What to Eat Tonight

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Rush hour can be quite cramped for the pumpkins.Photo: iStockphoto.com/photogal
With Halloween around the corner, pumpkins are everywhere — on stoops, in soups, and, of course, at the Greenmarket. (Zoe Singer tells us which ones to buy this week in At the Greenmarket.) Some of the better restaurants around town are getting into the spirit and serving up pumpkin in its many forms. Here are a few we can get behind.

Picholine has one of the more elevated gourd-derived dishes: a pumpkin risotto enriched by wild mushrooms and black-truffle butter. It’s one of their most popular items.

• At Casa Mono, fritters are the order of the day — they’re made of bits of roasted pumpkin wrapped around Coach Farm goat cheese that’s then breaded and fried.

Pure Food and Wine, an untraditional raw-food restaurant, offers a pumpkin tart sweetened with coconut meat and a crust made of date paste and almond flour.

• The seasonally driven Friend of a Farmer has two pumpkin menu additions: pancakes, in the mornings and for weekend brunch, served with or without walnuts, and accompanied by an intense pumpkin purée with ginger, cinnamon, and brown sugar; and, at night, homemade ravioli, with the same purée, and topped with sour cream, raisins, honey, and pumpkin seeds.

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown