Nathan (co-owner and chef) usually starts by serving loin steaks at the end of the week, brined and grilled. He seasons and stuffs the shoulder, slow-roasting it for a porchetta which is served typically for weekend dinners. The leg meat is made into breakfast sausage for the brunch menu and into meatballs that appear throughout the week as a special. The belly gets slow-roasted with a maple glaze for a pork-belly entree or appetizer early in the week. The shank and feet are braised, de-boned, stuffed and rolled up for trotters, which are then breaded and pan-fried on Monday or Tuesday. Lastly, the head…well, that’s frequently made into headcheese, called pork terrine on our menu and known in Italy as coppa di testa. This dish is frequently on our menu and we encourage you to try it, because it’s delicate and divine and is a rare old-world craft. That’s pretty much the whole hog, as the saying goes. Come the following Wednesday, we’ve usually run through the entire animal and are ready for another delivery from Fleisher’s. So drop in and try our nightly pork preparation any day of the week. It’s sure to be delicious and you know that it’s made fresh from a locally-raised pasture-fed pig.

The meat has been stripped off the bone, rolled around a sauté of mustard greens — a sly riff on that Southern classic, collard greens and ham hocks — then breaded and fried. What arrives at the table has the innocent mien of a crab cake, plump and golden.

Slice into it and the pork spills out, outrageously tender. There is nothing to tip off the squeamish that we’ve entered hoof territory.

It’s a thoughtful, inclusive dish, elegant but unpretentious, created by a chef who is interested in more than just flaunting his pork cred.

That chef would be Nathan Foot, late of Myth (since closed) in San Francisco. He opened the greenmarket-driven Northern Spy in the East Village in November with partners, Christophe Hille, formerly a chef and an owner of A16 in San Francisco, and Chris Ronis, who runs the front of the house.

The embrace of pig trotters reflects the restaurant’s commitment to sustainability: use the whole animal; waste nothing. The pigs comes from Fleisher’s, an upstate butcher specializing in grass-fed and organic meats. They are remarkably succulent. A recent entree of pork belly was close to 50 percent pearlescent fat.

The menu reads like a roster of favorite snacks and midnight feasts, albeit executed with a precision honed in high-end kitchens. Mr. Foot has done time in fine dining, but seems to have a soft spot for down-home cooking.

Note the pickled eggs, a staple of dive bars and gasoline stations, where they are stacked in jars by the cash register. Here they come two to a plate ($3), halved, with a ramekin of aioli. The condiment is key: without it, the eggs are like shots of pure vinegar; with it, they’re dainty hors d’oeuvres.

Corned beef hash ($13) cleans up real nice as well. It’s more of a salad than a hash, the generously sized hunks of brined brisket loosely tossed with potatoes and onions.

Polenta engorged with crème fraîche substitutes for grits, its country cousin, as a bed for baked eggs ($14). It’s a voluptuary’s dish.

More exotic is risotto made from freekeh, roasted green wheat ($11). One of my dining companions called it “hippie mac-and-cheese.” Did the grain’s high nutritional value make up for the glut of butter and mascarpone? We didn’t care.

The list of greatest hits at Northern Spy is undeniably carb-heavy: griddled corn bread ($6) daubed with sweet-onion yogurt; roasted potatoes ($5) spiked with hot mustard; runner beans ($5) so dense and creamy that one diner mistook them for mashed potatoes.

Flatbread is topped with paper-thin wafers of crisp, rosemary-scented potato ($4). Think potato chips on pizza, refined.

Sandwiches are stuffed with salty country ham ($10) or a poached egg nestled atop chicken ($11), delightful in theory but tricky to eat. Vegetarians, so often stuck with an unwieldy slab of portobello, are treated to a savory mess of wild mushrooms, studded with confit potatoes and tucked into a crusty baguette.

The winter palette of produce in New York is a bit of a downer; it’s hard to get excited about so many root vegetables. (Does Mr. Foot yearn for California’s year-round bounty?) Northern Spy makes the best of it, offering braised red cabbage amped up with bacon ($5), brussels sprouts lolling in the jus of a roast chicken ($15), and a kale salad that includes cubes of roasted squash commingling with almonds ($10).

For dessert, don’t expect homespun creations with craggy crusts and wobbly fillings. The pear tart ($6) is laced with frangipane. Apple pie ($6), made from the namesake Northern Spy variety, is paired with a worldly spoonful of almond semifreddo.

The dining room is charming, referencing a country store without the glaze of irony. There is no mismatched crockery. Should you wonder, the floorboards are reclaimed hickory, the wallpaper panels picked up at an antiques fair. You can sip homemade quince seltzer ($3) perched on the sky-blue park-bench banquette or on an old metal stool at the counter.

In back, there is an actual store, stocked with local artisanal goods that will be familiar to anyone who has cruised the Brooklyn Flea: Early Bird granola, McClure pickles, Liddabit sweets. (But where’s the Salvatore Brooklyn ricotta, guys?)

The “eat local” ethos is by now a familiar stance to New York diners. Refreshingly, Northern Spy doesn’t make a fetish of its carefully sourced ingredients. You won’t be ambushed by an amuse-bouche of tiny heirloom carrots speared to a plank and instructed to marvel at their sheer carrot-ness. If you don’t read Northern Spy’s menu closely, you may not even notice its meticulously curated larder.

That’s the way Mr. Foot et al want it. They’re keeping the prices low and the focus on the food, not the doctrine behind it.”

Northern Spy Food Company

511 East 12th Street (Avenue A), East Village; (212) 228-5100, northernspyfoodco.com.

BEST DISHES Crispy pig’s trotter roulade; freekeh risotto; polenta with baked eggs; roasted chicken with brussels sprouts; kale salad with clothbound cheddar, kabocha squash and almonds; potato-rosemary flatbread; mushroom sandwich; stewed runner beans; pear-and-frangipane tart; Northern Spy apple pie.

PRICE RANGE $3 to $17.

CREDIT CARDS All major cards.

HOURS Sunday to Thursday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday to midnight.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Restaurant is accessible, bathroom isn’t.

RESERVATIONS Not accepted.

The Northern Spy apple, a variety first planted in New York state in the early 1800s, was known for bearing big, colorful, juicy fruit that were legendary keepers, so they ended up in a lot of pies and sauce and other wintertime dishes. Not surprisingly, the cozy, 900-square-foot East Village restaurant (511 E. 12th St.) that bares this persistent fruit’s name was, on a recent chilly day, awash in farm-fresh cockles-warming treats being served to a bustling lunch time crowd.I felt an immediate kinship to the place, not just because I have a Northern Spy planted in my back yard, but because the Northern Spy Food Co.’s menu and commissary shelves unfold with characters from recent issues of Edible–from Liddabits King Bar to North Fork chips, from Channing Daughters Scuttlehole Chardonnay by the glass to Hot Bread Kitchen tortillas. An Xtracycle, invented by a college friend of mine and outfitted with an old milk basket, was even parked outside, recently returned from the flower district (and often from Union Square Greenmarket).

On our table, side by side with pickled eggs, toothsome polenta, Montauk calamari, and a raw kale salad that would have made Anne Saxelby blush (it was garnished with chunks of Cabot Clothbound cheddar and shavings of Three Corner Farm), were two pork specials: a porchetta sandwich done just right on Sullivan Street’s pane bianco, and some even more interesting headcheese. “They just started sending heads,” said chef Nathan Foot of the hogs the restaurant gets from Fleischer’s in Kingston.

He suspected that “fat is a tough sell in the East Village,” but that wasn’t a problem at our table. Packed with pistachio and parsley and red ribbons of pork, this terrine seemed less preserved and less handled than the typical gelatin-rich creation. Chef Foot, a Boston-boy who has mostly cooked in San Francisco and has been “impressed” by the East Coast’s offseason meat and seafood selection, paired the dish with a vinegary, jalapeno dressed salad and dijon. (Note to farmers: he plans to replace all this pork with lamb in the spring.)

This sort of juxtaposition is typical, no matter which side of the rustic-fine dining L Train spectrum you are on (East vs. West of the East River, that is). But it’s still delicious: Brunch patrons have been gobbling Chef Foot’s slow cooked eggs, made homey with homemade sausage, made refined with a bit of creme fraiche, and made perfect with grilled bread.

Some might say the joint has an interborough identity crisis. “I’m always hoping that the restaurants in the city will be more like what I go to Brooklyn for,” said Chris Ronis, who lives in the neighborhood and owns the restaurant with former A16 chef Cristophe Hill, who lives in Brooklyn. The two had wanted to open in Williamsburg, but ultimately settled on the foot traffic and the what-used-to-be Brooklyn rent of the East Village, and decorated the room with apple tree patterned wallpaper, custom powder blue banquets, and beer taps that pop from the wall.

The Brooklyn notion of a restaurant general store–see Marlow & Son or Brooklyn Larder–hasn’t yet caught on in Manhattan, Ronis suggested.  “Brooklyn’s almost become fancier in that way,” at least when it comes to food. As if on cue, a woman with pajamas on under her coat came in looking for local milk (Battenkill Valley Creamery) and local kimchi (Mother in Law’s ).

They opened last November, after the usual new restaurant rite-of-passage: struggling to get their gas turned on. Once the stove was lit, they hit the ground running and haven’t looked back.

Two of the owners, Christophe Hille and Nathan Foot, worked as chefs in San Francisco (A16, Myth, Jardiniere) before migrating east and bringing with them the California sensibility of serving regionally-sourced food. The third partner, Chris Ronis, has lived in the East Village for 12 years, working in music and film, but had an early connection to the food business. His half-brother is the third generation owner/operator of Philadelphia restaurant Old Original Bookbinder’s, now in Richmond, Virginia.

Initially the three scoured Brooklyn trying to find a location, but when the East 12th Street spot became available they took it. “It’s a Brooklyn idea come to Manhattan,” Chris told us, as we chatted over rosemary flatbread and house-made seltzer. “We want this place to be family friendly and we want neighborhood people.”

Keeping it local to the mid-atlantic and northeast region is what they promise and what they deliver. They shop the area farmers’ markets, like Tompkins Square and Union Square Greenmarkets, both just a few blocks away.  For the retail market, they hit the Brooklyn Flea, as well as further upstate, to learn about up-and-coming artisanal producers.

Their pantry shelves are lined with products like:

•spicy, garlicky pickles from McClure’s
•candies from Liddabit Sweets
•jars of Mother-In-law’s Kimchi
•serrano chili beans from Brooklyn Brine Co.
•jams from Miss Amy, Anarchy in a Jar, and Katchkie Farm
•potato chips from the North Fork
•cheeses and yogurts from local farms such as Maple Hill Creamery and Consider Bardwell Farm.

And yes, they acknowledge that the farm-to-table movement has become the latest trend for restaurants, but Chris sees it as an obvious. “Sounds silly at this point, but why wouldn’t you use local, fresh food?”  And what about the other hot craze sweeping NY restaurants – pig? “It’s definitely a ‘thing,’ but it makes economical sense,” he admitted “you can eat the whole pig; ears, trotters, shanks, and skin. You just can’t eat a whole lamb.”

The guys at Northern Spy Food Company are continuing to evolve their concept and, as with any new venture, tweak the details. As we were talking to Nathan about restaurant recommendations, he noted that these days he only eats at restaurants that respect his dollar. It’s good to know that it’s true of his own restaurant as well. They not only respect your dollar, but they also respect the product.”

And there more, more, more…so just drop in, browse the shelves, and grab something to take home or offer as a gift. We know that you’ll be impressed with the products and happy to support food artisans from around New England and the Mid-Atlantic region.

Third, we’re delighted to offer everything on our menu for take-out, so don’t hesitate to call and place an order. We’re aiming to add delivery as soon as possible, too, so pretty soon you’ll be able to get Northern Spy brought to your door, lunch or dinner, seven days per week. If that’s something that you’re especially eager for, feel free to send us a note or tell us in person. We have a lot on our minds day-to-day, so an occasional nudge from customers is in everyone’s interest.

Fourth, we’ll soon be open for counter-service breakfast. Great coffee from Small World Roasters (roasted fresh for us, right across the river in New Jersey), muffins baked in-house, and pastries from Sullivan Street Bakery. We’re also aiming to offer “brown bag lunches”, ready-to-go in the morning, so you can also grab something delicious for lunch at your workplace. If there’s something that you’d like to see offered for breakfast, please let us know.

Lastly, please browse the website for additional information about us, the store, our purveyors, and our products. There will be more and more neat content on here to satisfy your curiosity about what we serve and sell. Thanks again for all the support so far, we look forward to serving you and seeing you around the shop for many years to come.