when you want, where you want.
Restaurateur Natalie Johnson Romanticizes Sandwiches From the ’90s
Illustration: Adam Mazur
Natalie Johnson is expecting her second son in September, and the anticipation for another child — her first son, Raphael, is about to turn 2 — is a bit like the arrival of her second restaurant, Leon’s, which she and her husband, the chef Nick Anderer, opened late last year: “It is an exponential increase in responsibility and because you’re now juggling, there’s no turnoff valve ever.” It helps that the couple’s first restaurant, Anton’s, is a certified West Village hit, but its gradual success and growth was also what motivated Johnson and Anderer to open Leon’s with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all at once. “We learned how difficult it is to start with six nights of dinner, and then work to add that seventh night and then to add daytime services,” she says. “So our approach this time was, Let’s hire everyone, train for everything all at once, and just go for it.” And now that they’ve settled into the space, they have been able to sneak away from the dining rooms for trips to new restaurants, new bakeries, and a weekend house in Connecticut they may or may not have neglected while getting their new business off the ground: “We took a major hiatus during the opening of Leon’s — it was scary to step back into the house after that,” Johnson says, laughing. “We learned our lesson: Houses cannot be abandoned for ten weeks. The mice will move in.”
Wednesday, May 21
I’ve been making smoothies lately, which is very much out of character. I’m not typically a sweets or even a fruit person — I love savory food. But I’ve been craving sweets and trying to eat fresh things outside of all the carbohydrates my body is also craving right now. I’d made some fresh almond milk and I turned that into a strawberry smoothie with Rafa, which was super-fun. It was his first smoothie, and he’s been asking about them since then.
I went to work and jumped right into a chefs’ meeting. In April, we started doing regional wine dinners on Mondays at Leon’s. They’re four-course dinners with wine pairings. Because we spread out our crowd across three meals each day, we’re trying to make sure every service feels special. The chefs’ meeting was about next month’s series, which will focus on Sardinia. So the chefs brought a couple of tastes, and some market ingredients that had come in. I tasted a strawberry olive oil affogato, which is not part of the Sardinia menu but was very good. We had the first Sungold tomatoes, too. Our sous-chef is very excited about those. Nick also gave me a taste of the rabbit pappardelle that hit the menu on Thursday. So delicious.
I was still feeling hungry in the afternoon, and I had one of our salted cherry scones. I truly do not eat pastry outside of pregnancy, but wow. This scone is one of my favorite snacks. I split it with Drew, our general manager, who was like, “Nat, am I just your eating buddy during pregnancy?” And I’m like, Um, yeah.
Right before service, Nick handed over a fried sardine to me. We have fresh sardines stuffed with chopped spinach, parsley, capers, a little Pecorino, and they’re fried into, like, the ultimate fish stick. We run them as specials and Nick always fries one before service to make sure everything is right. I was the lucky beneficiary.
Nick and I ducked out of service early because we scored tickets to the first game of the Eastern Conference Finals. I ran uptown to meet Nick and Pierre, who runs Le French Diner. He’s a good friend of ours and our favorite dining buddy. We grabbed a quick dinner at Txikito before the game. Txikito is such a special restaurant. My first job in the city was as a pizza cook at Co. pizza, which was on the same block. Our cooks would trade pizzas out of the back door for Txikito’s burgers. The food is still so tight, so good. We had Gildas and their potato salad. They make delicious beans studded with mussels and little ruby-red shrimp.
Then we watched the Knicks lose, and, yeah. It was wild to walk out of the Garden in complete silence. One guy walking next to us tried to tell everyone, “It’s okay, kids. It’s not a funeral.”
We popped over to NY Pizza Supreme because I needed a slice, and it’s one of my favorites in the city. After that we went home to relieve Nick’s parents, who were watching Rafa. They still live in the city, in the apartment where Nick and his two brothers grew up. It’s pretty awesome to have them so close.
Thursday, May 22
I made oatmeal for Rafa. I make it for the week and season it up with dates, sometimes raisins, and honey from bees that my uncle keeps. Rafa didn’t eat much, so I finished it and made him snacks and went to meet my trainer who’s a complete maniac.
I’ve been seeing him for nine years, and I’m always so grateful for the time. He truly gets me to do things that I wouldn’t typically opt in to myself. The session was very intense. It’s such torture, but I always walk out of there feeling great. And feeling ready to eat more carbohydrates.
Dominique Ansel opened his new bakery, Papa d’Amour, around the corner from us. I took a bottle of sparkling wine to congratulate him and the team. He has always been a really lovely guest and supporter of ours at both of our restaurants. Even before that, I remember he would come into Otto when I was a somm there, and he loved this dish of goat-cheese agnolotti with fennel pollen that was on the menu. Anyway, I popped around the corner, handed off the wine, and scooped up whatever was left on the menu: They were almost sold out of everything. I got a crispy-shrimp sando on milk bread and some of what he’s calling “jars,” they’re desserts built into a white-chocolate shell. I got what I could and shared it with some colleagues I was meeting.
Nick and I snuck out again — two nights in a row! — for an early reservation at Santi, Michael White’s new spot. We try new places when we can because it’s important for us to understand what’s happening at other restaurants. I feel like I’m always running around and shoving bits of food into my mouth; it’s nice to sit down for a full dinner. This was fun. I used to sell Michael White truffles right after I moved to the city, after I left the pizza gig. I was selling truffles to chefs by day for an importer and then working services at night. It was one of my favorite jobs: I would walk into the back doors of all of these restaurants I was so enamored with and open up the truffle box.
The highlights from the meal were a warm seafood salad — just perfect, with olive-oil-poached shrimp — and then Michael’s pastas, obviously. For me, Nick’s pastas can’t be touched, but these are such a different style. Nick is a traditionalist and Michael White is more Frenchified, which is the way he builds and operates restaurants in general.
Friday, May 23
Another smoothie with Rafa. I made it extra thick and fed it to him with a spoon. He was kind of not really understanding how to suck it up out of a straw, so we pretended it was ice cream and he was tickled by that. Then I got him set up for lunch, which was shepherd’s pie that was a leftover from family meal at Leon’s. A.M. family meal at Leon’s is not to be missed. Sometimes, even if I’m headed to Anton’s for the day, I’ll make a stop at Leon’s. So we had some of that for Rafa and handed him over to our amazing nanny before popping out to SOS Chefs.
It’s one of our favorite places. We source for the restaurants but also for home. Atef, the owner, is so magical. On this trip, she rubbed some saffron oil onto my wrists and then shoved a jar of fig-olive paste into my bag and said it was a blessing for the baby.
Went to Anton’s to take some photos for our social media, and it’s always pretty full. That operation is wild at this point. It took us a while to build lunch as a service but we’ve put a lot of effort into it, and being able to serve the neighborhood in a way that feels appropriate. We have all of our pastas from the dinner menu for $14 during lunch, which people have now caught on to.
We also have these great sandwiches. It’s like my little sandwich program that Nick has put into place. I romanticize iconic sandwiches from the ’90s and get very specific about it. I think of what it would have been like to dine at, say, Union Square Cafe when it first opened. We do a seared tuna burger with wasabi soy glaze and it’s just what I want to be eating if I’m taking a midday lunch. The sandwich that I had on Friday is a baguette, gruyere and cheddar, and our roast chicken. We get our chickens from Snowdance Farms in Livingston Manor.
Nick happened to be over there — I never know when I’m going to run into him — working on a tuna tartare special with the team that we ran for the weekend. Being married and working together works really well for us. We’re so busy that it’s actually so much time apart. He’s checking in with his chef team, I’m trying to check in with the front-of-house teams at both restaurants. We’ll have quick check-ins with texts and calls, but especially since opening Leon’s, it can feel like ships passing.
Weekends are when we get to spend time together and Fridays are early nights for us. We bounced back home to be with Rafa and had an early dinner at Il Posto Accanto, our favorite East Village restaurant. Amazing place. It’s run by a couple, a Roman woman named Bea and her husband, Julio. It’s just, like, a perfect neighborhood restaurant with excellent food and an amazing, eclectic crowd. Restaurants are such an earned achievement: It takes so much time to find the people who make any restaurant part of their lives, regularly.
We had soft-shell crabs, and fried zucchini blossoms, and sat at this great table that’s perched into their window sill. It’s an outdoor table and you sort of sit in the sill to watch all the people walking by.
Saturday, May 24
We bought a place a couple of years ago in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, a very pastoral town in Litchfield County. We were headed out there, so we started with a quick breakfast and I just had coffee. Coffee with toast with honey and butter is one of my favorite things.
Before we left I checked in at Leon’s. We’re serving bomboloni, the little Italian doughnuts, and I’m really trying to push them on everyone. Grabbed one for my purse and then hit Joe Jr. on the way out of town for a bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll that we could split in the car. It’s just really the best, I think.
The drive usually takes about two hours. Once we get there it’s just, release Rafa from the car and let him run around. He’s obsessed with being outside, and we all spent the afternoon running around until it was dinnertime.
We fed Rafa chicken teriyaki, which is one of his favorites. Nick makes a delicious tare with soy, agave, ginger, and scallion, and we’ll use that through the week. Rafa is a rice kid. He won’t eat pasta, which is really devastating for us, personally, but we’re happy about his enthusiasm for the rice.
We put him down and had a quick pasta ourselves: bucatini alla Gricia with frozen peas and guanciale that Nick had grabbed from Leon’s. Salad came from Liberty Farms, one of our favorites, which make this spring mix that’s like a field blend of greens with tons of herbs, so you get fennel fronds and purslane. We’re running the salad at Leon’s right now. The greens are so delicate that we can season it on the plate with coarse salt, lemon juice, and olive oil. I had a splash of wine from a great producer in Burgundy, Cyprien Arlaud, with the Gricia. It was delish.
Sunday, May 25
Strawberries and a fried egg for Rafa. I ate some granola crumbs out of the bottom of the bag. I never really eat breakfast. It’s not a meal for me in non-pregnant times.
We had friends coming up from the city — Geri, who is the GM of Strange Delight in Brooklyn, and her wife — early. We had a pot of coffee with them. Geri walked in with a massive cake that was a top layer of flan and a bottom layer of the densest dark-chocolate cake that one of her porters gave to her. We all took a fork to this cake and had it with the coffee.
We really like to spend our days outside, walking and biking or, in less lovely weather, popping around to antique shops where we find a lot of the wares for our restaurants: Light fixtures, china, silver, linens. It’s really fun and our friends tend to like doing that with us, too. We bopped around to different towns and found some ramps along the roadside. I think it’s the last weekend for them. We picked a few to bring back to the house and Nick made a very delicious ramp spaghetti for everyone for lunch.
For dinner that evening we lit a fire because this spring weather has us living like it’s winter. We cooked beans over the fire and I made rice pilaf, which is the dish of my childhood. It’s very simple with shallot, chicken stock, and a little bit of white wine. That’s usually my contribution to dinner.
We had all of that with branzino while we watched the Knicks game, which was a very exciting, successful game.
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