Chef Mads Refslund Opens Ilis in Brooklyn
The Noma cofounder has unveiled his solo restaurant in Greenpoint, centered around the kitchen.
A few days before Ilis officially opened its doors in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, chef Mads Refslund was wheeling a cart of snacks around the lofty dining room.
The restaurant was in the middle of a friends and family service, a practice run before inviting the public over for dinner starting Wednesday. Tucked into the snack cart were selections of oysters and soups and juices in experiential serving formats. Refslund offered a primer on the zucchini juice, served within the bulbous end of a zucchini with the plant's stem made into a straw. A chilled clam drink was served in a clam shell that had been bound into a makeshift flask.
Many years in the making, Ilis is the long-anticipated solo effort from the cofounder of shuttered Danish Noma, formerly regarded as “the best restaurant in the world” for its experimental approach to cuisine.
In Brooklyn, Refslund has set his sights on building the best kitchen. “We're not making a restaurant,” Refslund says when describing his philosophy for Ilis. “We're making a kitchen that has a bar and restaurant inside of it.”
The dining room, set in a brick-walled former warehouse space, is centered around a central open kitchen where the restaurant's chefs huddle around various metal islands. All of the food preparation is done in full view of diners, the loud, chaotic frenzy of many restaurant kitchens swapped for the more contained spectacle of a high-end culinary operation.
Refslund's tableside appearance wasn't a pre-opening one-off; at Ilis, there is no front or back of house separation, and all of the chefs will rotate through server duty.
“We've only hired cooks,” says
Ilis partner Will Douillet, an alum of restaurants like Next and Alinea.
“If you go to a restaurant, what is the most important thing besides having good company? It's the food,” Refslund adds. “So, I thought it would be a good idea if we just hire cooks that know everything about the food, because they've cooked it. And if they can serve the food, and talk about the food, and get tips at the same time and get the credit for this, then it will be perfect.”
Refslund and Douillet met several years ago, and early in their friendship Douillet invited the Scandinavian expat to a Thanksgiving celebration in the Berkshires. While driving around the area, they came across a pack of wild turkeys.
“His first question was, ‘Wow, can we eat those?' And you know, it's Thanksgiving week and being an American, I've never even thought about eating wild turkey before,” Douillet says. “And here we are, seven years later, opening up a restaurant that focuses on game meats, and specifically game birds. So it all came full circle.”
The menu at Ilis (a portmanteau of the Danish words for “fire” and “ice”) was built around the concept of a market, with diners given the flexibility to shape their own dining experience. The menu starts at five courses, each chosen by diners, with the option of additional dishes and selections from the snack cart. Diners select from a list of primary ingredients — tuna, scallop, mushrooms, eel, wild boar — along with the choice of a cold or hot preparation. The ingredient list will change based on seasonality and availability in North America; the tuna on the opening menu, available as a sashimi dumpling with nasturtium and salted plum or grilled with sunflower miso — will soon be swapped for a similar fish.
Ilis is also planning to offer a casual family-style meal instead of typical brunch service on Sundays, a nod to the being a day reserved for rest and family in Denmark. The concept, which will launch in the coming weeks, will center around the restaurant's rotisserie.
The bar program reflects a similar approach to seasonality and temperature (rendered less literally). Cocktails incorporate unexpected ingredients like pumpkin and pawpaw, and natural wines are the focus of the wine list along with selections from less represented regions.
Seating is luxuriously spaced out around the perimeter of the room, along with a 14 seat bar and lounge in the front of the restaurant. Staff uniforms and woven leather lighting were designed by Camilla Staerk, and wooden seating and banquettes are from Atraform. Farshou gallery, located next door, is lending rotating artwork for the walls.
“We are not fine dining in that way of tablecloths and every time you get a new dish, you get a new fork and knife,” Refslund says. “It's a high-end restaurant because it is a high end restaurant. But it's still a place where you can come in shorts in the summertime. And it's a place where you can be yourself,” he adds. “We have a term in Danish called ‘hygge'; it's a kind of coziness. Ilis is a place where you can come and be cozy with your friends.”