Brunch at Red Rooster - Harlem, New York June 2011

Where: Red Rooster, Harlem
How much: Brunch came in at around $25 with coffee and juice
Come here if: you want a Harlem experience but don't want to go, you know, too local..

"The biscuits are outta control, right?!" It doesn't take much to confuse me, but that sentence came pretty close. 

The biscuits in question are nearer to what the English would call a scone, dense, crumbling and slightly sweet on the outside, served here not with jam and clotted cream, but in Southern US savoury style with thick meaty gravy and chunks of dense herby pork sausage. Conceptually it should be my favourite breakfast.

Shiny new frontage glares out across the 125th and Lenox junction. Red Rooster is the gentrification of Harlem writ large. Walk the road down and you get a different story, not even the area's biggest fan could say there was anything attractive about 125th Street, that windy alley cutting through the heart of the neighbourhood past the Dollar Discount Barns, the numerous drugstores and assorted street sorts hustling the out of towners gurning for photos in front of the Apollo Theater, legendary career kickstarter of legends including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jackson to name a few.

The Swedish raised, Ethiopian born chef, Marcus Samuelsson brought Red Rooster to life last year in a blaze of sweaty palmed anticipation. He's something of a name in New York. Young, telegenic and with awards coming out of his ears since his early 20's and a critically lauded stint as Exec Chef at Aquavit, everyone has been waiting for him to explode into multi-starred glory ever since. He was the first to cook a state banquet for the 44th President and he hosted Barack O at a $30,000 dollar a plate fundraiser at Red Rooster earlier in the year. It's safe to say he's a Democrat and safer still to say that with recent visitors like that it was going to be a hot table. I wanted to head up to Harlem for a weekend brunch of hot (preferably battered) soul, and figured if I couldn't get in here I'd be fine with one of the many other brunch stops in the neighbourhood.

As it was, I didn't have any problem getting a table, even at 11am on a Saturday it was me and a handful of tourists and older faces. It's a fair bit pricier than most of the chicken or waffle joints running down this end of the street and wherever the neighbourhood is heading, you get the strong impression that few of the faces seen around the street would be factoring in a lunch or dinner here in the near future. The other problem is that it wasn't that good. The coffee, constantly proffered by the preppy kid casting aspersions on the relative sanity of my biscuits, was probably the best thing I had. The gravy was cloyingly thick and too sweet, an odd dissonance with the over herbed sausage. The biscuits were also sadly saccharine, closer in texture and style to the too thick and solid cornbread served alongside with a fridge cold tomato gloop.

I've no problem with sympathetically gentrified restaurants 'celebrating' the food of the local communities, hell, I live in Peckham, I'd love something like that round there, but it's got to be good enough to compete. On the evidence of my brunch, Red Rooster would struggle to make it as a curiosity in London, let alone stand tall in New York's Soul Food heartland.