Sailor is everything.

April Bloomfield and Gabriel Stulman are making magic in Fort Greene.

Gabriel and April (image via Instagram)

I remember my first time at The Spotted Pig, back when it first opened in 2004, nearly 20 years ago. I can still feel the energy, the buzz, the white hot glow of that kind of blinding culinary success. Ken Friedman charming us in the front of the house, April, fresh from the River Café in London, cooking like a brilliant boss in the kitchen, creating what would become a wildly-imitated template for the gastropub phenomenon. 

There was her burger, fat and juicy, crowned with knobs of bracing blue cheese, nestled next to a mountain of shoestring potatoes fried in hot oil and sprinkled with coarse salt and fresh rosemary, so fragrant they could have turned those potatoes into a holiday wreath. Her pillowy gnudi, a marvelous marriage of choux and pasta, like clouds snatched from the sky and buried in butter and sage. Heavenly.

Oh, how I loved it there—at lunch at the bar with the sun pouring in the windows from West 11th Street, at night when the lights went down and the crowds and the stars waited, hip-to-hip, three deep, for a coveted table. It was magic. And then, of course, it wasn’t. In 2017, it took a dreadful dive; Mario and Ken were taken down as sexual predators; April took a hit as well, for turning a blind eye when perhaps she could have done more to protect her staff. 

Since then, April has kept a rather low profile, working quietly, confronting her own demons. She’s cooked here and there in kitchens in L.A., Connecticut, Rhode Island, and back in the U.K. Then Gabriel Stulman, the restaurateur behind the charming Joseph Leonard, Jolene, Jeffrey’s Grocery, Fairfax Tavern, and the late and lovely Bar Sardine, came knocking with an offer to partner and open a corner restaurant in Fort Greene. The story goes that he had no actual expectation that April would say yes. But then, she did. And how lucky we are that she did.