Improbable but undeniable: beans are having a moment. Last December, the food Web site Eater published an essay called “Cool Beans,” which detailed “How the humble legume—especially heirloom varieties—became the go-to ingredient for home cooks.” (In 2018, this magazine profiled Rancho Gordo, the largest, and cultiest, retailer of heirloom beans in the U.S.) As of this month, you can buy a book, unaffiliated, called “Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World’s Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein,” by the food editor of the Washington Post.
And so you could say that the people behind Leo, which opened last fall in Williamsburg, have their fingers on the pulse, pun intended (and apologized for). For several years, Ops, a restaurant in Bushwick with some of the same owners, has had simply prepared beans on its menu. At Leo, Scarlet Runners, an heirloom variety, are gently braised with garlic, rosemary, and sage until easily crushed between the teeth but still firm and meaty, generously salted, and finished with a glug of grassy olive oil.
Anthropologists reading this in the future, take note: Leo is a useful time capsule, a snapshot of right now. To drink with the beans, there is natural wine, to which diners—who, like the staff, skew young and stylish, in cropped pants and clogs—may help themselves from a shelf or a refrigerator by the bar. (To readers in the present, I suggest asking for a recommendation, lest you find yourself misled by a whimsical label into choosing something with top notes of wet cardboard.)
To sop up the bean broth (also known, to Rancho Gordo heads, as pot liquor), there is naturally fermented sourdough, baked on the premises and available by the loaf in an adjoining takeout shop. Leo’s pizza—Neapolitan-style round pies in the dining room, Roman-style square slices in the shop—and calzones are also made with naturally fermented dough.
On a given day, a calzone might be stuffed with ’nduja and collards, a pizza topped with tangy farmer cheese, flowering broccoli, prosciutto, and Robin’s Koginut squash, a variety bred by the chef Dan Barber. A salad listed on the menu as “lettuces” might be heavy on chicories, pale spears of tender Belgian endive mingling with magenta ruffles of Treviso radicchio, frilly frisée, and flat-leaf parsley, all slicked in a citrusy vinaigrette.
More than one trend forecaster has predicted that lasagna is going to be huge in 2020. At Leo, you can order a gorgeous slab of it: pillowy layers of thin noodles, stretchy provola cheese, and bright, tart marinara, with a bit of bite from crackly edges and the finely chopped blanched kale folded into the sauce. You’d never know it was gluten-free (thanks to corn-flour pasta).
For something sweet, the soft-serve is great—a swirl of pithy grapefruit and caramel approximates a breakfast brûlée—but the tiramisu, that lasagna of desserts, is better. Until fairly recently, I associated tiramisu with the kind of red-sauce joint whose charmingly chintzy atmosphere is more alluring than its food. It seemed too often to be a stodgy, compacted mass of ladyfingers and mascarpone cream, chalky with cocoa powder and flavorless but for blunt hits of Marsala wine and coffee, as if it were trying to sober itself up.
A few years ago, I started to suspect that a renaissance was afoot. At Una Pizza Napoletana, on the Lower East Side, they swapped the ladyfingers for lemon sponge cake, the Marsala for rum and Cynar. At Leonti, on the Upper West Side (now, sadly, closed), the mascarpone was so light that you could see air bubbles. Leo’s version comes in a fluted glass tumbler that showcases its appealingly messy striations, as spoonable as pudding. Vanilla angel-food sheet cake is soaked in espresso and a soft spike of rum and amaro. The finished trifle is showered in delicate curls of Askinosie chocolate, and each creamy bite bears an unmistakable vein of salt. Tiramisu is as cool as beans. (Dishes $5-$14, pizzas $16-$22.) ♦
