DISH OF THE WEEK: Smoked Pollock Fritters at LELAND EATING AND DRINKING HOUSE

Every week, I document another dish that impressed and satiated me during my food adventures around New York City

Places like Leland Eating and Drinking House make me yearn for the old days. In the before times, I’d often spend my evenings at buzzy chef-driven neighborhood restaurants in Brooklyn that turned out dish after dish of exciting food. It didn’t always work, but it was almost always exciting.

Of course, everything has changed. Due to many post-pandemic factors, I’m now really only in the city before 5pm when many of these restaurants are in afternoon hibernation.

But sometimes I get lucky and I find a restaurant like Leland that is open for brunch. And I get to try two of their spectacular dinner menu items in the light of day.

In fact, both were so good that this is going to be a two week feature. I’ll highlight one dish this week and another next week. That’s only happened twice before (here and here) on this blog.

The first dish I’ll write about comes under the menu heading of snacks. And these smoked pollock fritters did indeed make me want to snack all day long.

Five plump golden fritters eagerly sit on a deeply satisfying horseradish tzatziki sauce. The sauce had all the rich tangy notes of the the Greek specialty with a surprising kick from horseradish.

I scooped as much of the sauce on each ethereal bite of the fritters as possible. They were impossibly light with a hearty potato filling and chunks of smoky chewy white fish.

These were way too easy to gobble up and they left me wanting more. Good thing I had another dish on the table. Stay tuned until next week when I’ll sing the praises of that second dish at this exciting Brooklyn restaurant. Price: $9