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.

image c/o Flickr

600 Metropolitan Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
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718.599.4440

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Cards: Cash Only
Hours: Mon-Fri, 3pm-4am; Sat-Sun, 1pm-4am
Price: $
Subway: G, L at Metropolitan Ave.-Lorimer St.
Food/Menu: Free pizza when you buy a pint
Booze: Full bar
Happy Hour: No, but they have free pizza!
We say:

The dive meets frat boy decor is nothing to write home about, but the free brick over pizza (which is actually REALLY good) makes it hard to pass up.

NY Mag says:

Inside what was once the Galleria pizza place, this bar’s turquoise walls, pink flamingoes and Romanesque details don’t quite gel, yet one crucial feature remains intact: the arched, wood-burning oven. Because of the owners’ sensational idea of serving free personal pizzas every night until 3:30 a.m., this unremarkable joint has turned into a loveable hangout that’s a great first or last barhop stop. Young and old Williamsburg folk congregate along the bar, in the maroon, open-angle vinyl booths, and around the green pool table. A booming jukebox and Big Buck Hunter Pro game in back provide entertainment. A selection of 10 draft beers complements the delicious crisp-crust pies, which are on the house with every drink; toppings like pepperoni, caramelized onions and flavorful sweet sausage are available for an extra $2.

Aska (c/o Gothamist)

90 Wythe Avenue (Kinfolk Studios)
Brooklyn, New York 11211
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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.

Atlas Cafe

116 Havemeyer St
Brooklyn, NY 11211
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718.782.7470

Cuisine: Coffeeshop
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★
Cards: Cash Only
Price: $
Hours: 7am-10pm Daily
Booze: None
Subway: L to Lorimer St., J,M,Z to Marcy Ave.
Menu: Click Here Delivery: No
New York Mag says:

There’s something about this coffee shop that has the feel of a college town cafe. The two floor-to-ceiling windows of the corner place fill the room with sunlight, making it particularly attractive for the laptop writers who occupy their tables for hours at a time, digging the free Wi-Fi and occasionally spacing out to the wall-sized map of the world. Large, milky pendant lights and wooden tables lend a softness to the room, and two outside benches take on some of the extra traffic when the turnover slows down. Everything is served at the counter, and hot and cold drinks run the typical gamut-cappuccino, espresso, mocha, sweet and spicy chai latte, and a strong yet delicately foamed macchiato, as well as Odwalla juices and Boylan’s sodas. The edibles cover basic breakfast pastries-soft scones, danishes and muffins from Tomcat Bakery in Long Island City-as well as a few lunch items, like mozzarella, pesto and tomato or a nicely mashed tuna salad on a baguette. Bagels also go over big, especially topped with creamy hummus or tender slices of lox. The cafe largely empties out by nighttime, leaving plenty of seats for freelancers on an evening schedule. Recommended Dishes: Bagel with cream cheese and lox, $6; tuna salad on baguette, $6

Aurora

70 Grand Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
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718.388.5100

Cuisine: Italian
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★
Cards: Cash Only
Price: $$$
Hours: Mon-Thu Noon-3:30pm (Lunch), 6pm-11pm (Dinner); Fri Noon-3:30pm (Lunch), 6pm-midnight (Dinner); Sat, 11am-4pm (Lunch), 6pm-Midnight (Dinner); Sun 11am-10pm
Booze: Full Bar
Subway: L to Bedford Ave.
Menu: Click Here Delivery: Yes
Zagat says:

Tucked away in a isolated southeast corner of Williamsburg, this cozy brick- and wood-lined Italian has immediately become a take-out, delivery and drop-in boon for culinarily starved types who like its cheap prices and homemade pastas via a chef from Piedmont; the place has the feel of a branch of Max, which bodes well for its future.

NY Mag says:

Rome native Gaspare Villa named his rustic new restaurant after a favorite place in Tuscany. “I used to drive two and a half hours to get there,” he says. The trip to Aurora from Manhattan is much quicker, and well worth it for big bowls of chef Riccardo Buitoni’s maltagliati ragu. Not to mention, Villa now reaps the biggest benefit of a Brooklyn lease: a huge garden.

c/o Eater

131 Grand St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
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718.384.7273

Cuisine: American
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★
Price: $$
Hours: Open 24 Hours
Cards: All Major
Booze: BYOB
Subway: L to Bedford Ave.
Menu: Click Here
Delivery: Yes
Time Out New York says:

Williamsburg night owls in search ofa 3am breakfast have a new option with the arrival of this 24-hour diner. In addition to the standard omelettes, there are a few wacky creations, like BBQ-shrimp pancakes and the Machete plate (mac and cheese with eggs). The massive menu is also vegan- and vegetarian-friendly—look for meatless burgers and meatballs made with spiced beets.

c/o The Brueklyn

483 Grand St
Brooklyn, NY 11211
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718.387.0270

Cuisine: Coffee shop
Our Rating: ★★★
Cards: Yes
Price: $
Hours: Mon-Sun 6am-9pm
Booze: None
Subway: L to Lorimer St., J,M,Z to Marcy Ave.
Menu: Click Here
Delivery: Yes

c/o Brownstoner

45 Richardson Street
Brooklyn NY,11211
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718.599.1645

Cuisine: Brazilian
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★
Cards: Cash Only
Price: $
Hours: Tue-Thurs 5:30pm-12am, Fri 3pm-1am, Sat 10am-1am, Sun 10am-11pm. Brunch Sat-Sun 10am-4pm. Closed Mondays.
Booze: Full bar
Subway: L to Bedford Ave
Menu: Click Here
Delivery: No
NY Mag says:

Williamsburg’s Beco is located in a sort of Williamsburg-Greenpoint netherland, and the owners kept the place a neighborhood secret while getting it off the ground. Rather than a full-blown restaurant like Miss Favela, David Giddings says he and his partners envisioned it as a modest Sao Paolo boteco, where you can laze about while popping made-to-order pao de queijo and sip cocktails made with fresh passion fruit and pressed sugar cane. As Giddings describes it, the decor harks back to the days of Pele, and “doesn’t scream ‘Brazil’ in your face, but it’s more like what a boteco is — a real hangout.” You can hang there during brunch that includes acai and granola, omelettes, bife a cavalo (Brazilians refer to their steak and eggs as “steak on horseback”), and a feijoada that’s prepared over the course of two days by a Carioca chef, Casia Steinberg (Fabiane Lima, the Brazilian owner of Fabiane’s, also consulted on the menu).

(more…)

Beloved (image c/o NYMag)

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

Our Rating: ★★★
Cards: All Major
Reservations: Yes
Hours: G at Nassau Ave.
Booze: Full bar
Subway: G to Nassau
Drinks Menu: Click Here
Website: Click Here
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.

c/o The New York Times

346 Bedford Avenue
(Near South 3rd Street)
Brooklyn NY, 11211
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718.218.7067

Cuisine: Vietnamese
Our Rating: ★ ★ ★
Cards: Cash Only
Price: $
Hours: Mondays from 12-10 pm, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 6-10 pm
Booze: Beer and wine
Subway: L to Bedford Ave., J,M,Z to Marcy Ave.
Menu: Click Here
Delivery: Yes
NY Mag says:

A few days a week, An Nguyen Xuan, a Vietnamese chef who was born and raised in France takes over Simple Café in Williamsburg and operates it as Bep (meaning “Kitchen” in Vietnamese): “I serve Vietnamese staple dishes like pho, bánh mì, bun, and fried spring rolls.” There are also specials, like caramelized pork belly with pickled bean sprouts. Xuan is using natural ingredients and hoping to offer an alternative to current Vietnamese restaurants, which she says are sometimes too expensive and use too much MSG. Hmmm. We have yet to encounter these expensive Vietnamese joints, but if she claims hers is cheaper and better, we’ll see her soon!

In January, An Nguyen Xuan opened Bep, which means “kitchen” in Vietnamese, at the Simple Café in Williamsburg. At first, the concept was confined to Mondays, restaurants’ day of doldrums. But the experiment proved so popular that last month Bep expanded its hours to Thursday through Saturday nights. Mr. Xuan’s food tends to the Hanoi style, which uses herbs and spices more subtly than its southern counterpart. Texture is key. Cha gio ($4.50), fried spring rolls, are chubby with pork and mushrooms, their rice-paper skins crisp and bubbled without being oily. A steamed rice crepe is tucked around crunchy pork and silky Vietnamese ham ($10). Many of the brief menu’s supplemental specials deserve to be staples, like the catfish, coppery with turmeric and aromatic with dill, atop vermicelli ($10), and a tangy salad of mango, cabbage and banana blossoms ($9). But the pho ($8) lacks character, and the banh mi ($5.50) are filled with too gentle a hand. Still, it’s rare at this price to find such exquisite details as the dried sour plum bobbing among the mint leaves in the house-made lime soda ($3).