The amenities of Del Valle, which transformed itself from a glorified deli into a modest restaurant in April, are few but appealing, especially in the impersonal wilds of Clinton.
The building was turned into a modest restaurant by Robert Moses in 1934 and then, through a series of additions in the 1970s, transformed into a palace of kitsch by Warner LeRoy, the son of Mervyn LeRoy, a director and producer, and the grandson of the Hollywood studio boss Harry Warner.
The Smoke Joint, a modest restaurant in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, also does a very respectable short rib.
"The people are tired," said Jamal Fayez, who runs a modest restaurant in the city center.
Lately, lovers of Bangladeshi cuisine, which hums with a vibrant undercurrent of mustard oil, have been trekking to a modest restaurant in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx.
Captain Red scraped his stool back from the counter at the Car Wash Cafe, a modest restaurant in a former Shell station, placed two fives by the register and gave the waitress a wink.
But in the back there's a modest restaurant: a few booth tables, a line of stools along a wall and a big, fully equipped open kitchen, with a rotisserie and deck ovens (leftovers from the location's previous incarnation as a pizzeria).
"If you take a date out in Park Slope or Manhattan, even to a modest restaurant, it's a not inconsequential amount of money.
Being wanted can wreak as much attitude in a putatively modest restaurant as it can in a transparently immodest one.
