BLUEPRINT

196 Fifth Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11217

(718) 622-6644

Cocktail-centric gastropubs have become a force to be reckoned with in Brooklyn. Blueprint, one of the latest to emerge in the borough borrows heavily from the formula. Dark woods, good drinks, rich grubs. So it's not original by any stretch, but it is good. Indeed, it does just about everything right. Though I'd lose the gangsta rap soundtrack, which almost seems to be played in irony, the vibe is spot-on comfortable. The staff was super nice, the food was good, the beer was fantastic and the well liquor is top shelf.

Seth is planning on planting his flag in Brooklyn, as any good follower of this blog is well aware. And after bouncing from a walk-up in Prospect Heights to another in Sunset Park, we decided to split meet up, grab some dinner and get our shit-face on here in the Slope. Okay, so I may have mentioned that Blueprint is much like Rye is much like Char No. 4 is much like Fort Defiance. But I liked it. A lot."Come on," Seth said after I commented about this trend. "You know that if they opened up in your neighborhood, you'd stick a cot in the corner and move right on in." It's true. I would.

Half of the menu a Blueprint is meats and cheese, like a wine bar would have. The other half is a kinda-sorta small plates menu. Some are truly small plates which I will term an "appetizer". The larger plates I will give the random description of "entree". Seth didn't bother with the "appetizer" but I couldn't help myself. I ordered the Baby Octopus, a salad of cold potatoes and salsa verde with little whole grilled baby octopi. Fantastic. I don't care if you don't think you'd like octopus, you'd like this. Everything came at once, so while I was having a good ol' time with my app, Seth was enjoying his Blueprint Rabbit Pot Pie. Pot pie is an underrated food group. My dad makes the world's best pot pie and he stole his recipe from a Betty Crocker cookbook from 1965. While this didn't live up to the Dad Standard set my a corporate giant during the McCarthy era, it was still pretty good. Rabbit is more tender than your average meat (largely due to the muscle tissue being continuously massaged/petted by second graders on field trips) and it's also much sweeter (from those same field trip kisses that the rabbits get so many of). As a result, you're left with a meat that reminiscent of the dark meat of a chicken that's been glazed in maple syrup. If this sounds appetizing, I suggest you order some rabbit. My only complaint was that the crust was one of those annoying puff pastry crusts that looks good in photos but tastes like bread-flavored air. It added almost nothing except a soggy copy-paper texture after a few bites. My dinner was the Grass-Fed Beef Bourguignon served with a side of au gratin potatoes. Blueprint prides itself on using locally grown vegetables and locally raised meat. Their website even lists the farms that they order from. I happen to think that organic food is a scam perpetrated on the dumb by the crafty, but I am very much in favor of locally-obtained non-factory-made food. If I want that mass market stuff, I'll eat at Cracker Barrel. But I digress. The beef was great. Super tender, super sweet, super why didn't they give me four times as much? And maybe it's because I've cut so much starch from my diet that you could throw a potato in manure and I'd still love it, but damn was that au gratin good!