* Monkey Town
Photo by Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
Eclectic
58 North Third Street
(Bedford Stop on L train)
PHONE: 718.384.1369
CARDS: All Major
AVERAGE ENTREE: Starters, $6 to $8; main courses, $10 to $19; sides, $4; desserts, $6 to $7
HOURS: Seven Days a Week, 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.
BOOZE: Full bar
MAP: Click Here
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WEB: Click Here
THEY SAY: Our first location was at 222 Leonard St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Our new location at 58 N 3rd St, adds a front, non-performance dining room and bar, while our back dining room maintains our original configuration: 4 screens, communal setting, 6.1 surround sound, intimate capacity: 32
We have created a permanent space that privileges video art, short films, feature-length films and documentaries, outside traditional galleries, movie theaters, museums, or clubs. We will also host live music, dance and other original performance. We will commission surround sound installations and continue our 'Bathroom Sound Series'. We plan to establish an artist residency. We serve experimental cuisine and classic dishes from a country that doesn’t exist. Every cuisine and every ingredient are in play. The laboratory is open.
FROM NYTIMES: THIS weekend, at the culmination of Monkey Town's "porn week," there will be a double feature to go with dinner in the restaurant's back room. It is a rare opportunity for diners to assess the comparative virtues of homemade movies featuring Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton on gigantic projection screens while dining and reclining on bedlike couches.Part video parlor but all restaurant, Monkey Town is nothing if not unique. Montgomery Knott came up with the formula in 2003 when he rented a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to house a video installation of his own. He persuaded some good friends of his to cook and serve food. Among them was Coleman Lee Foster, who was cooking at Chanterelle at the time.
Events there featured video art or live music or, on one occasion, the combination of "America's Funniest Pet Videos" (played at one-third speed), dinner and hot stone massages. They proved popular enough that Mr. Knott and his partners decided to invest in a permanent home.
That home is a converted garage on the East River end of North Third Street in Williamsburg. The back room, lined with daybeds and four projection screens, is a more professional, permanent version of the original, which was on Leonard Street. (A schedule with movie times and program descriptions is at monkeytownhq.com.) The front room, with a huge jungle mural on one wall, a series of God's eyes ornaments on another and an oversize chandelier, is free of performance: it's a dining room. (On some nights diners can shave a few dollars off the bill by weaving God's eyes for the wall during their meal.)
It was a daring step for the group to take. It is one thing to cook food that pleases when most of a diner's attention is absorbed in a sensory-saturating environment; it is quite another to make it work when the food is the star attraction. To his credit, a good deal of Mr. Foster's cooking is worth the attention.
He has billed the inventive, quirky menu at Monkey Town as "classic dishes from a country that doesn't exist." His meatballs earn my nomination for the national dish. A set of three arrives on shiso leaves ($7), which your jumpsuit-clad waiter will instruct you to eat along with the meatballs. The tidy little panko-coated and deep-fried meatballs, which are dotted through with cashews and dried apricots and spiked with a hint of kaffir lime, teeter on the edge of excess but don't go overboard.
An appetizer of fried fish batons ($7) is served with two dipping sauces that rope in almost as many ingredients as the meatballs to a similarly direct and controlled effect. One is a rosewater yogurt tartar sauce, the other a yuzu aioli.
Not all the international ingredient wrangling works.
The promise of a hybrid posole-miso soup ($6) sounds too good, too rich, to be true, and it is. The result is soupy in a way that neither posole nor miso soup regularly is: watery and unfocused. It is the taste of an unrealized idea.
But for every misfire there are plenty of dishes that hit their mark: unctuously tender and deeply flavored braised short ribs ($14) over fried oatmeal cakes; Mediterranean-leaning braised squid in couscous ($12) with pine nuts, raisins and bonito flakes.
Grilled striped bass ($19) is firm and moist, and complemented, not dominated, by a pistachio-herb crust. It is served with gingered red cabbage and perfectly roasted cubes of sweet potato that are at once salty and sweet, crispy outside and tender within. The dish has a little too much going on, but too much of a good thing can be hard to argue with.
The two desserts on the menu at the moment have a little too much of one thing going on: Indian spices. The milk chocolate curry mousse ($6) has a dusty turmeric aftertaste, though the chickpea brittle it comes with is not without charm; the cardamom in the crust of a rose and pomegranate cheesecake ($7) overwhelms the rest of the ingredients.
As much of Williamsburg steadily marches on toward its fate of high-rises and higher rents, it is heartening to see a good-humored arty project like Monkey Town put down roots, even more so on account of its adventurous and often rewarding cooking.
Comments
These reviews remind me of what I hate about what Williamsburg and what it is coming... a nest of entitled, mock pretentious, self-important people who confuse being discerning with out and out rudeness.
Every time (I repeat, EVERY TIME) I have been to this establishment, the appetizers and main dishes have been perfectly prepared (using the best ingredients); the by the glass Wine list is very interesting for the price (I reveled in a petit Syrah last time I was there); and the staff is enormously polite.
This is hands down, one of my favorite places in Brooklyn. It has the concept and meticulous care of simplicity that you would normally only encounter in a joint over in Berlin or Istanbul. Get over yourself, Yuppy larvae. ;)
Posted by: Patrick Marckesano | October 4, 2008 06:15 PM
I cant believe all these comments! I found Monkey Town to be a really great place. The food is amazing. The lamb and the stake are so savory my mouth waters just thinking about it. The decor is fun and romantic! I have yet to visit the back area but look forward to it. The servers have been quirky but friendly. Sometimes a little slow in the beginning. Who are these people saying its not good! I have taken many a friend to Monkey Town and its a hit everytime! I would not order the baken cheese cake again. But so what!
Posted by: Gretchen | November 9, 2007 12:23 AM
I'll make this sweet and short. A foot long hair has baked into the crust of my tasteless mahi. It wrapped around my tongue and I had to pull it out slowly along with the chunks of fish it was attached to. My friend's mahi was raw. The wine was aged and smelled like gangrene. A PLACE THAT DEDICATES TOO MUCH EFFORT IN ITS DECORATION WILL NOT DEDICATE THE SAME AMOUNT OF EFFORT TOWARDS ITS FOOD. This place is not worth the money or the space it is situated in.
Posted by: Maria Clark | September 23, 2007 07:19 PM
Is this place STILL open? If it is, I can't believe it. Must have rich parents.
Posted by: ET | August 12, 2007 01:12 AM
This is the worst 'dining' experience I have ever had in New York. My husband and I went for our fifth anniversary to a reception and dinner at Monkeytown. The food was mediocre and slow in coming. But compared to the waitress who ruined our evening? Her attitude was hostile and pushy. When we left a 10% tip to register our diappointment with the vibe, food and service she came over to our table to try and get more money out of us. Glad to hear this terrible place is losing its lease.
Posted by: Joanne | October 22, 2006 03:45 PM
With all the buzz and hype surrounding Monkeytown, I had to check it out. I'm a local business owner and do my best to support other small businesses as well. While the dining space is funky and comfortable, the food was just horrible. Awful. And a jumbled up mess. Fusion is one thing...and throwing together ingredients and blending flavors that aren't in sync with one another leads to disaster. A friend and I arrived on a Wednesday night, around 8:30. The place was empty except for one table, but they were just having drinks (red flag #1). We started with the kaffir lime meatballs, which took 20 (yes, 20) minutes to arrive. They tiny fried balls of undercooked (they were still bloody red in the middle, ew) were just plain uninspired and gross. My friend has the black bean lasagna in a bowl (which looked like canned cat food dumped into a dish) and I had the "braised" squid over couscous. I thought the meatballs were bad but the squid? HA! It somehow pooled together the most disgusing flavors into one dish. The squid was clearly old--growing up on the stuff, I know it should be tender yet firm to the tooth (like pasta al dente), but this stuff was flat-out dry and scarily chewy--I was dismayed. And the tomato sauce tasted like spaghetti-o's sauce--syrupy and cloyingly sweet. Just horrible. Don't be fooled by the packed restaurant on Fridays and Saturdays. A solid restaurant with consistent (this is key) food is the mark of success. Stop by on a Wednesday evening and you'll see what I mean.
Posted by: eugene | May 17, 2006 05:08 PM
Monkey town, indeed.
This joint is located around the corner from Zebulon and Relish, in a fairly non descript warehouse type building. If it wasnt for the huge window, flashing lights, and the giant chandelier it would just fade in with the rest of the bleak warehouses. Now, I never woulda heard about monkeytown if it wasn’t for a glowing review in 11211 where the reviewer is gushing about this place. In a nutshell, this place boasts a large room where you can eat dinner on large comfy futons while watching a move projected on a huge screen in front of you. There is a flat charge of $8 (only from fridays-sundays, otherwise its free) to be let into the back room with the movie. Or, you could order your food in the front room and attempt to have a normal conversation without being blitzkreiged by whatever the monkey puts on.
The night the monk and I went, they had some sort of chilean video review, so there were all these shorts by chilean artists.. All in all, the videos were pretty good, and I had a good time lounging on the sofa/beds, drinking wine and watching the videos. Oh yeah, the food wasnt half bad either.
For starters, we got the shaved fennel salad (with spicy pickled mango, tarragon, & peach vinaigrette) and the tilapia ceviche (over arugula with pumpkin seeds and radish). Both were really very good, with the spicy pickled mango being an amazingly tasty morsel. For dinner, I got the special which was a mushroom, truffle oil, rissoto dish which was amazingly rich and pretty damn good. There was just enough cheese to give it that luxurious gooey quality which I so craving. The monk ordered the pulled pork which came with three different dipping sauces. She wasnt so pleased by it, and said it was too salty. Her feelings were that the sauces covered up the pork more than they contributed towards it.
For desert, we couldnt resist the sound of the milk chocolate curry mousse with chickpea brittle & whipped cream. Chocolate mousse with curry? Yessir, and it tasted exactly as it sounded. The monk didnt like it so much, but it was amazingly interesting. The spicy curry surfed on the wave of chocolate mousse sweetness and washed over the palate leaving you purely with the taste of curry . It was really something to be savored.
So, In short, the dinner wasnt bad. Not so bad at all. Once we got the bill, we were of course surprised with the expense. I probably wouldnt go back though, if it wasnt for the video/sofa thing though.
Total Cost for two people: $95 (plus $8 per person to get in)
Posted by: Jarkob | May 11, 2006 07:55 PM