Sweetbriar x 2, Kips Bay, NYC

Sweetbriar in the Park South Hotel had been on our radar to meet for dinner since it opened in April as we wanted to again eat Chef Bryce Shuman’s upscale comfort food. Bryce hailed from Betony and Eleven Madison Park, where he garnered three stars from the New York Times, One Michelin Star and was named 2015 Food and Wine Magazine “Best New Chef.” That and he is a friend of my dining partner. Bryce includes many of his hit menu items from his popular pandemic barbecue pop-up Ribs n Riesling.

With sweetbriar focused on live-fire cooking of their seasonal veggies and meats, I thought it fitting to sample their Smoke Out cocktail as their old-fashioned made with Russells bourbon is finished with smoke ($20).

Don’t miss the grilled radicchios with escarole, Castelfranco and other lettuces in a lemon-caper vinaigrette ($28), being sure to toss it before eating. We also shared the unusual spicy Mangalista pizza. Instead of tomato sauce, they use house-made fermented chili paste with red peppers topped with the cured ham with honey on a sour-dough pizza dough ($32) made from wild yeast (levian).

As chef Bryce suggested, we googled Mangalista pork to see this curly-haired Old World breed indigenous to Hungary resembling sheep. The fleece is most commonly blond yet can be black or red. From what I read, this breed was nearly extinct in the 1990s, when fewer than 200 pigs remained in Hungary.

We then shared Bryce’s smoked black pepper Duroc (a lean pig breed) ribs ($34) in a pepper bourbon sauce along with their famous stone-ground sweet cornbread ($10) served in a cast-iron skillet along with cole slaw in a sweet mustard dressing and housemade honey butter. Benjamin, our server, exclaimed, that is the “best cornbread I’ve had in the city.” In addition, we had their tender chunks of kohlrabi, cooked in the fire’s embers, that came with a black garlic vinaigrette ($8), their fire-roasted golden cauliflower with pumpkin seeds ($12) and their chow chow ($5).

After all that, we were way too full to try any of the desserts.

And so I returned with another friend for his birthday. We had a couple of pizzas including the wild mushroom one that I hadn’t tried before with wild mushrooms with the crust topped with a sherried béchamel ($15 happy hour pricing).