* Bep
photograph by Tam Ngo
CUISINE: Vietnamese
ADDRESS: 346 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211 (nr. South 3rd Street)
(Mondays at Simple Cafe)
PHONE: 718.218.7067
HOURS: Mondays from 12-10 pm, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 6-10 pm
CARDS: Cash Only
BOOZE: Beer
MENU: Click Here [c/o Serious Eats]
SUBWAY: L Train to Bedford
MAP: Click Here
WEBSITE: http://beprestaurant.blogspot.com/
DELIVERY: No
SERIOUS EATS SAYS: The failings of New York's Viet restaurants usually occur in a combination of three ways: poor quality of ingredients, inattention to technique, or an underestimation of the audience's appetite for spice. Bep, which sets up every Monday inside Williamsburg's Simple Cafe, is an ambitious young upstart in the city's Vietnamese dining scene. By limiting its scope to a weekly special of home-style dishes, Bep strives to offer the piquant flavors most Viet restaurants fall short of delivering.
In Vietnamese, the word "bep" evokes the cozy warmth of the cooking hearth, so it's surprising that Bep's best dishes are not the comfort classics. Rather, Bep excels at the ubiquitous staples that almost every Viet restaurant offers (cha gio and thit nuong). What distinguishes Bep from competitors, however, is their use of high-caliber ingredients while keeping close to Chinatown's portion sizes and price points. And Bep's menu is a thoughtfully edited one--key proteins are replicated in several dishes, allowing Bep to keep quality high and overhead low.
