When chef Jake Tyler Brodsky picked up his phone the morning after opening the coastal-influenced brasserie Cafe Charmant, he didn’t expect to find himself going viral. “Hearing ‘Charmant, Charmant, Charmant’ blew my mind,” he recalls. “It all happened so fast.”
It was a fitting debut for a restaurant whose origin story began in Brodsky’s DMs. Catch Hospitality Group (The Corner Store, The Eighty Six, Or’esh) co-founder Eugene Remm made the first move after a trip to Palm Heights on Grand Cayman, where the culinary program left such an impression that he tracked down the man behind the menu. Brodsky, who spent seven years at the helm of the resort, had already left his post to travel around Asian street food capitals and Italian beach towns, taking notes along the way.
When Remm asked Brodsky if he wanted to open a restaurant together in his native New York, the answer was obvious. “It’s a homecoming for me,” he says.
The duo arrived on Bleecker Street in September, taking over an address that previously housed an old-school Greek diner and a 1970s jazz club frequented by Miles Davis and Nina Simone. Rockwell Group kept the bones and added patinated mirrors, checkered velvet curtains, and deep red subway tiles to complement an impressive roster of Basquiats and Warhols.
The kitchen turns out a lineup of brasserie staples imbued with playful, global touches. “I love merging a really classic world with fun new concepts,” Brodsky says. “That was the energy I was trying to inject into this place.” He insists on proper white tablecloths and buttoned-up service, but his sense of whimsy comes through on the plate: crispy squash blossoms stuffed with shrimp instead of traditional ricotta, DIY tuna tartare on potato chips, and an unexpected hint of tamarind in the steak frites’ peppercorn sauce.
Brodsky is careful not to show all his cards right away. While the fan-favorite chocolate mousse arrives with sidecars of candied cherries and crumbled cookies, the chef secretly prefers his spread plain on a hunk of baguette. It’s off-menu for now—“I don’t want to freak people out in the first month,” he says—but ask, and you just might receive.
