Showing Its Age

Borgo displays a confidence that can he only from experience.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

STICK AROUND long enough and an enfant terrible becomes a prince becomes a king. Andrew Tarlow and his former business partner Mark Firth did as much as anyone to define "Brooklyn dining" in the 21st century: an artisanal burger, a carafe of carbonic wine, a little liver in a little jar. If it all seems a bit rote now, that's a mark of their success. It was refreshingly edgy when these two Odeon bartenders founded Diner in still-remote Williamsburg on the cusp of the millennium. "I am actually not cool enough to go to Diner. Nobody I know is cool enough," the Daily News critic wrote in 1999. She loved it.

The East River was the unbridgeable divide, and as the Marlow Collective grew (it now comprises Diner, Marlow & Sons, the reliably excellent Roman's in Fort Greene, Achilles Heel in Greenpoint, a wineshop, a butcher, an events business, a commercial bakery, and an occasional fashion-and-leather-goods label), it remained in Brooklyn's confines. (Firth left in 2008.) Now, 26 years in, Tarlow is crossing over. On a stretch of East 27th Street currently but probably not long to remain undersubscribed, he has opened Borgo in a double-wide space with a wood-burning oven, a back garden, and the original long marble bar.

But planting a flag in no-man's-land, as Tarlow jokingly called the area earlier this year, is one of the only ways Borgo resembles the Diner or Achilles Heel of yore. What I love about Borgo is how little it seems to worry itself about being cool. The tables in its two dining rooms are graciously spaced.