Soon after collector Lonti Ebers inaugurated Amant, her East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, center for contemporary art encompassing galleries, performance spaces, and artist residencies, she recognized something missing from the industrial stretch of Maujer Street: a pleasant place to gather and eat after the campus café closed. “It was clear that with so many other artists and other residents in the neighborhood, opening a restaurant would serve the whole community,” recalls Ebers, a MoMA trustee. Fortunately, she didn’t need to look far for a chef. During the pandemic, she and her husband became regulars at Houseman, Ned Baldwin’s acclaimed yet under-the-radar restaurant in Manhattan’s Hudson Square, and developed an appreciation for his cooking. “It is unpretentious, fresh, and healthy,” Ebers says, “which is sympathetic with what we’re creating.”
Much like the creative experimentation Amant fosters among artists, the restaurant Ebers and Baldwin created, named Zoli after her imaginary dog, embraces a similarly adventurous outlook. The 35-seat dining room occupies the ground floor of a former warehouse adjoining the Amant campus, placing art within close reach. In fact, Pierre Huyghe’s site-specific artwork Satellite presides over the bar with three massive aquariums, their horseshoe crabs and marine life swimming amid reconstructed debris that nods to nearby Newtown Creek. The French artist’s most ambitious work yet also offers a fitting prelude to Baldwin’s seafood-forward menu.
That menu changes weekly, but Baldwin’s longtime passion for fishing on the North Fork of Long Island draws him toward seafood and oceanic flavors. He developed the offerings alongside chef de cuisine Danny Roberts and executive sous chef Aimee Li, whose résumés include New York’s Altro Paradiso and Dame. “It’s a great team, and the three of us are a pure idea factory,” Baldwin says. Local fish figure prominently, particularly in such cold preparations as pickled mackerel, oysters with smoked rhubarb mignonette, and razor clams brightened with preserved lemon and horseradish. More substantial plates range from crispy-skin black sea bass with nam jim and pil-pil to littleneck clams glossed with douchi butter and Thai basil. Beyond the sea, a wood oven turns out bison strip steak with sauce Robert and spatchcocked roast chicken enriched with kombu jus. Pair them with the classic-leaning beverage program, which features a fennel-infused Gibson and kombucha brewed in-house.
Such adventurous cooking inhabits an equally distinctive setting by GRT Architects, which preserved the warehouse’s cavernous proportions while introducing warmer materials that harmonize effortlessly with Amant’s concrete architecture by SO–IL. Two-tone cinderblocks, sourced nearby from a manufacturer that produced blocks for Sol LeWitt’s sculptures, rise through the 20-foot-high dining room in a tripartite arrangement: rusticated near the floor, polished at eye level, and fluted above. “We then worked with local masons to modify these blocks to serve as both light fixtures and ventilation grills,” explains firm co-founder Tal Schori. “The best projects are the ones where the big decisions guide you to the smallest.”…