Micro-Seasonal Fare, at Tribeca’s One White Street

The chef Austin Johnson, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, kick-started his career at the storied restaurant Canlis, in Seattle, which led to stints on an Alaskan salmon-fishing boat (lucrative) and at Eleven Madison Park (nine dollars an hour). Later, in Paris, his trajectory to executive chef at the tasting-menu restaurant Frenchie mirrored its ascent to becoming one of the hottest places in town. There, across the cobblestoned Rue du Nil, Frenchie’s owners opened a wine bar (with snacks such as a merguez Scotch egg), and specialty stores followed—that block is now “foodie central,” Johnson told me, where discerning locals shop for produce, meat, fish, cheese, and bread. It was at Frenchie that some of Johnson’s repeat American customers made the offer of a lifetime: they had hundreds of acres near Hudson, New York, and they wondered, did he want to set up a farm on ten of them, to supply his own dream New York City restaurant?

He definitely did. Johnson enlisted the small-agriculture specialist Eliot Coleman, who helped develop the Blue Hill at Stone Barns farm, to design Rigor Hill Farm, a year-round organic operation with seven full-time farmers. It now provides much of the produce used at One White Street, which Johnson opened in 2021, in a gorgeously gut-renovated nineteenth-century Tribeca town house (with a history as the fictional embassy address of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s conceptual country Nutopia, no less).

Johnson’s original idea was to dedicate the two upper floors to a tasting menu, but his plans have evolved in response to the community’s obvious preference for a neighborhood hangout. Now only the second floor is reserved for the tasting menu, with the third and ground floors, along with extensive outdoor seating, offering a more casual, but commensurately vibrant, à-la-carte menu.

The menus shift with the micro-seasons. You can count on bread—house-made sourdough, perhaps, or well-oiled focaccia stuffed with leeks and mozzarella and showered in Parmesan, with a rich tomato sauce for dipping—and a seed catalogue’s worth of vegetables. Salads galore include, of late, showcases for snap peas, snow peas, green peas, and favas. One stalwart dish is the oddly refreshing Shaved Fennel, for which a tangle of thin fennel curls, hiding plump anchovies and soft blue cheese, is dusted with crushed pistachios and fennel pollen.

On a recent evening, the Foie Gras Presse accompanied rhubarb three ways: in a gelée, poached, and in a smooth marmalade—all delightfully tart-sweet counterparts to the rich liver mousse, and to a pull-apart walnut pain de mie with the fluff of a Parker House roll. Duck breast with perfectly crisped skin was a mere sideshow to a pool of Kelly-green garlic-scape sauce and an umami-bomb emulsion of farm-produced black garlic, for which heads are cured and cooked at a hundred and seventy-six degrees for three weeks.

If this isn’t enough, Johnson has also parlayed a sidewalk farm stand he’s been running for the past few years into Rigor Hill Market, a to-go café next door to the restaurant which sells breads, pastries, sandwiches, salads, and soups, as well as a vast selection of the farm’s fruits, vegetables, herbs, microgreens, and flowers. As you might expect in Tribeca, the prices reflect the socioeconomic status of the “White Lotus”-mom, finance-bro, moneyed-creative-class clientele—the seven-course tasting menu is a hundred and eighty-eight dollars, the (excellent) double cheeseburger is thirty, and market tomatoes can run eight dollars a pound. But the cost also reflects the immense collective effort behind this glorious bounty.

Where else could you find the tiniest white elderflowers and Rigor Hill strawberries? They both recently jazzed up One White Street’s strawberry dessert, where they topped a disk of meringue-layered sponge cake beside a quenelle of buttermilk ice cream. But you could also pick them up next door, and bring home something just as beautiful. (À la carte $16-$46.) ♦