Helen Rosner reviews Trudie’s Tavern, the newest Brooklyn restaurant from Nate Adler and Rachel Jackson. It is the third of their restaurants named for Adler’s grandmother, and the least overtly Jewish — but Ashkenazi American cooking runs through the menu.
The restaurant thrives on combinations that should feel mismatched:
- White tablecloths, blue velvet, and pink napkins alongside an old tube TV and bar-mitzvah-style bathroom décor
- Families at early seatings, dates later, and room for either oysters and Martinis or a burger and beer
- Tavern food beside swordfish in pepper-and-watermelon gazpacho
- A potato pancake — effectively a latke — topped with cucumber-dill crème fraîche, smoked trout, and flying-fish roe
- Schmaltz in the fried rice and even floating on a Martini
The kitchen’s biggest swing is lamb schnitzel with blackberry sauce, whole berries, and mint. Rosner places it somewhere between a lush Mitteleuropean folktale and cowboy-style chicken-fried steak. Roast chicken comes with potatoes, a grandmother’s cucumber salad, and onion-sweet gravy sharpened by vinegar.
The point is not authenticity as a fixed rule. Trudie’s draws on Jewish American food memory without turning it into solemn nostalgia: sophisticated and kitschy, polished and easygoing, “not quite emulsified” but coherent anyway.
Rosner finds the whole restaurant condensed in its carrot cake — familiar yet idiosyncratic, sweet but not too sweet, happily a bit of one thing and a bit of another.