To offer a purely anecdotal take, however, we'll direct you to a moment relayed early in the story. It's a regular night at The Spotted Pig, and Jay-Z, Beyonce and guests have inquired about the restaurant's no-frills Roquefort burger, which one must order sans substitutions of any sort. 

One of Jay-Z’s friends wasn’t sure about the Roquefort. Bloomfield hates to leave the kitchen, but [co-owner Ken] Friedman dragged her to the table, where she prevailed upon the friend to have the dish the way she had intended it.

“Who’s that golfer dude you made me meet?” Bloomfield asked Friedman later.

“He’s not a golfer,” Friedman replied. “He’s Kobe Bryant.”

Another piece of Spotted Pig trivia from the New Yorker piece: Unless your name is Lou Reed, good luck ordering onions on your burger.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234 

It’s a sentiment increasingly familiar to New York diners. In the past few years, offal—the animal parts that fall off the butcher table, like the entrails, head and feet—has progressed from a rare delicacy at risk-taking restaurants like Babbo, Prune and Michael White’s now-defunct Fiamma to a ubiquity of near–pork-belly proportions. Prime beef? Hopelessly minor league, not to mention kind of unenlightened. Call yourself a chef? Let’s see what you can do with a whole (locally raised, hormone-free, of course) carcass. Let’s see you braise a kidney.

Meanwhile, butcher shops like the Meat Hook in Williamsburg and Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market sell ambitious amateurs everything from headcheese to chorizo-stuffed duck hearts. A blog called Nose to Tail at Home chronicles the Julie Powell–like adventures of a young foodie named Ryan Adams (not the singer) attempting to cook from the British chef Fergus Henderson’s seminal 2004 offal bible, The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. And last summer’s inevitable nationally televised offal street-food competition occurred not on Fear Factor but Top Chef Masters, with Chicago’s Rick Bayless’ tongue tacos triumphing.

“It shows a level of skill and also a care and concern,” said Seamus Mullen, chef at Boqueria in Soho and on 19th Street, who regularly serves pan-roasted sweetbreads, pork liver terrines, lamb kidneys and rabbit organs. Mr. Mullen said that the dishes, while not yet blockbusters, sell well, especially when he puts them in small, cheaper appetizer portions—less of a commitment. There is an obvious spirit of daring to the entrail enterprise. “When we first opened L’Artusi and even Dell’anima, all I wanted on the menu was funky, weird shit,” said Gabe Thompson, chef at the two West Village Italian restaurants, where he cooks sweetbreads and livers and has considered adding brains. “Cooks like to eat funky, weird shit, and cooks like to send other cooks out funky, weird shit.”

High on the Hog

Cesare Casella is currently serving plenty of guanciale and Sloppy Guisseppe (a sloppy Joe made of leftover parts like oxtail and bone marrow) at Salumeria Rosi Parmacotto on the Upper West Side. He served a veal brains special at the now-shuttered Maremma, along with Granelli—“otherwise known as Rocky Mountain Oysters or cow’s balls,” Mr. Casella said, but “brains were so much harder to sell than testicles. … For some reason, diners were more comfortable with the idea of eating balls.”

Mr. Batali, the primary auteur of fine dining’s current offalmania, has had better luck with his lamb’s brain “francobolli,” a staple since he put it on Babbo’s opening menu in 1998. “I used it because it was an inexpensive way to profit,” he told The Observer, “but also because it served to distinguish my restaurants from the rest of the Italian restaurants that pretty much had veal Milanese and ricotta ravioli with tomato sauce.” He also cites “philosophical responsibility.”

For all the balls-out (sorry) nature of offal, chefs offering it still tend to traffic in euphemism. A handy glossary: guanciale (pork jowl), trotters (pig’s feet), cod milt (cod sperm, once offered at the now-shuttered John Dory on 10th Avenue), tripe (stomach, though it sounds more like a mild white fish, which perhaps helps account for its popularity), Orielles de Christ (pig skin, available at the Vanderbilt in Brooklyn) and, of course, so-called sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas, available everywhere from Babbo to Prune to Little Italy). Some offal is more straightforward in name, such as fatback (literally, back fat) and caul fat (a fatty membrane surrounding pig intestines). And organs like the liver, kidney and brains have largely evaded semantic cover, though they also sometimes escape mention in terrines around town, where they add depth of flavor if not commercial appeal.

At the new Breslin at the Ace Hotel, April Bloomfield, a Brit and offal’s reigning high priestess, has dispensed with the niceties and is serving “Stuffed Pig’s Foot (for 2),” which Times critic Sam Sifton described as “the size of a toddler’s leg.” And possibly piggybacking (sorry again) on the favor for British cooking cultivated by Ms. Bloomfield, a new Scottish gastropub in the West Village called the Highlands has begun tempting/repulsing customers with haggis, the traditional Scottish delicacy involving boiling intestines in a sheep’s stomach. Mr. Thompson said the civilian clientele for offal consists of two distinct groups: “All these people who are 20 being like, ‘I eat everything!’; and people who are 60 saying, ‘I haven’t eaten sweetbreads since I was a little kid!’” At the Spotted Pig, where crispy pig’s ear is the sixth best-selling dish, owner Ken Friedman recently observed, “These people come in, mostly older English people, and they eat [chef Bloomfield’s] liver and onions and bacon, and they like have tears in their eyes.”

Sumptuous when cooked right and revolting when botched, offal is the perfect medium for showing off. “It’s all about stimulus,” said Saul Bolton, who is currently cooking real French andouille sausage—i.e., pork stomach blanched and slow-cooked and glued together with “hog gel” before being stuffed into pork large intestine, cold-smoked and poached—at the Vanderbilt. “It’s like TV: The textures are more varied, the flavors more varied, it’s a much more interesting eating experience all-around. If you allow yourself to spend the time to really get to know feet, tail and head, they’re so much tastier than any other part!”

Undoubtedly, some chefs relish offal’s aloofness and lack of appeal to the city’s growing vegetarian, allergenic population: David Chang, for one, an innards enthusiast who once famously excised his only vegetarian dish from the menu after being chastised for being insensitive to meat-avoiders; and Gabrielle Hamilton, who has served sweetbreads and bone marrow at Prune since 1999 (she also serves veal hearts and monkfish liver, and calves’ brains every Valentine’s Day). “It was this very efficient kind of mutual interview for a date,” she said of her offal. “Like, here’s my menu and it’s very plain what’s available here. It weeded out a clientele.”

Cheek Chic

But though the snob appeal of challenging organ meats cannot be denied, “people who say we’re an elitist movement are ignoring entire cultures that are based off lesser cuts,” said Patrick Martins, owner of Heritage Foods USA, which supplies pork from small farms to Mr. Batali, Mr. Chang, Ms. Bloomfield and Daniel Boulud, among others. In certain enclaves of the city, offal isn’t back so much as it never went anywhere; it’s a staple of, say, traditional Italian, Spanish, Dominican, Puerto Rican and Greek cuisines. Mr. Mullen of Boqueria describes having Dominican tripe that, touted as a hangover cure, “really tastes like cow gut,” on the Lower East Side; Mr. Gold, the author, often treks to Yakitori Totto, in midtown, for “chicken parts”—i.e., “hearts, livers, gizzards, bones, cartilage, the tail, crispy chicken tails, which are amazing crunchy little nuggets.” (He called this restaurant his “happy place.”)

A quick glance at a Gourmet cookbook first released in 1950 reveals the extent to which we’ve become squeamish eaters in a single generation: The book boasted 51 recipes for offal, most French; the most recent Gourmet cookbook, released in 2009, had two. Ms. Hamilton grew up eating a wide variety of organs cooked by her French mother in rural New Jersey; Mr. Batali was raised in Seattle on liver slathered in ketchup. “When I landed in New York City in ’92, I thought, ‘Wow, what an interesting place filled with a lot of steaks and tuna and chicken!’” he said.

Only in Manhattan could we pay premium prices for something once considered a culinary castoff. Farmers and purveyors used to send innards in bags attached to the carcasses for free, but offal has become a specialty item that is, in some cases, more expensive than filet mignon. “The stuff’s doubled,” said Pat LaFrieda, the famed third-generation meat man who keeps 600 of Manhattan’s best restaurants stocked. Mr. LaFrieda estimates that offal currently makes up 10 percent of his business, up from 5 percent five years ago and 2 percent 10 years ago. “I’m constantly speaking to the packers when I call and ask for offal, and they say, ‘What are you guys doing with it?’” said Mr. LaFrieda, who estimated that “lamb’s brains have gone from $2.50 to $5 a pound, veal cheeks have gone from $5 to $10 a pound in the last five years; pork livers are maybe up 50 percent.” (Filet mignon, meanwhile, goes for $7 or $8 a pound.) Calf livers are up about 30 percent in the past five years, Mr. LaFrieda added, and other veal items are the same price they were 20 years ago.

The rise of guts is good news for small farmers who once gave the stuff away, but it has decreased chefs’ margins on dishes that were once moneymakers. “These used to be the ones that might buy me a Mercedes-Benz, but now I’m definitely going to be in a Volkswagen forever,” bemoaned Ms. Hamilton, who now pays upward of $8 a pound for sweetbreads and anywhere from $9 to $19 a pound for monkfish liver, an expensive delicacy in Japan.

Still, Mr. LaFrieda said that offal’s limited regional appeal (currently, the revival has not spread beyond New York and a few other urban culinary centers) means that prices will only rise so much, because the supply of animals with organs to give is “not tapped out.”

In which case: Will we eventually tire of seeing hooves and intestines alongside salt cod and rib-eyes? Cheek is hot right now, but after that, what next? What is left to eat? Former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl recently predicted via Twitter that “lamb necks might be the pork belly of 2010.” Mr. LaFrieda, for his part, is burning through 200 pounds of veal tongue a week and has been fielding requests for cock’s combs—currently on the menu at Michael White’s Alto. Mr. Martins of Heritage Foods admitted to selling the “bunghole”—that’s exactly what it sounds like—to a chef in Virginia, who uses it to make sausage casing. He also said that Mr. Batali has been recently begging him for pig’s bladder, currently banned by the U.S.D.A.

“He’s like, ‘I’ll pay you anything for pig’s bladder,’” said Mr. Martins. “I think he wants to cook stuff in it.” Ms. Hamilton, meanwhile, one of the original harbingers of the trend, is moving on, in her mind if not yet on her menu, from the modern obsession with cooking things “for the sake of being outlandish,” an attitude she described as “‘Hey, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put pork snout on top of pork belly and then I’m going to fry it, man.’” What will she do instead? Perhaps “a little crab salad and a half an avocado and a glass of Lillet,” she said.

mbryan@observer.com

After the recent FergusStock, a festival during which famed British chef Fergus Henderson cooked whole pigs for a rapt crowd of New York chefs and foodies, Mr. Friedman said the mosque’s leaders called a meeting with the hotel. “They said, ‘Can you move the bar?’” he said. “And I laughed. And the guy said, ‘Oh, you think that’s funny?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that is funny, that is really funny, because we’re not going to move the bar just because you discovered we’re serving booze.’ Can you name one restaurant in New York that doesn’t serve booze?”

Mr. Friedman and his partner, Spotted Pig chef April Bloomfield, did agree to nix plans for a dive bar in a townhouse next door, but as for the restaurant, “I said, ‘This is the United States of America and we’ll do whatever the fuck we want.’” He said the mosque had suggested it couldn’t control the behavior of “a few bad eggs”; i.e., “we could get a brick through our window.” Mr. Friedman said he made the police aware of this threat.

A volunteer at the mosque returning a call from the Transom said that a law forbids serving liquor within 200 feet of a place of worship and that “not more than 200 feet is between the mosque and the bar.” To which Andrew Zobler, the hotel’s developer, responded: “The law is clear that in order for that to apply it has to be an exclusively dedicated house of worship, and at their space they have both residences and a restaurant, so basically, because of those uses the law allowed there to be a bar within 200 feet. Everyone was aware of that when the liquor license was granted.” He added: “Out of neighborliness and respect we’ve voluntarily acquiesced to covering the window with a curtain.”

The Breslin will serve breakfast and lunch beginning Thursday, Oct. 29, and add dinner a week or so later. U2 hosted a party there earlier in the month, and Alain Ducasse recently named its fries the best in New York. The restaurant was named for James Breslin, who originally opened the hotel as the Breslin in 1904 and hosted the longest boxing match in history in a special ring he built in its basement (he also once dated an Andrews sister). “He was the Andre Balazs of his time,” Mr. Friedman said.

He added that he and Ms. Bloomfield are optimistic about the restaurant’s prospects, despite the recent shuttering of another venture, the pricier John Dory on 10th Avenue. He said they plan to reopen the John Dory in a space four times as large (he would not reveal the location), and make it more casual, “like the Spotted Pig with fish.” They further hope to do some “weird things” like a bakery, a bar and perhaps “a country inn.” (This in addition to the Rusty Knot, which Mr. Friedman owns with Taavo Somer, and Locanda Verde, a restaurant he opened in the former Ago space with Robert De Niro, Ira Drukier and Richard Born of the Greenwich Hotel)

When the Transom visited, the “doily curtain” covering had not yet arrived, and paper has been taped to the windows to shield the mosque’s worshipers from the sight of a gay wedding over the weekend. “They can threaten, but they can’t really stop us,” Mr. Friedman said.

At the Spotted Pig

I've just come back from England, where the restaurant of the moment is the Fat Duck. It's a village pub in Berkshire that serves, among other oddities, sardine-on-toast sorbet, snail porridge and smoked-bacon-and-egg ice cream. It has three Michelin stars. The cuisine served at the Fat Duck is hardly the pub grub I knew as a girl in Dorset, when the plats du jour were Smith's Crisps and Scotch eggs (the latter made with a hard-boiled egg rolled in sausage meat and bread crumbs and then deep-fried). But now hundreds of local "boozers" (British slang for pubs, not drunk people) have morphed into so-called "gastro pubs." Scotch eggs have been replaced by balls of buffalo mozzarella, just off the plane from Naples, and the crisps are now served with mashed King Edward potatoes to go with your order of organic pork sausages from pigs owned by the Prince of Wales.

The Spotted Pig, on the corner of 11th and Greenwich streets, is the West Village's first gastro pub. It looks every bit the part: quaint and tavern-like, with a pressed-tin ceiling, bare brick walls and archways, wooden tables, mismatched cushions on the banquettes and a long, crowded bar. There are no horse brasses, dart boards or slot machines. Instead, the pub is decorated with pink clay heads of pigs with rings through their septums, pictures of ducks and framed illustrations of vegetables. Red velvet curtains hang in the windows, where herbs are placed in boxes on the green painted sills, sending out an aroma of mint and oregano instead of the usual pub smell of stale tobacco and spilled beer.

You can locate the Spotted Pig, which used to be Le Zoo, by the number of people clustered outside on the sidewalk outside waiting to get a table (the restaurant only takes reservations for parties of six or more). Part of the draw is its stellar cast of investors, including owner Ken Friedman from the music business, and the team from Babbo, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich. Running the small kitchen is an English chef, April Bloomfield, who once worked at the groundbreaking River Café in London and Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.

Her food is simple and rustic, using the freshest ingredients, and the menu changes constantly. At frequent intervals, cooks emerge from the basement through a hatch outside and stagger through the front door bearing trays of freshly made burger patties and plump little dumplings. Don't miss the dumplings: They're called gnudi, and they're the size of a quarter and light as a feather, filled with sheep's milk ricotta and served in melted butter with fried sage leaves.

Bloomfield's Italian dishes are stellar. I've never had a better version of orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe. She serves the pasta (the name means "little ears") with crumbled spicy sausage that goes well with the bitterness of the broccoli rabe, and cooked fresh tomatoes binding it all together.

When I was growing up, Elizabeth David's Italian Food was the rage, and one of my mother's standard dishes for a lunch party was vitello tonnato. Sometimes, when veal was too expensive, she made it with pounded chicken breasts. Ms. Bloomfield makes the dish with roast pork, sliced paper-thin and coated with a thick, creamy tuna mayonnaise, capers and arugula. She also does a fine job with a char-grilled skirt steak-it's rare and juicy and served with fresh horseradish, roast carrots and celery root. There's also a whopping charred hamburger on the menu, topped with melted Roquefort cheese and served with shoestring potatoes.

You can begin with a wonderful chicken liver parfait, a light creamy mousse served with grilled country bread and cornichons. It's very rich, so I took the rest home for later. Bloomfield also puts together delightful vegetable dishes, such as roast Jerusalem artichokes with sunflower seeds and sprouts; roast pumpkin with pine nuts, shaved pecorino and arugula; and a hearty stew of asparagus and fava beans simmered with slabs of prosciutto.

Oddly enough, the worst dish on the menu is a "gastro-pub" standard: shepherd's pie. The chef has no interest in it. The meat is dry and stringy, there's no sauce (not even England's favorite, Bisto Gravy Granules!), and the mashed potatoes aren't rich and loaded with butter, but as watery as those in a school lunch.

Ms. Bloomfield has a firmer hand with sea bass, grilled and served with spiced lentils and sprightly herb salad. Lentils also come with grilled wild king salmon, laced with sliced asparagus.

Since the Spotted Pig is a pub, there are some intriguing beers on tap: Old Speckled Hen (from Abingdon, England), Beamish stout from Cork, and Brooklyner Weisse. The wine list, compiled by Bastianich, is international and out of the ordinary, with plenty of choices at reasonable prices.

Don't miss what the English call "puddings." Chocolate nemesis, a dark mousse-like cake made famous at the River Café, comes in a thin sliver with a dollop of crème fraîche. On one occasion, it was sublime; on another day, it was gummy. The lemon tart is splendid, as is the ginger cake made with molasses (treacle) and served with whipped cream.

Aside from lunchtime, when it's not too busy, there's usually a long wait to get a table at the Spotted Pig. The hostess or maître d' takes your name and suggests that you have a drink at the bar or sit outside until a table opens up (but, unlike at a real English pub, you can't take your drink outside). After waiting over half an hour one night, three of us decided to grab some stools and squeeze around a small high table near the front door. It suited us fine. Suddenly, a crazed-looking woman with a belligerent expression on her face came in, stared around and was told there was a wait. She then stamped out of the front door and kicked in the window.

I once knew a Cockney actor whose local "boozer" was the Coach and Horses in Soho, London. It was no gastro-pub, and after a few pints at the bar he'd say: "Right, then-anyone fancy going out for some solids?" Alas, he died of drink. He'd have liked the solids at the Spotted Pig.