Tag Archives: beer
Brindle Room
Though it’s a noble goal, authenticity isn’t always what you want when seeking out imported regional specialties. Take saucissons bourguignons. Few New Yorkers would likely complain that there isn’t enough tripe in French sausages here. Just pork and beef is fine, thanks.
Likewise, though authentic poutine has its devotees in Quebec, you might not want to recreate it exactly. Fast food fries slathered in mystery-meat gravy and piled with heaps of cheese that’s a cross between regular and cottage cheese is an acquired taste, even in a drunken state at 1am – which is generally when poutine is consumed in Montreal, under the fluorescent lights of a take-out shop. (more…)
Posted in American, East Village, food, New York restaurants, restaurants
Tagged bars, beef, beer, burgers, duck, New York, steak tartare
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Strong Place
You wouldn’t think Court Street would need another bar – until the right one opens, and it feels like it should have been there all along. The latest addition to the neighborhood, Strong Place, is a grown-up bar with a staggering 24 beers on tap and 14 more available by the bottle. The vintage industrial interior with its exposed brick walls, wooden bar and science lab stools feels like Brooklyn’s answer to the Otherroom in the West Village.
There’s a spacious restaurant here too, and though we didn’t have time to delve into the entire menu, the deviled eggs served as the perfect bar snack. Creamy and fresh with a kick at the finish, these eggs doubled down on spice with cayenne on top and peppery olive oil underneath.
Posted in American, Boerum Hill, food, New York restaurants, restaurants
Tagged bars, beer, Brooklyn
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Atria, Martha’s Vineyard
There’s no shortage of fancy restaurants on Martha’s Vineyard – the only problem is choosing just one when you only have a few nights on the island. Alchemy is a perennial favorite, but if you want to get away from the hoi polloi in the center of Edgartown on weekend nights, head to Atria for its patrician atmosphere.
At Atria, whitewashed Adirondack chairs spot the gracious side lawn, where you can settle in for drinks or dinner outside, and inside there’s a dining room hung with antique fish prints and furnished with dark spindle chairs, plus a downstairs pub, Brick House, that serves up burgers, beer on tap and live music. It’s the sort of place you can imagine the Kennedys going (but that may be just because several people in the clubby dining room that night actually looked like Kennedys). (more…)
Posted in food, Martha's Vineyard, restaurants
Tagged bars, beer, Martha's Vineyard, travel
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Hot Bird
On a forlorn stretch of Atlantic Avenue in Clinton Hill, parking lots and gas stations give way to this unexpected gem of an outdoor bar, Hot Bird, so named for the yellow painted signs that linger on several buildings across Brooklyn. The old BBQ chicken chain is long gone, but this new bar keeps the grungy spirit we imagine Hot Bird BBQ once had. Almost a dozen varieties of bourbon line the shelves on the back of this garage space, done over with dark-grouted subway tile walls and vintage Americana. Local craft beers are on tap.
The real draw is the spacious, laid back patio that somehow feels miles away from it all, even though it’s just a few feet away from the traffic of Atlantic Avenue, beyond a wood slat fence. (more…)
The Bodega
We originally went out to Bushwick for Northeast Kingdom – but if we went back, it would be for new wine and beer bar The Bodega. This Spanish-inspired spot is owned by a local couple, Gina Leone and Ben Warren, who’ll help you navigate the rotating menu of hard-to-find beers, many of them Belgian. (You can find the full menu here.) Wine lovers are not left out of the equation though – this is one place where the owners are equally well versed in both.
D. went for the unusual Cuvee Renee Lambic beer from Belgium, which was a hit. Sour and apple-y, it had an almost cider taste. (more…)
Lunch: Bark Hot Dogs
Hot dogs may be one of the most basic New York foods: a tube of beef or pork, a squishy bun, and some mustard, ketchup and relish. Simple, right? Wrong. Hot dogs just got a whole lot more gourmet at Bark Hot Dogs in Park Slope.
There are 10 different kinds of hot dog on the menu at this airy, industrial space with communal tables and high school science lab stools. But Bark’s are a different kind of mystery meat from your traditional dirty water dog. Commissioned from Hartmann’s Old World Sausage in Rochester, the recipe is a private label affair, with the exact mix of ingredients kept secret. But the mix of pork and beef with garlic and spices served as an excellent canvas for the creations that followed. (more…)
Posted in American, food, New York restaurants, Prospect Heights, restaurants
Tagged beef, beer, Brooklyn, hot dogs, lunch, New York
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Hecho en Dumbo
If you’re opening a Mexican restaurant in New York, do you set out to please the general Tex Mex diner who expects chips and salsa to land on the table at the beginning of every meal? Or do you go the authentic route and offer things like cactus and rajas?
Hecho en Dumbo, which just arrived on the Bowery in the old Marion’s space, toes the line between the two schools of Mexican food, offering amazingly good, deeply spicy, traditional Yucatan cuisine—but also a number of fun cocktails and some tortilla chips for the type of person who says “Let’s go out for margs!” When “authentic” can mean not just “truly Mexican” but true to anyplace that has adopted Mexican food (like those Mission-style burritos at Dos Toros), this approach seems like the best route to success for a new style of Mexican restaurant. (more…)
Posted in food, Mexican, New York restaurants, Noho, restaurants
Tagged bars, beer, New York
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The Joy of Cheese at d.b.a. Brooklyn
Wine isn’t the only thing that pairs well with cheese: Beer is a great match too, especially if there’s plenty of it, as there was at the Joy of Cheese tasting at d.b.a. Brooklyn on a recent night. Cheese expert Martin Johnson and d.b.a. owner Ray Deter joined forces to present seven rounds of beer and cheese, with a special focus on holiday brews.
Standouts among the cheeses were two English selections, a Spenwood and a clothbound Montgomery cheddar, and the Gubbeen washed rind cheese from Ireland. (more…)
Revisiting 124 Rabbit Club
We went back to this little basement nook of a beer bar recently – it’s right near local hot spots Minetta Tavern and Mermaid Oyster Bar. Macdougal Street tends towards the touristy and fratty, so this is one speakeasy that’s not mysterious just for the sake of being clever. The black metal basement door repels the hoi polloi and opens for people who look like they have a clue, which should be especially handy now that the annual holiday tourist invasion has begun.
If you’re a fan of craft beers and haven’t been here already, by all means go now. (more…)
Mermaid Oyster Bar
Though food critics always seem to be on the hunt for latest new undiscovered place, most of the real buzz this year has been about new restaurants by old masters. Just try landing a table at Danny Meyer’s Maialino on opening night or getting through the door at Keith McNally’s Minetta Tavern without a reservation. With established brands like these, a market of loyal followers is already in place before a new restaurant even opens.
Which is why Danny Abrams’ Mermaid Oyster Bar will probably thrive in the space that once housed the charming but ill-fated Smith’s on MacDougal Street (never helped by the fact that it opened at the same time as “The Smith” on Third Avenue). The redesign shows signs of an expert touch.
Posted in American, food, Greenwich Village, New York restaurants, restaurants
Tagged bars, beer, Bloody Marys, duck, lobster rolls, New York, seafood restaurants
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Henry Public
If you didn’t know this Cobble Hill space was an old TV repair store until just a couple months ago, you would think new gastro pub Henry Public had been here forever. Past an antique bar, refurbished gas lamps and black and white photos of Frederick Douglass and the old Brooklyn Eagle headquarters hang in the dining room, where the wood paneling and marble fireplace date the room to sometime around the turn of the last century. But this carefully curated mix is actually the result of years of scavenging by owners Jen Albano and Matt Dawson, also the team behind the Brooklyn Social Club, who’ve created an old-timey bar and restaurant that actually feels authentic.
Though it opened just a couple weeks ago, the place was already packed with a mostly local crowd on a recent weekend night. Many were there for the drinks: pre-Prohibition cocktails involving things like egg whites and obscure liqueurs. (more…)
Posted in American, Boerum Hill, food, New York restaurants, restaurants
Tagged bars, beer, Brooklyn, burgers, fireplaces, gastropubs, New York
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The Ten Bells
You know the feeling: You get older, but the neighborhood stays the same age. So it is on the Lower East Side, where beer-soaked dens with an American-Apparel-clad clientele don’t have the same appeal after you’ve been there, done that umpteen million times.
Fortunately, there’s the Ten Bells, where you can actually get decent – make that very good – wine by the glass. We didn’t go as obscure as Eric Asimov did in his recent visit, but we also got some sparkling fresh, briny Malpeaque oysters ($2 each) and deceptively spicy papas bravas ($5) with a nuanced 2006 Rioja Arbanta Llorens for $9 a glass.
Best of all, it’s all enjoyed amid the company of grown-ups.
The Ten Bells
247 Broome Street, between Orchard and Ludlow Streets
New York, NY
212-228-4450
thetenbells.com
Red Hook Bar Crawl
Red Hook is a lot like the IKEA that landed there: sometimes you have to amass a certain number of things to check out before you can motivate for the trip. With new places like Anselmo’s Pizzeria and Fort Defiance opening recently, however, the time is nigh to hike it to Red Hook for a night on the town. We took the B61 down to Van Brunt Street and started with some fancy cocktails. (more…)
Prime Meats
What’s the magic formula for opening a restaurant in this economy? Old-timey décor and bartenders in handlebar mustaches and suspenders? Gourmet burgers on the menu? The people behind several successful inexpensive-but-charming restaurants at the helm?
Prime Meats, the new German-inflected Brooklyn restaurant by Frankie’s Spuntino owners Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli, has doubled down on previous winning elements to come up with a seemingly foolproof recipe for success. And so far, everyone’s loving it: the wait for a table on an August weekday night was almost an hour. In the roomy bar area, the ceilings are pressed tin, Victorian brass lamps hang over the bar, and a vintage butcher shop mirror with “Prime Meats” etched on it reflects the grown-up, very Brooklyn crowd. (About three out of five men in the place had beards, including owner Frank Falcinelli, who was sitting in the corner.) Seeing this kind of steampunk setting yet again made us wonder if Freeman’s Taavo Somer and Milk & Honey’s Sasha Petraske are wringing their hands somewhere, wondering what they hath wrought. (more…)
Posted in Carroll Gardens, food, Italian, New York restaurants, restaurants
Tagged beer, Brooklyn, burgers, sausage
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The Chatham Squire, Cape Cod
Cape Cod: land of baseball caps, Red Sox fans, microbrews on tap, and really good seafood. Marie Fromage and I found a lot of all the above on a recent trip to Chatham, Massachusetts. Located on the “elbow” of Cape Cod, Chatham was home to the Nauset Indians and settled by the English in 1665. Much of the town is a historic district, and there are still a lot of (slightly spooky) 18th century houses in town.
One of the most popular restaurants there, the Chatham Squire, feels like it’s stuck in a time warp of its own, though this one may be closer to the Caddyshack-esque golden years of the ‘80s, much like Bertha’s Mussels of Baltimore. Vanity plates and old wooden signs line the walls, the game is on TV, and the beer starts flowing at lunchtime and doesn’t stop until close at 1am. There’s a restaurant dining room here, but the place to be is the bar, which operates like a town lunch counter for tourists and locals alike. (more…)