It was a grotesque Tuesday evening in the southwest corner of Bed-Stuy, barely March and still mired in the last frigid, visible exhale of Winter. It had been drizzling solidly, miserably all day, which extended into the evening, and dogshit colored ice drifts still clung stubbornly to the curb outside The Fly on the corner of Classon and Fulton, making parking as uncomfortable as anything that would require foregoing a delivery app and leaving your house to dine out in this weather. It’s the kind of night that tanks a week of business on a restaurant’s P&L sheet, the type of week that tanks a month, and a bleak extended winter that can tank a year in the abbreviated life of a New York City restaurant, where the rate of failure is astronomically high because New York City overhead leaves no margin for an off week.
(Photo by Abe Beame)
And yet, The Fly was packed by 6:30. The bar was full, incomplete parties were milling around as far from the frequently opening and closing entrance as they could get with martinis and glasses of wine in their hands, and the walk-in-only dining room was fully sat, aside from two seats crammed into a communal table in a far corner a friend and I were fortunate to snag. We were all gathered to celebrate the seventh anniversary of a great local restaurant, and fuck up some hot chicken. In honor of the milestone. On Tuesday and Wednesday of the first week in March, they ran a menu laden with heat that included a unique, chile-kissed rotisserie bird and a host of accompanying sandwiches, sides, and themed cocktails.
It is significant, but not particularly surprising, that The Fly has turned seven in a city in which the average lifecycle of a restaurant runs three to five years. There could, and arguably should be a Fly in every neighborhood in New York, with its all-seasons concept of roasted chicken with perfectly paired wine. The restaurant was founded on a so-basic-it’s-brilliant premise that is indicative of the entire project of the restaurant group lead by founding partners Nick Perkins, Nialls Fallon, and Leah Perkins that includes Hart’s and The Fly in Brooklyn, Cervo’s and Eel Bar in downtown Manhattan, the tinned fish company Minnow, and a forthcoming oyster bar set to open sometime early this summer in the former Bar Meridian space on Washington Avenue.
Low and slow is a kind of governing mantra for the managing partners of this constellation of businesses that lack the basic, practically requisite modern metropolitan pretension of a brand name for their restaurant group. All their spaces are closer to genres of restaurant than the en vogue, hyper-narrative-driven, buzzy-chef-driven, virality-prone foodstuff and/or region-specific headline grabbers that define this era of city dining culture. I spoke to Nick Perkins and Hart’s and The Fly’s longtime chef/partner Gillian “GG” Graham over the phone the day after my meal, and Perkins couldn’t come up with much more than a definitional cooking fat to explain what sets his concepts apart. “I can’t eat dairy, so we don’t cook with butter. There’s olive oil, anchovies, lemon. We offer cheese add-ons, for dessert, so not everyone has to suffer like I suffer.”
It’s easier to understand their businesses based on what the group doesn’t do. “There’s no schtick, and we’re trying to stay away from schtick,” Perkins said. He and his partners came out of Andrew Tarlow’s empire in Williamsburg and restaurants further afield, and that makes sense in the context of their minimalist, essentialist, sturdy businesses. “My partner Leah always says we’re not trying to confuse people, we’re trying to open places that are built to last,” Perkins says. “We do much of our work figuring out dishes in the editing process,” Graham adds. “Our whole thing is: Why use four ingredients when you could use two?” Perkins and Graham both attribute the group’s out-the-gate, now well-proven success to their considerate, intentional, focused approach to menu and team-building with rockstars like The Fly’s longtime linchpin, sous chef Daniel Alcantara.
(Photo by Michael Gonik)
This likely contributed to the packed house that had subjected itself to this wet and frigid Tuesday evening for another dinner at The Fly. The service was out of character for a restaurant and a menu that never changes, with the exception of occasionally rotating in a few specials on the weekends, and celebrating its anniversary once a year with little ceremony, most often with a chicken sandwich. This year was different. For two days, that menu was not on offer, and this hot menu supplanted it (replete with a hot chicken sandwich). I had a boat full of crispy hand-punched fries, transported from Yankee Stadium, that were tossed with rosemary and crushed cloves of raw garlic, a marinated cucumber salad with large, bias-cut chunks of the cukes soaked in rub and laden with whole, delicate mint leaves.
The wedge salad (Photo by Michael Gonik)
But the star of the show, the spicy rotisserie chicken, is a brilliant invention that I, at the very least, could find little to no precedence for. Chef GG made a hot sauce of habañeros, apple cider vinegar, and spices, and rubbed the birds down before they took their endless Ferris Wheel ride around The Fly’s battle-tested rotisserie. It comes out burgundy and mottled with clumps of sauce, doused once more out of the oven with that sauce, creating a spice pool for my pile of sectioned half-chicken to swim in and run my fries through. The roast chicken fucking ripped and offered an option for yet another brilliant and obvious standalone restaurant concept.
I chased the heat with ramps of “wedged” romaine, covered with chunks of blue cheese and croutons buzzed lightly by Robot Coupe, along with a side ramekin of tart, fermented ranch sauce, and a Sicilian skin contact white that tasted like Catarratto masquerading as tepache.
I stopped occasionally to take in the life crammed into the space, the longtime lifeblood of The Fly. Couples of every orientation were huddled around their small, actual fire-lit candles and small tables in the ranch-style dining room, with an exposed wood beam ceiling and white stucco walls dotted with semi-recessed globe lights whose soft glow matched the candles. It was mostly young, attractive pairs with a few salt and pepper, flannel-laced commiserating Brooklyn dad crews mixed in. A single baby in a corner stood out, with air traffic controller ear muffs to protect them from the dining room, and the Pink Pantheress-adjacent house turned up loud enough to demand mild shouting from even intimate conversation.
It was a night that explains the beloved status and prolonged success of The Fly and all of this group’s properties: Familiar with a twist, novelty that keeps the relationship between a stalwart restaurant and their core clientele literally spiced up in this case. It’s not exactly sexy, but also not an identity Perkins & Co. runs from. As he’d tell me later, “We owe our success to our restaurants’ working as neighborhood restaurants. All of our places are 60-70% the same people, every night. That’s the secret.”
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