Achilles Heel (c/o Village Voice)

180 West Street
Brooklyn, NY 11222
view map
347.987.3666

Cuisine: Bar snacks
Our Rating: ★★★★ Great
Hours: 8am – 2am • Every Day
Brunch: None
Booze: Full Bar
Subway: G to Greenpoint Ave.
Delivery: None
Website: achillesheelnyc.com

Village Voice says:

Look out the window from your seat at Achilles Heel, the new Greenpoint bar from Andrew Tarlow — whose expanding empire includes Marlow & Sons, Diner and Reynards, among others — and you’ll look straight into the shipyards, where a dock worker might be casually leaning against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette.
Historically, this address served that crowd, but after it went dark forty years ago, it remained vacant until Tarlow inked the deal for it and decided to open a cafe and bar inspired by — and meant to cater to — his neighbors across the way. “When Andrew saw this space a year ago, he fell in love with it,” explains Mike Fadem, a Marlow alum who now manages this spot. “It looked a lot like it does now. He saw it, saw the neighborhood, thought about what this was last time it was an operation, and decided to recreate that from his taste.”

That meant preserving a lot of the original details, like time-worn wood floors and the bar mantle. And it also means the spot will be serving early morning beers if it can lure in workers coming off the night shift. “People are on a different schedule on the docks,” says Fadem. “There are people out early, and it’s unique to have this kind of a place now. Back in the day, bars were open early, and in other places, they sometimes still are. But it’s not that way here anymore. But at our bar, we will serve drinks.”

The crew would also like the spot to serve as a local gathering place for the other folks who’ve moved into this nook of Greenpoint, many of which are used to trekking down to Marlow for their morning coffee fix. “There are a lot of daily customers at Marlow that live on these two blocks that don’t have to go there for their scones now,” notes the manager. That’s because thanks to a delivery service that connects all of the restaurants in Tarlow’s group, the Marlow scones are available behind the counter, as are croissants from Reynards. Those bites pair with the same ambitious coffee program that connects all of the sibling restaurants, too, with George Howell beans serving as the base for cappuccinos, espresso shots and pour-over cups brewed to order. “We have a lot of people who treat Marlow as their neighborhood coffeeshop,” explains Fadem. “So Andrew was definitely interested in opening a cafe.”

While coffee drinks will be available until 11 p.m., the place definitely turns bar-focused sometime in the mid-afternoon, when locals start wandering in for a beer (the well-edited list features drafts from Evil Twin and Pietra and bottles from ‘T Gaverhopke and Firestone) or a cocktail chosen from a classically slanted but perpetually changing short list of seasonally appropriate tipples. Bartender Craig Weinrib explains that many of those, like the Hemingway daiquiri, as well as the back bar are currently a bit rum-centric — “it’s a shipyard bar so it seems appropriate,” he says — but notes the spirits program will continue to develop, and that all bartenders can stir up classics not called out on the list.

And the wine, he says, is a big argument for drinking here, too. “The woman [Lee Campbell] who buys wine for this bar buys wine for the whole company, and she’s one of the most looked-to spokespeople for natural wine in New York. So there’s a heavy focus on her wine program, and it seems like there’s going to be a lot of people here to drink wine.” The list explores crisp white Muscadet, Grand Cru Champagne, Provencal rose, and Burgundy designation Chambolle-Musigny along with a number of more obscure varietals and geographies, which firmly plants the program in serious oenophile territory.

Eventually, says Fadem, the spot will ramp up its food program, offering oysters, meat and cheese plates and other snacks. But there will never be a kitchen, he notes, and the focus is always going to be on the bar.

Alameda

195 Franklin Street at Green Street
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Brooklyn, New York 11222
view map
347.227.7296

Cuisine: American Bistro, Pub Fare, Small Bites
Our Rating: ★★★★
Cards: All major
Price: Entrees $10-$17, Cocktails $10
Hours: Mon – Fri: 4:00 pm – 2:00 am
Sat – Sun: 11:00 am – 2:00 am
Brunch: Weekends
Booze: Full Bar with fancy cocktails
Subway: G Train to Greenpoint Ave.
Delivery: No
Menu: Click Here
Website: www.alamedabk.com
says:

Eater says:

Evan and Oliver Haslegrave, the brothers behind the Home design company, are opening a new bar and restaurant in Greenpoint called Alameda. Brooklyn Star veterans Nick Padilla and Waine Longwell are also partners in this project. Nick will be the chef and Waine will be in charge of the bar. Alameda will inhabit the corner space that formerly housed The Greenpoint Coffee Shop and The Garden Spot Cafe.

Padilla describes this as “an American Bistro.” The chef tells Eater: “The idea is to provide a set list of raw bar itmes, salads and sandwiches and supplement it with chalkboard specials that are seasonal and frequently changing.” The restaurant will serve Blue Bottle Coffee, and the team hopes to offer dollar oysters during happy hour. Expect a full list of beer, wine, and cocktails.

The Haslegrave brothers designed Paulie Gee’s, The Manhattan Inn, Donna, Goat Town, and Torst, but this is their first time building and running a place of their own.

Anchorred Inn

57 Waterbury Street
(between Meserole St & Scholes St)
Brooklyn, NY 11206
view map
347.881.9095

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Cards: All Major
Price: $$
Subway: L Train to Montrose
Hours: Mon–Fri 1pm–4am; Sat, Sun noon–4am
Food and Drink Menu: Click Here (pdf)
Booze: Full bar
Website: www.theanchoredinn.com
NY Post says:

The new watering hole signals comfort after a long day or night for the world-weary rockers and other tattooed, skinny-jeanswearing locals who people the bar, which mashes up a maritime theme with a dive bar vibe.

Co-owners Adrienne Dowd and Carmen Mello dreamed up the nauticaldive fusion while working together as bartenders at The Half King, and opened the doors to their Brooklyn joint in February. A golden mermaid and a wood sign emblazoned with an ornate anchor and the bar’s old-timey logo (which Dowd, who’s an artist, created) mark the entrance. Inside, Mello’s collection of kitschy velvet paintings lines the walls, and true to the bar’s seafaring focus, one depicting a whale and a giant squid in a oceanic death match hangs over the bar, while a vintage deep-sea diving suit suspended from the ceiling hovers nearby. Cushioned red vinyl booths, salvaged from a pizza parlor Dowd frequented in her youth, offer spots to kick back and enjoy the suds and tipples on hand.

On a recent night, the beer selection was ample and reasonably priced enough to meet the needs of those with only a little cash to spare as well as those with money to burn, and happy hour brought a $1 discount for all drafts. Six taps rotate seasonally, and recent drafts included a standard low-priced lager, Yuengling ($4) and craft brews from local breweries, such as Sixpoint’s Brownstone ($6) and Bluepoint’s Toasted Lager ($6), as well as some further afield, including Left Hand Milk Stout ($6) from Colorado. The cans and bottles covered a wide range, from the ever-popular, low-budget drink of the effortlessly cool, Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can ($3), to the bottled microbrew Dreamweaver Wheat ($7) from Tregs Brewery in Pennsylvania.

The Anchored Inn’s cocktail list steered away from the oceangoing theme and into the realm of divey rock ‘n’ roll with a menu of drinks inspired by the local bands that tend to make up the majority of The Anchored Inn’s crowd. The Mutante Supremo ($9), named after the death metal band Mutant Supremacy, was a Tecate Michelada with a shot of chipotleinfused mezcal, and The Bad Dream ($7), created in honor of the grime metal band Bad Dream, mixed stout with Stoli Vanil. Simpler well cocktails go for $6, and several fine liquors, including Woodford Reserve bourbon ($9), Whistlepig Rye whiskey ($10) and Ron Zacapa rum ($9) were available. And cheap shot possibilities abounded. Any canned beer paired with any well shot costs $5, and the ubiquitous pickle back shot, with well whiskey and pickle juice, was also a mere $5.

But despite all its welcoming qualities, The Anchored Inn’s intense noise level sometimes made it hard to relax. On a recent night, the sound of the hardcore band playing at The Acheron next door was so loud that The Anchored Inn’s bartender had to blast the Black Sabbath blaring from the bar’s speakers just to make it audible above the din.

TimeOut says:

Adrienne Dowd and Carmen Mello, longtime bartenders at the Half King, break out on their own with a nautically themed drinkery in Williamsburg. The bar features a golden mermaid bust outside and a hanging Russian metal diving suit indoors, plus 20 black-velvet paintings, including a squid-versus-whale rendering. Tip back one of six draft beers (Left Hand Milk Stout, Sixpoint Sweet Action) or opt for a sipping liquor (Woodford Reserve bourbon, Flor de Cana rum). Overboard boozers can counteract the night’s tippling with salty bar snacks, including nachos, boiled peanuts and an intriguing combo of pickles with whipped pork fat.

115 Berry Street
(@ North 8th Street)
Brooklyn, New York 11211
view map
347.763.2635

Cuisine: Italian
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Cards: All major
Price: Entrees $15-$30
Hours: Sunday–Thursday; 6pm–11pm
Friday & Saturday; 6pm–12am
Brunch: 11:30 to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
Booze: Full bar
Subway: L train to Bedford
Delivery: No
Reservations: Yes
Menu: Click here
Website: www.anticapesa.com
Gotham says:

The big, crackling fireplace across from the bar at Antica Pesa has a special history—it’s an homage to the fireplace that sits in the restaurant’s original since-1922 sister spot in Rome. Bottle-lined walls and dim lighting via modern circular ceiling lamps add to the cozy-romantic atmosphere, as does the fresh-from-Rome fare. Whatever you order—we love the family-recipe chitarra alla carbonara, guanciale pasta with Parmigiano, black pepper, egg, and Italian bacon; or the sumptuously juicy guancetta, braised beef cheek with whipped carrot and thyme puree—we suggest starting off with the gita fuoriporta. A luxe rendition of an appetizer sampler, it arrives in a wooden box, which opens to reveal a picnic-like assortment of everything from Roman pecorino and mozzarella cheeses to focaccia bread with spek to porchetta with pear sauce. End your evening with a dessert like house-made gelato, and curl up around the fire with an aperitif of Italian wine or a signature cocktail. We recommend a reservation, as New York big-names like Ivanka Trump and Mayor Bloomberg are already fans.

NY Observer says:

Restaurants where Italian food is served in charmingly ramshackle conditions are manifold. Between Fiore, Aurora, Osteria Il Paiolo and other vowel-heavy trattorie too legion to mention, wandering around the neighborhood can feel like stumbling about Cinecitta’s Palermo back lot. But that’s not Antica Pesa.

Whereas those restaurants, whether by design or default, offer a homogenized view of humble Italy, a nation of casalinghe and clotheslines, Antica Pesa—Italian for “the old scale”—presents the Italy of Loro Piana, Fiat, Brioni, Trussardi and Ferragamo. This is the Italy of oligarchs.

On a recent Saturday night, the scales were fully loaded with richesse. Every table in the high-ceilinged room was occupied by patrons who smelled nice and looked nicer. Men wore thick gray sweaters with shawl collars. Women wore Carven frocks and Isabel Marant shoes. Scarves for all, Moscots for many, New Balances for none.

The bar was crowded, but its patrons civilly spaced. Out of a silver cup, a woman sipped a Piazza di Ricci, a cocktail made of vodka, fresh raspberries, mint, lime juice, homemade ginger syrup and ginger beer. Next to her, a man nursed a negroni and checked in on Foursquare.

Even the leather settee in front of the fireplace was occupied by a warm if silent couple. The man had made the mistake of wearing a hoodie. Man that I am, I could tell that he felt insecure in the company of so stylish a crowd. The woman, sensing trouble, drank a cocktail called Goodbye Lovers (Tequila 8, agave sec, yuzu juice, lime juice; $14) to steel her nerves.

That fire, set in a fireplace with an immense burnished-wood frontispiece, imbued the restaurant with a golden light. The fixtures at Antica Pesa are custom-made brass tubes in which bulbs are recessed. They consequently cast a soft brassy glow that seems beamed in from mid-century.

This is not the first Antica Pesa. To find its progenitor, one must travel to Via Garibaldi, 18, in Rome’s Trastevere, the neighborhood of that ancient city that lies west of the River Tiber, and climb up the family vine four generations to 1922, when the Panella family opened the restaurant in a former Vatican tollhouse.

Today, Antica Pesa is to Rome what Cipriani is to New York, a tollhouse for the cavalcade of big-name stars whose brilliance is only burnished by plates of high-priced pasta. The walls are lined with photographs of Hollywood celebrities like ScarJo, Matt Damon and Jessica Alba arm-in-arm with the owner, Francesco Panella, taken in front of a wall full of photographs of celebrities arm-in-arm with the owner, Francesco Panella. It’s a mise-en-abyme of celebrity and cuisine. And that star has not diminished. In early January, the Roman mothership hosted a premiere party for Django. Quentin Tarantino, it turns out, loves the spaghetti cacio e pepe.

The Brooklyn outpost of Antica Pesa is primarily the work of two of the four Panella brothers, Francesco and Simone. But when I arrived, both were in Rome, where they live, and I was met by Lorenzo, the only one of the brothers who lives in New York full time—who, like a Roman colonist of yore, had set off from the shores of Latium to seek his fortune in distant climes.

Suave and handsome, Mr. Panella looks like Johnny Depp impersonating Robert Downey Jr. He is given to cashmere sweaters and high-quality blazers. His goatee is unparalleled in lushness. The menu is expensive—pastas start at $16 and main courses range up to $30—and the presentation of its content is fittingly elegant, the result of its owners having run a very successful restaurant for 90 years. I don’t think it would even occur to them not to serve their fresh baked grissini, foccacia and pane casareccia in a wooden box with a brass clasp or to decant the olive oil—from the family orchard, no less—without a flourish of the hand. They don’t, for lack of a more graceful term, peasant-up their cuisine.

Starters like crudo e bufala croccante ($17), a treacherously addictive ball of imported mozzarella baked in a jacket of filo dough, or arzilla confit ($15), silky confit skate sautéed with escarole, pine nuts and spelt bread, aren’t presented on heavy, chipped porcelain with a floral border. They are, rather, accompanied on broad white plates by an entourage of fussy dots of balsamic vinegar, in one case, or draped, painstakingly, over a hillock of escarole in the other. The rack of lamb ($30) is perfectly frenched, very well cooked and served, not with mashed potatoes, but with a dainty potato gâteau.

Even the pasta, which is hard to present in a way that gives proper credit to the effort needed to produce it, comes across well. The cacio e pepe, in which pecorino and Parmesan bind themselves to thick al dente strands of homemade spaghetti, is phenomenal. Disagree as you will with Mr. Tarantino’s taste for violence, his taste in pasta is top-notch. The schiaffoni all’Amatriciana, little fat rigatoni with guanciale and pecorino, is equally addictive.

In short, the food is presented with pride. It’s a pride that, unlike in many other prideful restaurants, is presented in an entirely unforced and unself-conscious way. The Panella brothers are stars in their own world; their food is lionized in its own town, their charm is unimpeachable and it does not occur to them that it might not fare as well in a foreign land.

Their confidence, I hope, is justified. But, it must be said, confidence has an overweening side and can well swoop perilously into silliness. When I asked Lorenzo why his family opened in Williamsburg, as opposed to, say, the West Village, he told me that the neighborhood reminded him of the scruffy charms of Trastevere. “We wanted to open here,” he said, “before the neighborhood blossomed. Before,” he said, looking at me earnestly, “it was too late.”

So deep and puppylike were his brown eyes and so soothing the little massage he gave my delts that I couldn’t bring myself to say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” Instead, I sipped a Manhattan that a man in a turtleneck had made for me and nodded. In fact, Williamsburg might be the apotheosis of a neighborhood whose scruff had been shorn by capital and condominiums—the very condominiums, I wager, from which these patrons had issued.

And yet the more I thought about it—aided and abetted by a terrific bottle of teroldego ($35), one of the many stars on an all-Italian wine list, and by the ministrations of a waitress born in Osaka and raised in Sydney, who had moved to Greenpoint only five months earlier and who, she told us, had a passive-aggressive boyfriend—perhaps Mr. Panella was correct. It was just a matter of scale.

Ten years ago, Antica Pesa would have been the restaurant to which Williamsburgians brought their parents in order to prove they didn’t live in a dangerous hinterland. Now, those erstwhile children have grown up, grown richer and grown unashamed to eat well. They can, in fact, eat Lucullan feasts, not in faux grubby diners with egalitarian waiters who nestle next to you, but like mini-captains of industry. And now the burden of parental soothing has fallen farther out on the L, to places like Roberta’s, Northeast Kingdom and Dear Bushwick. Only a fool would call Williamsburg hinter anything.

Aska (c/o Gothamist)

90 Wythe Avenue (Kinfolk Studios)
Brooklyn, New York 11211
view map
718.388.2969

Cuisine: Scandinavian
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★
Cards: All major
Price: Expensive ($115 for the six-course tasting menu; à la carte items, $6 to $12)
Hours: Dinner Monday through Friday and Sunday 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Saturday to 4 a.m.
Reservations: Yes
Booze: Full bar
Subway: L to Bedford Ave.
Menu: Click Here
Delivery: No
New York says:

Aska, which opened earlier this winter in Williamsburg, looks at first like a caricature of the new Brooklyn-style restaurant that my wife is so tired of hearing about. There are only seven tables in the spare, slightly gloomy main dining area, which occupies the same space as Kinfolk Studios on Wythe Avenue. The (mostly male) wait staff sport checked shirts and carefully trimmed lumberjack beards and have a voluminous knowledge of trending Brooklyn topics, like cheese-making, obscure pickling techniques, and handcrafted beers. There’s a noted cocktail master on the premises, and because Scandinavian food is of the moment in Brooklyn (and around the world), the chef is, of course, Scandinavian. The featured dining option, if you don’t sit in the barroom, is a seasonal tasting menu ($65 for six courses), and because we’re in the depths of winter, it contains ascetic ingredients like rose hips, curls of lichen, and knobs of root vegetables, which the chefs proudly cultivate in the kitchen in a little brass pot.

But like many restaurants popping up all around this food-mad borough, Aska is a more sophisticated, worldly operation than it seems. The cocktail guru (and also a part owner) is Eamon Rockey, who comes to Brooklyn from Manhattan, where he ran the beverage program at Atera and helped develop the drinks for Eleven Madison Park. The chef, Fredrik Berselius, did time in several grand New York City kitchens (Aquavit, Per Se) before opening a short-lived but well-reviewed restaurant in the same location as this one called Frej. He’s a peer of the Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson, who conjures up strange delicacies from all sorts of primal ingredients (pig’s blood, cow’s bones, wet forest leaves, etc.), and his cooking is as close as you’re likely to get, in this cosmopolitan town, to the kind of unreconstructed locavore cuisine that Nilsson serves at Fäviken, his famous hunting lodge in the northern wilds of Sweden.

Or so I thought to myself as I pondered a pair of crimson-colored cracker­like objects, which, our lumberjack waiter gently informed us, were made mostly with dehydrated pig’s blood. They tasted a little like rust, the way fresh blood does, with a back taste of barnyard pork, and we washed them down as quickly as possible with an aquavit creation called Next of Kin, which tasted like a Scandinavian version of a mint julep, flavored with kombucha and caraway instead of mint. The other pre-dinner “tastes” included crisps of fried pike skin, and thin shortbread wafers flavored with molasses and dabbed with little pools of smoky housemade cheese. Freshly baked caraway rolls came out of the kitchen after that (served with a shmear of the excellent, house-churned butter), followed by the first course, which was a pair of warm Long Island oysters mingled Fäviken style at the bottom of a clay bowl with cucumbers, a sniff of dill, and a scoop of beef tallow.

Unlike Magnus Nilsson, the cooks at this little Brooklyn restaurant don’t gather your dinner from a sprawling, 20,000-acre estate. But they do an admirable job with what they have of making you feel connected, in a tenuous, mannered, priestly sort of way, to the edifying culinary variety that’s available in the great outdoors. The aforementioned Long Island oysters are “hand foraged” (as opposed to farmed), our server took pains to say, and were followed by a single herring, which the chefs deconstruct, cook separately, and rearrange on the plate in a kind of nose-to-tail sculpture, complete with new potatoes, sprigs of greenery, and the crunchy fried tail and head. The next course is a mulch-y concoction of root vegetables (salsify, lichen curls) served with the yolk of a single egg, which tasted bracing in a faintly medicinal way, despite looking, in the words of one of my city-slicker guests, like “something you’d find in the puddles of a tree stump after a rainstorm.”

Inevitably, a few of the ascetic concoctions at Aska aren’t quite so palatable.
I wasn’t crazy about the shreds of turnip and salty squid I was served one evening, or the tough, faintly rubbery hunk of monkfish the kitchen plates with a pasty, peanut-butter-colored cabbage purée. Berselius’s protein of choice this winter seems to be pork, and although he serves several appealing cuts (trotter, rib and cheek, belly), the admirably seasonal garnishes (shaving of rutabaga fermented in whey, sunchokes, the faint essence of toasted hay) tended to muffle the innate porky taste of the meat. The exceptions are a richly fatty, deboned trotter, which is sweetened with apples, and an excellent rendition of a classic Swedish potatis dumpling, which the chefs make with mashed potatoes and pork belly and serve à la carte only, with a pool of wet, smoky farmer’s cheese flavored with fennel fronds and lingonberries.

It’s possible to have an excellent meal at the bar at Aska, where the menu on the evenings I dropped by included helpings of braised beef cheeks, platters of local oysters on the half-shell (hand-foraged, of course), and two different kinds of Scandinavian-style hot dogs. You can complement this hearty winter grub with one of Rockey’s antic cocktails or a variety of carefully curated ciders, porters, and stouts (ask for a bottle of the coffee-thick Swedish porter called Dugges 1/2 Idjit! to go with your dumpling). For a mere $40, Rockey will pair wines and spirits with each course of your dinner; we enjoyed a nice Languedoc-Roussillon white with our oysters, and frosty shots of aquavit flavored with onions with the herring. Dessert was a single scoop of cardamom ice cream wreathed in a mousse made with crushed hazelnuts and brown butter, and it went down very well, I dimly recall, with a glass of Bodegas Dios Baco cream sherry.

Note
The tasting menu is available Sunday through Thursday in the main dining room; an à la carte menu is available there on Fridays and Saturdays, and at the bar at all times.

Recommended Dishes
Oyster, herring, pork trotter with sunchokes and apples, potatis dumpling, cardamom ice cream.

Betto

Cuisine: Italian/French/Spanish
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Cards: All Major
Price: Moderately Priced
Hours: Tue-Fri, 5pm-midnight; Sat-Sun, 11am-midnight
Website: http://bettonyc.com
Menu: http://bettonyc.com/menu/
Booze: Full Bar/Notable Wine
Subway: L to Bedford Ave.
Delivery: No
Time Out New York says:

Jason Denton (‘ino, ‘inoteca) takes his menu of shareable Italian plates across the bridge with this bi-level Williamsburg restaurant. The industrial space features exposed brick, concrete floors and a graphic mural of Italy. Chef Shaunna Sargent—transferred from Denton’s West Village trattoria Corsino—draws on Union Square Greenmarket produce for a seasonal menu that also features French and Spanish flavors. Gather some friends for one of the family-style plates, like a whole roasted saddle of lamb or spaghetti with brisket-and-pork-belly meatballs.

Time Out New York says:

When it comes to trendy openings, Williamsburg seems to be ground zero these days. The latest? A bi-level Italian restaurant from restaurateur James Denton (‘ino, ‘inoteca, Corsino) called Betto. Boasting his Corsino chef Shaunna Sargent, the 60-seat newcomer has a Greenmarket-heavy seasonal menu that, while focusing on Italy, includes Spanish and French flavors for its long list of shareable small plates—think grilled plums and burrata ($10), mackerel a la plancha ($8) and spaghetti with brisket-and-pork belly meatballs ($18)—as well as for its “large format” options, which includes whole-roasted baby lambs, ducks and whole fish by the pound.

NY Mag says

Jason Denton of ‘ino and ‘inoteca brings a dose of eclectic European cuisine to this 60-seat, dimly lit restaurant, his first in Brooklyn. The eccentric menu offers several whole animals (heads and tails included), which change throughout the week. Of the more permanent edibles, the majority are not only well thought out, but quite hearty. Each of the ten variations of “market toast,” with charred bread is worth showing up for, and several could be consumed as a complete meal. The cheese selection, mostly from Vermont (the one West Coast exception being the Smokey Blue), is a curd-lover’s dream, and worth ordering as a complete set, of course, accompanied by a carafe of wine. The majority of the menu encourages sharing, with plates ranging from $6 for a set of 3 lightly fried squash and ricotta fritters to $14 for a heaping bowl of spaghetti with pork-belly meatballs.
Recommended Dishes
Market toast, $12; suppli, $6; squash fritters, $6

c/o Grub Street

67 South 6th Street
New York, NY 11211
view map
718.388.0908

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Cards: Cash Only
Menu: Click here
Website: biabargrill.com
Hours: Mon-Sun 5pm-2am
Price: Moderately Prices
Subway: J,M,Z to Marcy Ave.
Food/Menu: Vietnamese snacks
Booze: Full bar (specialized in Asian beers)
Happy Hour: No
Grub Street says:

Hipsterphernalia meets Southeast Asia at Bia, South Williamsburg’s new Vietnamese restaurant and bar. The owners of recently shuttered East Village dive bar Duke’s have brought their kitschy roadhouse décor with them, and auto-repair signs, tables made from oil drums, and plastic bar stools somehow successfully mix with Buddhas, plants, and paper lanterns. Named after the Vietnamese word for beer, Bia has a solid selection of craft brews and imports (some from Asia), and most of the dozen taps are already flowing. The cocktail list is short and a bit pricey, and the house wine comes from a wooden barrel at the end of the bar.

A full menu with “authentic Vietnamese” fare inspired by owner Duke Quan’s family recipes — think pho, banh mi, and, for summer, a raw-beef salad. The kitchen will hopefully serve daily lunch in the future, but they’l focus on dinner and weekend brunch at first. A wooden roof deck (pictured here) is situated directly under the Williamsburg Bridge, so it doesn’t have much of a view. But the picnic tables, lawn chairs, and wooden fences give it a funky backyard feel

Blackbook Mag says:

Good evening, Vietnam. Duke peeps cross the river, take over raw industrial space in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. Rooftop bar provides views aplenty. Twin staircases lead to cavernous interior complete with balcony seating. John Wayne photos joined by recycled signs from the last tenant (“Vince’s General Auto Repairs”). Kitchen pumps out traditional grilled meats, rice dishes, and bánh mì (duh). Bar pours craft beers and old-fashioned cocktails, for better sipping under the rooftop umbrellas.

Bistro Petit

774 Driggs Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
view map
718.782.2582

Cuisine: French
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Price: Moderately Priced
Hours: Mon-Fri 3pm-12am; Sat-Sun 12pm-12am
Cards: None
Booze: None
Subway: L to Bedford Ave.
Menu: Click Here
Delivery: Yes
Time Out New York says:

Jean Georges alum Seung Park combines his French training with his Korean background at this diminutive Willimasburg takeout spot. Expect East-meets-West crossover dishes, like kimchi bouillabaisse, made with local, seasonal ingredients.

NY Mag says:

French standards—duck confit, steak frites—are joined by a few international riffs, like the kimchee that is added to the bouillabaisse at Bistro Cafe.

BlackBrick

300 S. Bedford Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
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Cuisine: Coffee Shop
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Price: Moderately Priced
Hours: Mon.-Sun. 7am-8pm
Cards: All Major
Booze: None
Subway: L to Bedford Ave.
Delivery: No
We say:

Beautiful new coffee shop serving Stumptown coffee, Jacques Torres hot chocolate, and coming soon-fresh baked goods.

261 Moore St
(between White St & Bogart St)
Brooklyn, NY 11206
view map
646.703.2715

Cuisine: American (New)
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Cards: All major
Price: Expensive ($180 per person)
Hours: Reservation only serving dinner Wednesday-Saturday.
Brunch: No
Booze: Beer & Wine Only
Subway: L train to Morgan
Delivery: No
Menu: changes nightly
Website: www.blancanyc.com
NY Times says:

Time exacts a price, too. It is too much to expect all 27 courses to be brilliant. But there shouldn’t be many dull spots, either. A lightly torched chip of pen shell clam with glasswort; a square of bigfin squid with Charentais melon; a separate course of good but not extraordinary bread may have had their quiet charms. But each made me wish Mr. Mirarchi edited his menu as ruthlessly as he edits his dishes. After three hours or more, eyelids all along the counter flew at half-staff.

Blanca is on the grounds of Roberta’s, the pizzeria that has sprouted a bakery, a radio station, a backyard tiki bar and gardens planted atop shipping containers. The whole shambolic compound feels like a Barker Ranch for young Brooklyners who are into fermentation. At times, like when nobody is answering the phone on the one day a month somebody is supposed to answer the phone, Blanca shares that spirit of enthusiastic amateurism.

More often, though, it is not Blanca’s ragged edges that impress so much as its polish and sophistication. Mr. Mirarchi and his staff are trying to find a new voice for fine dining, one that is both gracious and fun, and that could do for Brooklyn now what places like Chanterelle and Montrachet did for downtown Manhattan a few decades ago. And if you lean back into the leather at midnight on a Saturday, with the shifting sands of Stevie Nicks’s voice raking the air and an inky splash of Amarone left in your glass, it looks as if they just might do it.

NY Mag says:

It’s a general rule, in this new age of boutique tasting bars and overrun hipster noodle joints, that the smaller, more willfully obscure the restaurant, the more people will be clamoring to get in. Take Blanca, the distant (yes, it’s in Bushwick), fashionably tiny (twelve seats) tasting room that opened earlier this year on the grounds of Roberta’s in Brooklyn. When I first called for a table, a canned voice informed me that the voice-mailbox was full. When I got the same message the next week (and the week after that), I explored a few furtive, sub-rosa options (“I’ve failed you, Platty,” said one supposed “friend of the chef”). When those dried up, I handed the task over to my daughter, who discovered (on the website that Dad had ceased checking long ago) that Blanca would take reservations by phone on the first day of each month for dates 7 to 30 days hence. “Okay, Dad, you’re all set,” she said after a few minutes of speed dialing, “but don’t be late, or next month we’ll have to do this all over again.”

Blanca, for those of you who may not have heard, is the brainchild of the formerly anonymous Bushwick chef Carlo Mirarchi, who, along with two partners, has turned Roberta’s from a ramshackle neighborhood pizza hall on the fringes of Bushwick into a poster child for the great Brooklyn culinary miracle. The night I dropped in, Bill Clinton himself was renting out the main restaurant for a private party, so the barbed-wire-enclosed compound was crawling with serious-looking security operatives in dark suits. Those of us who were lucky enough to get a seat at Blanca (which sold out for the month within hours) were met by a gentleman wearing glittering silver pants who led us into the restaurant past a folding metal door decorated with a graffiti painting of a giant purple cat. Once inside, we were poured flutes of Champagne by the genial sommelier, who had acid-blonde hair and fingernails the color of pea soup. “The president’s in town. There’s a rumor he might be coming to dinner too,” she said.

Roberta’s has all sorts of local charms (the calzone, the roof garden), but the restaurant owes its outsize national reputation to Mirarchi, who began serving his improvised, twice-weekly tasting menu a couple of years ago to local Bushwick gourmets. These elaborate dinners used to take place at weathered picnic tables, but at Blanca, the $180, twentysomething-course meal is served at a polished counter lined with the kind of padded chairs with which your father may have outfitted his retro suburban wet bar. A large taxidermied tuna head has been affixed to one of the walls, and near the entrance is an antique turntable, where guests can spin vinyl LPs. The room — in a converted garage — is commodious, even huge, by the standards of other cramped tasting ateliers in town, and as Mirarchi saunters around his state-of-the-art kitchen, dressed in khaki shorts and a backward baseball cap, he looks less like an imperious auteur chef than like the host of an impromptu backyard barbecue.

There’s nothing impromptu about dinner at Blanca, however, which began, on one recent occasion, with a salvo of studied Japanese-style omakase dishes delivered by waiters who sounded like they were reciting hastily learned lines from a particularly grave play. These included thimble-size tastes of osetra caviar topped with frozen beet granita, faintly gummy pearly shrimp touched with celery juice, and a collection of decent-enough crudi tastefully arranged on lime-­colored porcelain plates from Japan. The most memorable of these early dishes tended to involve textural combinations — creamy sweetbreads with a lightly frizzled crust, a deliciously smooth polenta mingled with even smoother uni. I didn’t hear any real murmurs of approval from the assembled food geeks at the bar, however, until the arrival, about an hour into the meal, of Mirarchi’s version of beef carpaccio, which is sweetened with duck yolk and has the soft, melting consistency of a fine French crêpe.

Mirarchi has long had an underground reputation as one of the city’s preeminent pasta wizards, but as dinner unfolds at Blanca, it becomes clear that his real genius is for cooking fish and meat. The house garganelli, and toasted-flour “twistiti,” blandly flavored with mushrooms, aren’t especially memorable. But I can tell you in intricate detail about the little stack of snow-crab legs from Alaska, which the chef grills to the perfect point of sweetness, then spoons with a subtle mix of crab guts, uni, and sake lees. This was followed by delicious, crispy-topped ribbons of lamb, which Mirarchi ages for several weeks and enhances with wobbly spoonfuls of gêlée made with mint from the garden outside. The delicately funky, spoon-tender Wagyu beef at this Brooklyn restaurant is aged for up to 85 days, and the duck is roasted until it’s the color of honey, then cut into fatty lozengelike slices, which leave a pleasing slick of richness as they slide down the back of one’s throat.

Mirarchi’s cooking is more about purity of technique than El Bulli-style pyrotechnics, and inevitably some of the gastronauts who’d made the arduous journey out to Bushwick were disappointed, given all the hype. “Delicious but not stunning” was the assessment of one, as we picked at a series of soothingly refined desserts, which the pastry chef, Katy Peetz, concocts from homespun delicacies like apple ice, sunflower-seed brittle, and sunchoke purée. But this is Roberta’s, after all, and what Blanca lacks in culinary fireworks it makes up for with its own particular sense of occasion and place. Dinner took four hours, but it seemed half that long. Toward the end of the meal, someone put Sinatra on the stereo, and the waiters poured a sweet, sparkling wine from Bugey. It wasn’t a stunning wine, but on this evening in the wilds of Bushwick, as the improbably talented cook circulated among his guests in his baseball cap, and the moon rose over the garden outside, it tasted just fine. It tasted delicious, in fact.

Note
The multicourse sake, beer, and wine pairing costs $85, but if you tell the friendly drinks staff that you’re driving home, they’ll pour sips for $45.

Recommended Dishes
Uni with polenta, Wagyu carpaccio with duck egg, snow crab, lamb with mint gêlée, roast duck, apple ice with sunchokes and sunflower-seed brittle.