April 9th Family Meal: Restaurant Prune
This Family Meal is our thank you to a Chef and restaurant that inspired our love of food and the restaurant industry: Gabrielle Hamilton`s iconic Manhattan restaurant Prune. In addition to being one of the game-changing restaurants of the early aughts, it also happens to be one of the restaurants that gave Chef Jessie the culinary spark: A friend gifted Jessie with Gabrielle`s memoir before the embarked on a backpacking trip around Europe; Jessie came back from the trip and wrote a letter to Gabrielle, at Prune, asking for a job. Needless to say, this Family Meal is coming straight from Jessie`s heart!
Gabriel Hamilton opened her restaurant Prune, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1999. While to us, today, New York`s dining scene is at the forefront of culinary creativity, "[a]t that point New York didn’t have an ambitious and exciting restaurant on every block, in every unlikely neighborhood, operating out of impossibly narrow spaces. There was no Eater, no Instagram, no hipster Brooklyn food scene. There was no serious restaurant that would allow a waiter to wear a flannel shirt...". Prune brought French inspired bistro food, using hyper local produce to a neighborhood served predominantly by European and middle eastern delis. Gabriel wanted to created a restaurant that served the type of food she cooked at home and for her friends; "a place you could go after work or on your day off if you had only a line cook’s paycheck but also a line cook’s palate." To say that she accomplished her goal would be an understatement. Prune changed the face of Manhattan`s dining scene, served as a precursor to the "hipster Brooklyn food scene", and firmly rooted the concept of elevated comfort food. Prune closed in 2020 due to the pandemic.
