
Photo: Canal House