One Great Plate: Foie Gras Butter Corn on the Cob at Roebling Tea Room

WHEN IT COMES to corn on the cob I’m generally a purist: boiled corn, butter, salt. Anything else is some sort of succotash.When I farmed in New Hampshire, I ate corn on the cob a minimum of five times a week during August and as far into September as I could keep plucking fat ears of Silver Queen from their stalks. It’s not that I don’t like grilled corn or Mexican-style corn with cotija and lime; I just don’t see how they’re an improvement. I’m also suspicious when fancy ingredients show up in low-key dishes. My grilled cheese does not need truffles and doesn’t need to be made with barely legal raw-milk Brie, either.

So if it weren’t for the unceasing awesomeness of the small plates at Williamsburg’s Roebling Tea Room, I would never have tried a dish as flagrantly offensive to my personal food orthodoxy as the corn on the cob with foie gras butter and chives ($10 for a plate with two ears). And Jesus God, would I have been missing out.

The Tea Room’s chef, Dennis Spina, (who I will admit is a pal, but I was crazy about his food before I was crazy about him) is an unparalleled master of the deep fryer. From garlic-scape knots that beat up onion rings, take their lunch money and spend it on tranny hookers to quick duck confit, Spina’s high-low aesthetic is best communicated through his hot oil work.

For the corn on the cob, he pops the ears in the fryer for a few minutes, tosses them with foie gras butter, adds a smattering of chives and sea salt and tops the whole thing off with sliced cornichons.Turns out that the meaty funk of foie gras offsets sweet corn in a way that intensifies and highlights both flavors. Add the cornichons to a bite and the corn becomes a stand-in for bread on a country pâté plate, only with more textural interest and complimentary sweetness than your best crusty loaf or raisin-fennel semolina. “The blender is big for foie gras butter,” Spina explains. “We sear off the lobes, then add butter and buzz them together." The dish will be a regular on the menu as long as the corn, which comes from upstate farmer Guy Jones, holds out.

As with many of the small plates on the specials menu at Roebling Tea Room, the corn sums up what the restaurant does best: taking a familiar, homey item and transforming it into something fancy, but unpretentious and completely satisfying. I had the corn and a plate of just barely steamed green beans finished with crème fraiche and toasted sesame seeds for dinner one night and I left with the self satisfied sensation that I had eaten a super healthy, vegetable-centric dinner. I’m not saying I want to see the foie gras corn supplant the classic version at barbecues and state fairs across the land, I’m just saying that I’m rethinking my ban on fancying up familiar favorites.

> Roebling Tea Room

143 Roebling St. (at Metropolitan Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-963-0431