The Four Horsemen

The Restaurant

The Four Horsemen occupies a narrow, candle-lit dining room at 295 Grand Street in central Williamsburg, around the corner from the L train at Bedford Avenue. The room seats roughly forty across a single floor - a quiet zinc bar at the front, a long communal table mid-room, two-tops along the perimeter, and a low, warm light that the wine glasses catch through the evening. Co-owned by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy with restaurateurs Justin Chearno, Christina Topsoe, and Randy Moon, the room opened in 2015 with a deliberate, downtown-low-key sensibility and earned its first Michelin star in 2022. Chef Nick Curtola - previously at Frankies 457 and on the opening line at Franny's - runs a kitchen that has become a defining argument for restraint in American restaurant cooking.

The menu is intentionally small and changes every few weeks with the Northeast growing season. The cooking removes ingredients rather than adding them: clams in their own broth, sugar snap peas with a single dollop of fresh ricotta, beef tartare with cured egg yolk and very little else, a soft-shell crab in the right weeks served simply over salsa verde, a hand-cut tagliatelle with brown butter and parmesan. The pastas are the room's longest-running argument - the housemade tagliatelle has been on every menu since opening and the kitchen has rebuilt it perhaps a dozen times in service of small refinements. There is no tasting menu and no required pacing; tables order four to six plates across two hours and pair them through the wine list.

The wine programme is the reason a meaningful portion of the room's customers travel from across the country. Around four hundred references, almost entirely natural and low-intervention, selected by Justin Chearno - a self-taught buyer whose selections out of the Loire (Foillard, Pacalet, Mosse), Sicily (Cornelissen, Frank Cornelissen's full vertical), the Jura (Overnoy-Houillon, Bornard), and Slovenia and Friuli (Radikon, Gravner, Vodopivec) are widely cited as the most consequential natural-wine list in the United States. The by-the-glass programme rotates through twenty pours per evening, and the floor team can navigate a fifty-dollar bottle conversation and a five-hundred-dollar bottle conversation with the same care. Service is informal in the East Village-Williamsburg register and unhurried - a four-plate evening readily stretches across two and a half hours without ever feeling pressed.