This egg sandwich is the stuff wet-yolk dreams are made of, I promise. The restaurant where it's from is the place where dreams of a sustainable, local, affordable and creative dining experience become reality.
Black Tree is best known in Brooklyn and Lower East Side as a farm-to-table spot where the menu changes every week to offer any and every part of a whole animal. In other words- if it's goat week, you can expect to find goat all over the menu in some way, shape, or form. If there's a soup, the broth is made from the goat's bone marrow. If there's a cheese, it's goat cheese. If there's sausage... you get the point.
I met with Sandy Dee Hall on a sunny, Monday afternoon in March. He was sitting toward the back of the restaurant near the kitchen window, on his laptop, wearing a baseball cap backwards, papers spread all over the table.
In between calling to his kitchen staff about the week's relish sauce (pear based that week, as they decided on the spot), answering emails, reviewing bills and keeping up with his phone, he manages to answer a few questions for me.
It seems like his brain runs at a thousand miles a minute, yet nothing seems haphazardly done in his world. Sandy is one of the few extraordinary people I've met that can functionally multi-task.
It's common that restaurant goers fall in love with a menu item and never see it again. Sandy keeps his team small and tight-knit. Working together they carefully design unique menus every week. With so much agency, his team creates new dishes that guests keep coming back for.
Almost 100% of ingredients in the kitchen and the bar are sourced from within a 300 mile radius. Thirty minutes into our interview, a truck rolls up outside and a short, thin, man begins to unload meat. The very farmers that raise and slaughter the meat deliver them straight to the door.
"These animals, we've been to the farms they were raised on, they lived good lives until it was their time, it's all very ethical," says Macnair Sillick (Mac), co-owner of Black Tree.
As Sandy looks back at Black Tree's beginnings, he felt it was most important establish direct connections to local.
"I just started going to farmer's markets all over the city, when I first started, and started making connections that way," says Sandy.
Sandy's relationships to farmers has definitely led him into some interesting opportunities: like that time he briefly adopted a lamb and walked around with it all the time. Maybe he sympathized with Smokey, the little orphaned Lamb because he was an orphan himself.
"I grew up eating canned and frozen food and not even knowing that food could be good," he says.
After working in the restaurant industry for a few years he fell in love with food. Now if only this food didn't cost an arm and a leg for someone like Sandy.
"Why should people have to save up to eat locally?" asks Mac. "One night we came up with this idea to throw these ingredients (locally sourced) that you get at places like ABC Kitchen, into a sandwich, instead of having 50 people in the kitchen, keep the staff low, and make prices affordable."
The co-owners met some years ago when they lived in the same building, and started hanging out. After that night, they wrote up a business plan and soon they opened a pop-up at Crown Inn. Just a short year later, they had a brick-and-mortar location in the Lower East Side.
"The goal is to make farm-to-table more accessible, we can eat locally and educate people about the fact that you can't get avocados every day of the year, or citrus in the winter, but you can still eat delicious food," says Sandy.
Plates at Black Tree run from $10 up to $25, with the occasional rib-eye or specialty cut that runs for more, but the menu stays true to the restaurant's aim to be affordable.
"We feel really proud of what we're doing. We want to be a part of the community." says Mac.
"People go to these places that are 'farm-to-table' and they don't realize that they're paying all this money and the kitchen probably only sources 15-80% locally. Being 100% farm to table is difficult. I'll be proud when people realize that this is how it should be everywhere."
For more on Black Tree, stay tuned!
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