80 West Street, Brooklyn, NY 11222
8am – 2am • Every Day
347-987-3666; achillesheelnyc.com

Via

For his follow-up to Reynard, Brooklyn restaurateur Andrew Tarlow created a casual all-day bar and cafe on a quiet stretch of West Street in Greenpoint. Achilles Heel serves coffee and pastries in the morning, and cocktails and charcuterie at night. Tarlow hopes to offer sandwiches, oysters, clam chowder, and other lightly prepared foods in the near future. All the goods are sourced from his other restaurants, and Achilles Heel also offers produce and fresh baked breads to take home. The beverage list includes beer, wine, and classic cocktails, plus a few drinks from Tarlow’s other restaurants.

The corner space existed as a neighborhood tavern from the early 1900s to the 1960s, but it has sat vacant for the last 40 years or so. Tarlow tells Eater that he got the idea for Achilles Heel when the landlord for the building approached him last year about opening something in the space. The restaurateur refurbished the bar from that old tavern and touched up the room, but it still has an old-world, worn-in feel. Achilles Heel is now open from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., daily. Stay tuned for a tour of the bar early next week.

This teaser from his new record seems to suggest he could be. Sleeper is out August 20 on Drag City:

River Styx, photo: Kit Chaney

Via the Times

Disco globes and vintage car pulleys dangling from the ceiling. A fire-engine-red wood-burning oven capped by a wooden, wagon-wheel-like formation. Handcrafted tables that form a heart shape when pushed together. It’s clear from these quirky design details what River Styx — the newest restaurant from the team behind Brooklyn’s Roebling Tea Room, which opened last night on a quiet, riverside street in Greenpoint — is not: another neighborhood eatery that takes itself too seriously.

“I just want people to have fun at dinner. Really, it’s all I care about,” the chef Dennis Spina explains of his inventive menu, which is categorized simply by small plates and entrees. While Spina’s cooking is graced by unconventional twists, everything somehow remains comforting and satisfying. The Big Chef, a small plate that’s one of Spina’s favorite creations, is composed of slivers of capicola, an Italian pork cold cut, and creamy béchamel, wrapped in fresh pizza dough and baked in the oven. The result is warm, chewy, salty and gooey. In the Squid Suave — which got its eccentric name after a menu typo changed “sauce” to “suave” and customers praised the dish — tender pieces of flash-fried squid get a punch of lip-smacking heat from a special blend of Clamato, Frank’s RedHot sauce and butter. A flat bread, which Spina refers to as his “house naan,” is supple and pleasantly oily, getting a tangy and nutty boost from buttermilk and spelt. Paired with puréed fava beans, curried cream and raw honey, it just might be the restaurant’s aesthetic plate, with sherbetlike colors and delicate flavors that make it soothing on the eyes and the palate. Even the house chicken surprises. After marinating in a juice of house-made pickled jalapeños, the chicken quarters are fired in the oven and generously slathered with burro rosso, a boldly colored red sauce of butter, paprika and tomato paste. The meat is tender, the skin airy and crisp, and the sauce subtle enough that you’ll chase every last bit of it.

Staying true to the house philosophy, the cocktails are also deceptively simple and balanced. Developed by Dmitri Bartlett, the drink menu is filled with unexpected surprises. The Sinking Body is made of just four ingredients — vodka, grapefruit, cinnamon and simple syrup — but tastes far more complicated. While tequila is the key spirit in the Discipline, its unlikely pairing with amaretto and serrano peppers slices that are lit on fire — you blow them out — makes the cocktail nutty and spicy. “In the end, it’s about having a good time,” Spina says. “We’re all having fun.”

Ugh:

A massive new nightclub planning to open near popular desitnations Brooklyn Bowl, the Wythe Hotel and Output Club wants to bring electronic dance parties that will last as late as 6 a.m. to the Williamsburg waterfront.

Verboten (German for “forbidden”) — a popular dance party company that throws techno and house DJ events around the city — is applying for a liquor license for its soon-to-open nightclub on North 11th Street that will hold more than 700 people, company representative Jen Schiffer said at a public meeting this week.

“It attracts a discerning crowd of music fans, Europeans, hipsters, freaks, party girls and industry types,” the company’s website explains of its “techno programming.”

Previously: Douchey Velvet-Rope Shitfuck Jersey Shore Cologne Tourist Trap Electro Dance Club Coming to Williamsburg

via Eater

For the last few years, SnackyTunes brothers Darin & Greg Bresnitz have hosted a summer barbecue series where chefs cook food that they don’t make at their restaurants, in a casual setting. Last year, the people from Mable’s Smokehouse, and St. Anselm all joined the party.

The series returns next Tuesday, May 14 at Good Co. in Williamsburg with a meal prepared by Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster Garrett Oliver andAndrew Gerson, who is the brewery’s first house chef (he joined the team just a few months ago). Garrett and Andrew will be cooking a Middle Eastern-inspired meal with things like lamb skewers, Israeli couscous, and a braised cabbage salad with apples. Dinner with a Brooklyn Summer Ale is $10, and the party will feature a DJ set by Turing Machine.

The event will be held Tuesday, May 14, 2013 from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM. Grab your tickets here.

Desnuda (c/o Zagat)

Via

It’s been more than a year in the making, but the Williamsburg outpost of Desnuda is now open for business. Dominic Martinez’s menu includes a handful of ceviches, like lobster and coconut milk with citrus, and salmon with Thai chili oil, almonds, tamarind, and sweet potatoes. There are raw shucked and tea-smoked oysters at the bar, and Chaim Dauermann’s cocktail menu includes the Prufrock and a Hard Place, made with pisco, moscatel, lemon, hot chiles, and, of course, peach liqueur. Dare you drink it? The ceviche list will ultimately grow to about twenty daily offerings. Check out the full menu, including wines and the lineup of South American and Mexican spirits, straight ahead.

More information in our listings.

Simply amazing:

Since 1996, this group of 1-inch bugs, in wingless nymph form, has been a few feet underground, sucking on tree roots and biding their time. They will emerge only when the ground temperature reaches precisely 64 degrees. After a few weeks up in the trees, they will die and their offspring will go underground, not to return until 2030….

This year’s invasion, Brood II, is one of the bigger ones. Several experts say that they really don’t have a handle on how many cicadas are lurking underground but that 30 billion seems like a good estimate. At the Smithsonian Institution, researcher Gary Hevel thinks it may be more like 1 trillion.

Hopefully we’ll see a few in McCarren Park. Here’s a handy Interactive Cicada Map:
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The Bounty, 131 greenpoint ave, brooklyn, ny 11222

They say that things come in threes. In north Greenpoint that seems to be true since we are about to have three seafood “shacks” within blocks of each other: Lobster Joint, the yet-to-open Archilles Heel and the just-opened The Bounty.

We poked our heads into The Bounty last night and the space looks great with several beers on tap (Peekskill ipa, Brooklyn Pennant, Jever and Kostritzer Schwarzbier) and a handful of traditional house cocktails including a Hemingway Daiquiri and a Dark & Stormy. For now, they are serving a limited menu of oysters, cheese plates, and other bar snacks. We’re told, the full kitchen will open in days to come. Here’s what we know so far:

A brand new seafood restaurant is slated to open soon in Greenpoint called The Bounty. Nika Carlson, who also operates The Drink in Williamsburg, tells Eater:

We’ll be serving seafood from the North Atlantic region, made with a hint of Southern charm. Our menu will include things like crab cakes, whole grilled fish, a raw bar (oysters, clams, etc), a burger, and eventually, when blue crabs are in season in the Chesapeake, Maryland-style steamed crabs.

The head chef is Eric Mann, who previously worked at Craft and Prune, and Roberta’s vet Kevin Ang is also on board as a baker/chef and co-owner. The other partners in this project are Adam Collison, also of The Drink, and Lance Hess, who previously worked for André Balazs Properties. The Bounty is slated to open by the end of the month at 131 Greenpoint Ave, just 50 feet away from the G-Train station.

In other Greenpoint restaurant news, we’re told Roebling Teas Room’s sister restaurant River Styx is coming soon with the Greenpoint branch of Fornino opening any day now. We’re still waiting for news about this venture, but in the meantime are loving the burger at the beautiful Alameda which taste like a Shake Shack burger cooked medium. In other words, delicious.

Here’s The Bounty’s temporary menu, via their Twitter page: (more…)

We’re hungry already!

Late afternoon on summer Sundays last year, a crowd packed in to the Crown Victoria’s expansive, sun-drenched Williamsburg backyard. Friends nursed beers at picnic tables and, perhaps, partook in a game of bocce ball. But first they grabbed something to eat, forming a long line in front of a table where pork-scented smoke rose and hung invitingly in the air. There, two guys and a gal carved up a whole pig into succulent, tender cuts, sliding them onto paper plates with sautéed greens and banana cream pudding one week, Vietnamese noodles and ice cream another.

The weekly collaboration between chef Jose Ramirez-Ruiz (formerly of Isa and Per Se) and John Ratliff, owner of Greenpoint-based charcutier Ends Meats, was casually dubbed Pig Roast Sundays, and it was so popular that it’s returning for a second season this Sunday, May 5. Like last year, Ramirez-Ruiz’s girlfriend, pastry chef Pam Yung (also of Isa as well as the ParmTorrisi/Carbone group and Roberta’s), will often join the crew to dole out her finely crafted desserts.

More information here.

And yes, it’s great!
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