285 Kent Ave (image c/o BrooklynVegan)

285 Kent Ave
At South 1st St
Brooklyn, NY 11211
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Our Rating: ★★★
Hours: see event calendar
Cards: No
Booze: Full Bar
Calendar: http://toddpnyc.com
Subway: J, Z, M to Marcy Ave; L to Bedford Ave; G to Metropolitan Ave
Time Out says:

Todd P hosts DIY indie-rock shows at this Williamsburg space, which used to house Paris London West Nile.

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.

Beloved (image c/o NYMag)

674 Manhattan Ave.,
Greenpoint, New York, NY 11222
view map
718.486.9222

Our Rating: ★★★
Cards: All Major
Hours: Mon-Wed, Sun 5 pm – 2 am
Thu-Sat 5 pm – 4 am
Booze: Full bar
Subway: G to Nassau
Drinks Menu: Click Here
Website: belovedbar.com
NY Mag says:

Tucked away on Manhattan Avenue just up the street from Five Leaves, the 900-square-foot establishment (formerly Stones Tavern) will provide twelve craft beers, including $4 Narragansett Lager. The cocktail menu — designed by Heather Ash, head bartender from Allswell in Willamsburg and Rene Hidalgo, bartender from Lantern’s Keep — features six drinks, including the Storm Warning (Smith & Cross, Cynar, ginger, lime, club soda, Peychaud’s Bitters). Later this summer, Sreekumar and his co-owner Aaron Manheim will nearly double the size of the nightspot by opening their 800-square-foot backyard.

Time Out Says:

Get craft cocktails at this handsome Greenpoint drinkery, appointed with a stately mahogany wood bar, gunmetal-black pressed-tin ceiling and Victorian-style patterned wallpaper. The drinks list features creative tipples like the Backhand (rye, coffee liqueur, Campari) and the That’s My Word (gin, St.-Germain, yellow Chartreuse, lime). But beer hounds can tilt back a Sixpoint Righteous Rye, Brooklyn Summer Ale or can of Tecate.

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.

Briskettown (c/o Eater)

359 Bedford Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211
view map
718.701.8909

Cuisine: Brisket
Our Rating: ★★★★
Cards: All Major
Price: Moderate
Hours: Tuesday through Sunday, Closed Monday, 6 to 6:30pm – Pre-Orders Only, 6:30PM to Sold Out – Open to Public
Booze: BYOB
Reservations: Yes
Subway: L: Bedford Ave, J to Marcy
Menu: delaneybbq.com
Website: delaneybbq.com
Delivery: No
Eater says:

Pitmaster Daniel Delaney learned how to smoke meat from barbecue big shots Aaron Franklin and Wayne Mueller. Delaney’s acclaimed brisket retails for $25 a pound, and the menu also includes traditional barbecue sides. In its first week of business, BrisketTown sold out of meat, several times, so show up early.

Cameo

93 North 6th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
view map
718.302.1180

Our Rating: ★★★★
Hours: see event calendar
Cards: All Major
Booze: Full Bar
Website: http://cameony.com/
Calendar: http://cameony.com/
Subway: L to Bedford Ave.
NY Mag says:

Brooklyn painters, bands, and comedians have a home base in the form of kaleidoscopic arts hub Cameo, hidden in the Lovin’ Cup Café. The Cup, named for that ageless Stones jam, plays gracious co-host to the performance space-gallery-recording-studio, dedicated to the still-kicking disciplines of artisanal handicraft and classic, shake-the-floors rock. The casual air coloring Cameo’s spacious gallery is a fresh alternative to the insular Chelsea crawl, and the venue’s sky-high ceilings allow for the sort of natural, Spector-sized reverb that haunts aspiring rockers’ dreams. The venue resembles a black box but functions as a high-design soundstage, providing an ideal showcase for local talents with an hour and a mike.

image c/o WSJ

58 North 3rd Street
(between Wythe Ave & Kent Ave)
Brooklyn New York,11211
view map
347.763.2938

Cuisine: Mexican
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★
Cards: Cash Only
Price: $$
Hours: Mon, Sun 12 pm – 12 am, Tue 12 pm – 1 am, Wed-Sat 12 pm – 2 am
Booze: Full bar
Subway: L to Bedford Ave
Menu: www.cantinaroyal.com
Delivery: No
NY Mag says:

While Felipe Mendez’s other Williamsburg Mexican restaurant, La Superior, is designed to be a funky, down-home taqueria, his new Cantina Royal is “somewhere between street food and high-end,” he tells Grub Street. “Cantinas in Mexico are more like a place to sit with friends and hang out and drink and get tapas-style food.” Signature bites include clarinetes, a clarinet-shaped snack that’s “kind of like a flauta” with duck filling, or cappuccino potato soup, made with cinnamon, potatoes, and mushrooms. Even if you’re just dropping by for a cocktail, like one of Mendez’s signature margaritas, or maybe a “tequila martini,” there are complimentary housemade salsas ranging from mild to spicy to smoky for anyone who nabs one of the 42 seats. To position the venue as “a place to have fun,” Mendez created a combination gallery-performance-lounge space in back, where he hopes to screen films and hold dance parties

The Wall Street Journal says:

Cantina Royal is a new Mexican restaurant in Williamsburg that pays homage to the cantinas south of the border with a sophisticated touch. The dining room is a mixture of industrial touches like electric meters in plain view and stylish finishes like the large sparkly chandelier. As at any true cantina, there is a wide variety of tequilas to choose from. There are more than two-dozen varieties, with Herradura Blanco serving as the house’s official brand. The house tequila is featured in a stiff tequila martini ($12) and also in the traditional margarita ($10). The food menu includes a fiery salsa sampler created by Julio Mora, chef and co-owner of Cantina Royal. Chilies and house-made salsas also play a big part in the cocktails. There is El Mescalero ($13), an arbol chili-infused mescal that comes with jalapeño. Another favorite is the Michelada ($8), a beer cocktail with tomato and lime juice and a dressing made of five red chilies.

karczma (image c/o Yelp)

136 Greenpoint Ave
(between Franklin St & Manhattan Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11222
view map
718.349.1744

Cuisine: Polish
Our Rating: ★★★
Cards: All Major
Price: $$
Hours: Mon-Thurs 12pm – 10:30pm, Fri-Sat 12pm – 11.30pm, Sun 12pm – 10pm
Booze: Full bar
Subway: G at Greenpoint Ave.
Menu: http://www.karczmabrooklyn.com/menu.html
Website: http://www.karczmabrooklyn.com/
Delivery: No
NY Mag says:

Karczma sets itself apart from other Polish spots in Greenpoint by playing up the Old World décor — appropriate for a place whose name means “farmhouse.” Upon entering the heavy, windowless front door, you’re greeted by costumed servers and ushered into the farm-themed dining room, replete with bucolic accents like a barrel, wagon, wooden-wheel chandeliers, and even an old-fashioned well. Despite the kitschy accents, real Polish people actually come here. Tables are occupied by families speaking the language and the bar is a mix of natives and locals grasping tall, thin glasses of Zywiec. The pierogies (served fried or boiled) are filling and come with sour cream, as do the crunchy potato pancakes. The grilled plate for two includes spicy kielbasa, thick bacon, seasoned chicken, beef-textured ham, charred salmon, and an eight-inch bitter, black blood sausage with roasted potatoes and a mound of sauerkraut. Sandwiches can be less meat-focused: a popular sesame-seed-roll sandwich comes lined with chunks of grilled squash, zucchini, and red and green peppers with crinkle-cut fries on the side. Desserts have an American bent with slices of apple pie or cheesecake. Cheese and potato pierogies, $5.50; grilled plate for two, $22

Village Voice says:

Though karczma sounds like a serious skin condition, the word is Polish for something like “rustic country inn.” Karczma is also the name of Greenpoint’s newest restaurant, one of the first that attempts to elevate Polish cuisine above the level of diner fare. The interior is countrified and agrarian—in a designer sort of way—featuring barn-wood booths flanked by loveseats that look like pregnant Adirondack chairs, capable of accommodating the widest derrieres. Farm implements are scattered on the walls, including pitchforks that might impale you if you get too excited about the food. An overhang with hay thatching identifies the bathrooms, making them look like outhouses…Our favorite entrée was the grilled fresh ham ($8.50), a pair of pale steaks that must have been marinated in white wine before being grilled to complete succulence. The accompanying fries, however, left something to be desired—dull and mealy crinkle cuts like the kind you find freezer-burned in the supermarket case. Playing the healthy card, Karczma’s menu is filled out with dishes that are grilled rather than deep-fried, including salmon, trout, and—natch!—skinned-and-deboned chicken breast, the world’s most unpromising ingredient.

Thankfully, unreconstructed Polish dishes survive and can be ordered and savored once you’ve eliminated the “healthy” stuff from consideration. The entrée spicy beef goulash ($8.5) was anything but, convincing us that the Poles are a tender-tongued lot when it comes to chilies or even black peppercorns. The cubes of beef fell apart at the touch of a fork and the gravy was brown and flavorful, though far less copious than one would have hoped. More gravy, please! Once again, lovers of sheer volume will find much to like on the entrée menu. Special meat selections for two ($22) or four ($31) are so abundant, they really feed three or six. These come with big bowls of roasted potatoes and pork-flecked sauerkraut, the latter a bit too sweet for my taste. It would probably make a good “healthy” dessert, though.

And Karczma has (gasp!) a wine list, the only Polish restaurant I know of that is so equipped. It includes a red Côtes de Bourg ($22), a hopelessly obscure Bourdeaux appellation from the village of Bourg on the bank of the Dordogne River in southwestern France, tannic enough to cut through any gravy. Or, as a tribute to Greenpoint’s nearby and newly hip Metropolitan Avenue, you can elect a cut-price California merlot: Bohemian Highway ($17).