Cafe Mado Is a Worthy Return to Locavore Cooking

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-stamped passport, Australian ocean trout, tortillas made from milled-in-Mexico corn. I’m surprised anyone can still get a seat in the Centurion Lounges of the world’s airports with so many groceries flying around.

At Cafe Mado, a new all-day café and restaurant 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 uninterruptedly 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.

She demurred, but when I returned two days later (Wednesday, a market day) to test the hypothesis, there were three brand-new additions. “Our forager, Tama, ran into a bunch of mid-summer mushrooms,” a different server told me. Tama Matsuoka Wong, a Harvard-educated attorney who gave up a life of finance lawyering to return to New Jersey, where she was raised, and supply New York restaurants with wild discoveries, is invoked like a patron saint, bringing Mado things too local and small bore for even the farmers’ market. Besides the mushrooms, there was lovage, hyssop buds, and autumn olives, which are not olives at all but the tart, currantlike berries of an invasive shrub. Mado’s ensalada picada is like a raw scavenger hunt. During my visits, it included peaches, cauliflower, radishes, zephyr squash, skewer-thin wax beans, figs, hakurei turnips, and Chioggia beets. (Its carrot-and-dill-pollen vinaigrette is served underneath everything, lest it disrupt the pristineness.) “I’m sure it’s got some ingredients you’ve never had before,” the server said, setting down the plate. “Any questions, please ask. We love to talk about it.”

Mado itself cultivates a secret-garden atmosphere with its rewilding backyard and skylit, greenhouse-style dining room. Blonde wood, a scattering of ceramics, and a Top 40 soundtrack give it the feel of a museum café, which it was essentially designed to be; the Brooklyn Museum is a block and a half away. It is brewing Parlor Coffee and selling pastries from 8:30 a.m. onward, as any self-respecting Brooklyn café would, but much of what’s delicious at Mado is available from midday into the evening. The Tony is a take on Anthony Bourdain’s favorite sandwich (their words), mortadella and melted caciocavallo with dijonnaise on a seeded sesame roll that gives mini-bagel. The Caesar salad is a bowl of Little Gem leaves furred with Parmesan and tweaked ever so slightly with the addition of toasted yeast and lemon zest.

Given how regularly new options rotate in, there is unfortunately no formula I could find to guide you toward only the hits. It’s hard to predict when these little renovations will work beautifully (the gentle but persistent heat of Thai chile in the bacon jam that enriches brûlée’d figs, served on a baton of focaccia) and when they’ll wind up less needful than showy (I’m not sure what a tomato farci in a pool of black garlic oil gained from being blackened even further with charcoal). Why, among the few mains, was trout with Sungold tomatoes in a mussel-scented cream merely “good” when pork ribs glazed with fermented honey were much better? Luckily, the menu is short enough that my table of four did a clean sweep and still had room for dessert.

Nico Russell, Mado’s chef, clearly has the chops to pull off high-wire cooking. He was previously the chef at Oxalis, the tasting-menu restaurant that occupied this space, and is an owner of the Redwood Hospitality Group, which runs nearby Place des Fêtes and Laurel Bakery in the Columbia Waterfront District. He spent a year before that at three-starred Mirazur in Provence. France and its culinary traditions have clearly left their mark: Mado is named in honor of Marie-Louise Point, known as Mado, the patroness of La Pyramide in Vienne, a pilgrimage site for 20th-century French gourmands. Mme. Point’s husband, Fernand, was one of the forefathers of nouvelle cuisine, who taught Paul Bocuse and Michel Troisgrois; in fact, he was “the greatest practitioner of la grande cuisine in our time,” in the studied opinion of Joseph Wechsberg.

La grande cuisine was typically the domain of men, whereas the homier bourgeoise cuisine was traditionally handled by women. That’s not to take anything away from Madame Mado, who ran La Pyramide very capably after her husband’s untimely death in 1955 (or, given that he was some 300 pounds and both started and ended the day with Champagne, perhaps not so untimely), but spotlighting Mado rather than her more-lauded husband feels like a statement of intent, and thank God for that — there are enough tasting menus to glut any gourmet looking for one. We need small, nimble, and variable.