On a very snowy New Year’s Eve in 1998, a young painter and bartender named Andrew Tarlow changed the course not just of the Brooklyn restaurant scene, but of the Brooklyn Brooklyn scene, when he opened a restaurant in the vestiges of an old Pullman railroad dining car. It was called Diner, and it was located on Williamsburg’s burned-out south side—a patchwork of abandoned warehouses and dive bars where you checked your knife at the door, a place inhabited by a community of artists who had recently been priced out of Manhattan, namely Chelsea and the West Village. Diner would be Tarlow’s clubhouse, where he welcomed the locals with strong drinks, cheap cheeseburgers, and improvised cooking from a talented young chef named Caroline Fidanza. On this cold night, the restaurant’s opening, Fidanza introduced her boss to one of the great cold-weather dishes in the world’s canon of rib-sticking and soul-warming edible things: the cassoulet.

“We had no heat, no power, and no cooking instruments, and it was one of the best meals of my life,” recalls Tarlow of that night, nearly 17 years ago, which he organized to feed a group of 20 friends and coworkers who had helped build the restaurant. He and Fidanza had made the dish in his apartment a few blocks down the street, and the pair walked the dish over in a couple of oversize cazuelas.

Andrew Tarlow

The cassoulet by nature is a dish fit for a celebration. It requires several days of planning, a hard-core trip to the butcher shop, and, well, labor. It starts with the confit of duck legs, an old-school preservation technique that has the cook slowly heating a lot of duck fat until it liquefies, then placing salt-cured duck legs into a bath of this golden bird butter and slow roasting for hours (see recipe below). There’s also sausage to make, beans to soak, beans to cook, beans to stir and cook more, and pork shoulder to cure. The cassoulet is the over-the-top marriage of all these individual techniques, brought together in a deep cast-iron vessel that shares the dish’s name and a combination of Provençal herbs, tomato paste, and chicken stock. Simmer for an hour, and rest overnight. The next day, the dish is ready to simmer, bake, and eventually serve. (Recipe below.)

“There’s a romance to this dish, and dinner that night had this feeling that it was coming from another place, not the bombed-out part of Brooklyn we were living in, but the South of France,” says Tarlow of the long-ago meal. “There was a sense of optimism during that dinner.”

Of course, Tarlow’s optimism during the Clinton administration eventually crystalized into a full-blown revolution—both food and commercial—for little old Brooklyn. While Diner is still happily open today in the same railroad car on the same street, Tarlow went on to open several other pace-setting establishments, including Marlow & Sons, Romans, and Reynard at the Wythe Hotel. All concepts cloned and cloned and cloned many times over, as New York’s most-populated borough (and America’s fourth-largest city on its own) has grown into a restaurant mecca. Tarlow and his talented foot soldiers, including Fidanza and longtime collaborator chef Sean Rembold, are to be given much credit for machete-ing through the wilderness.

Tarlow’s new book, Dinner at the Long Table, is a reflection on memorable meals, like the snowy opening night, that have shaped his life. A clambake on the rocky beach, or New Year’s Eve Eve fonduta—melty and made with a pound of Fontina Val d’Aosta from the Piedmont. “These meals happened on a yearly basis and were really all about the celebration.” He excuses himself for a second, and we overhear precise directions being given to an employee. “Sorry, we are doing a ramen pop-up for 150,” he says of a collaboration with Oakland’s Ramen Shop. It will most certainly be a party.