Eat: Your Own Personal Detox

The whole deal with Eat in Greenpoint is that they only serve locally sourced organic food from New England and the tri-state area, that is mostly as far as I understood to be either vegetarian or vegan. And if you think they’re fucking kidding, well, according to their website, they don’t even serve coffee at all (they do have herbal tea, though), sugar (they use maple syrup and honey), olive oil (sunflower or butternut squash oil instead), or spices that are imported. The one food product served that comes from the farthest away is their salt, from Maine, which is dried entirely by solar powered means.

So, they generally have like 2 main dishes on the menu (pretty reasonably priced, too) that rotate with the season and ingredient availability, plus a seasonal dessert. As far as I know, though, they always have bread (I think made with spelt flour) and tea. Here’s the thing though, apart from the slapstick comedy act I unintentionally performed with their water dispenser (it’s in this WEIRD thing and I, like, didn’t get how it worked, ok?) and the fact that I kind of felt like I was at my pottery-loving aunt’s house in New Mexico, I truly was excited to give this place a chance, based on a pretty reliable recommendation.

Though I truly appreciate what this place means and is….I kinda thought the food was a little bland, even with the additional salt I added in. I had a beet pasta with greens and squash (you’d THINK that’d be tasty, right?), while my boyfriend had whatever the other thing was on the menu, I think it was polenta with kale. Maybe I’m spoiled by places like Angelica’s Kitchen, but I just wasn’t fully on-board with the lack of flavor. It was sort of nice, though, to have a bit of a detox from the Italian food-stravaganza I’d been having that week. So, to be fair, in comparison to eating non-stop garlic/olive oil/tomato sauce/truffle oil all  week, nothing could have been more stark a comparison than going to Eat.

My conclusion: if you’re not super into “that kind” of food or just need a break from rich foods, you can think of this as your detox, and then you won’t be as big of a jerk expectation-wise. If you are going to do one thing good for your body and your region, you might as well eat your way into it.

Eat
124 Meserole Ave (at Leonard)
Brooklyn, 11222 [Greenpoint]