Hannah Goldfield: A Roving Reservation-Only Restaurant in Williamsburg: The New Yorker José Ramírez-Ruiz and Pamela Yung make their own rules. After stints in high-profile kitchens all over New York, the chefs, who are also a couple, decided to jump on the pop-up bandwagon: their food, their life savings, someone else's space. "If we're gonna go down, we're gonna go down doing exactly what we want," Ramírez-Ruiz said. More than a year later, Chez José, their roving reservation-only restaurant, is thriving. They started out in a South Williamsburg coffee shop, making do with just a hot plate and a small induction oven, then moved around the corner to Lake Trout, a shuttered fish-sandwich shop they've left untouched. And so, for now, their elegant, vegetable-focussed tasting menu is served beneath a Dairy Queen-style menu board advertising "cheese fish" and "Western fries." Unwitting passersby occasionally bound in hoping for a sandwich. The walls are faux-wood-panelled; the orange plastic bucket seats are bolted to the floor; the clean but graffitied bathroom is straight out of a dive bar. With freedom comes responsibility. Yung and Ramírez-Ruiz work entirely alone, and it's a small miracle that they manage to serve ten courses - not to mention explain each dish in detail, pour wine (it's B.Y.O.B.), and bus tables - in between cooking them. One night in late summer, they distributed miniature tumblers of earthy, fragrant chilled tomato-carrot soup, bobbing with cold Sungolds that functioned almost like ice. Bowls of creamy, al-dente risotto came layered with raw mandolined button mushrooms, which cooked gently when bathed, tableside, in molten brown butter. Baskets of warm bread - if Yung is an "accidental baker," as she puts it, it's a happy accident - earned a course of their own, showcasing springy sourdough and a decadent green-garlic-nettle brioche, like a savory cinnamon bun. A few weeks later, tender sweet-potato leaves were fashioned into hand rolls and filled with sweet-potato purée, crisp heirloom apple, and a medley of crunchy seeds. Tangy buttermilk panna cotta, topped with tomatoes confited in caramel-vanilla vinegar and cracked-open figs, successfully pushed the boundaries of dessert. Because they're harder to source sustainably, meat and fish appear sparingly at Chez José, but Ramírez-Ruiz and Yung are hardly animal averse. In summer, they host a Sunday pig roast in the backyard of a Williamsburg bar, allowing participants to choose their own cuts. Here's hoping they continue doing exactly what they want. ♦ (Open Tuesdays and Thursdays for dinner. Prix-fixe $55. Reservations are required.)