The Runner Restaurant In Clinton Hill | Tasting Table NYC

The vegetables arrive first: platters piled with a mix of roasted and pickled beets in a sharp vinaigrette ($9), thinly sliced Brussels sprouts and kale with an almost buttery pistachio dressing ($12). It's what they call vegetable-focused cooking; but with no fuss, the kind of comforting, delicious stuff you might pass around the table at Thanksgiving (then happily eat out of the fridge the next day).

Get the side of white beans ($12), which has so much depth and flavor, it could almost pass as cassoulet. Woven through with a few threads of duck confit, sweet with torn-up marjoram, all of it slick with olive oil, they steal the scene like character actors who only appear for a minute but lodge in your mind.

Andrew Burman doesn't mess about or reach for luxurious ingredients at The Runner, but he really doesn't need to: The man can cook. (Burman also co-owns Other Half Brewery, which means the restaurant is one of the only places in the city right now where you can taste the new Brooklyn brewery's hoppy West Coast-style IPA.)

A roasted-then-braised lamb shoulder ($16) scattered with bits of preserved lemon and tiny branches of blackcurrants is just the thing with mashed potatoes ($12) that carry the sweet perfume of stinky cheese (Gruyère and raclette). You might have made this yourself, if you'd gotten home a few hours earlier.

Then there's the molasses ice cream ($6). It's so lovely, we called Burman to ask him how he made it. He laughed. It's just an egg custard, he explained, folded through with the right amount of molasses. Plain and simple.