Free Williamsburg

The Williamsburg Brooklyn-based culture guide to New York and beyond.

Oxomoco

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Oxomoco is a beautiful Mexican restaurant in Greenpoint from the owners of Speedy Romero. The focus is on inventive, wood-fired Mexican cuisine and fancy cocktails. Admittedly, the food is stellar but we find it to be a little fussy and unnecessarily expensive.

Featured Reviews

  • Tacos, which arrive in pairs, form the largest section of the Oxomoco menu, and here are the four varieties we ate on consecutive nights last week, ranked: the beautifully funky Pork Cheek Carnitas with crackling chicharron; the Swordfish Achiote, the big, tender chunks of fish holding their own under a barrage of lively flavors, including habanero salsa; the rich and earthy Grilled Asparagus, which comes with fat morels, chipotle, and ramps; and the overwhelming Chicken Al Pastor, which was the only real “miss” in any category over two large meals.

    There’s a lot more great food to eat here, too. The Tlayuda is terrific—a thin, crisp tortilla layered with lardo, refried beans, melted salty “string” cheese, and a grassy pipicha salsa. Even the Guacamole offers fresh thrills, thanks to a liberal sprinkling of queso fresco and whole smoked cherry tomatoes. And after all that smoke, salt, and heat, your table will need at least one of the Oxomoco desserts. Either of these will do the trick: the tart and tangy Hoja Santa Curd with smoked strawberry, lime drizzle, and raspberry ice; or the Oaxacan Chocolate Cake, a sweet and wonderful tower of dense pastry, a sticky disc of cajeta, walnut crumble, and vanilla ice cream.
    Oxomoco is an exciting, enormously appealing restaurant, a big winner on all fronts that will likely be hopping all summer. And if you have to wait for a table inside, the comfortable front terrace is not a bad spot at all for a drink or two while doing so.

  • A breezy new Mexican restaurant is setting up shop this week, bringing wood-fired dishes from across the country to Greenpoint. The chef behind popular Bed-Stuy and Lower East Side pizza spot Speedy Romeo, Justin Bazdarich, has teamed up with his lifelong friend and restaurateur Chris Walton to open Oxomoco at 128 Greenpoint Ave., between Franklin Street and Manhattan Avenue, on Tuesday, June 5.

    The menu centers around the wood-fired grill, which touches the tacos, meats, seafood, vegetables, tostadas, and ceviches that fill out the menu. Those tacos are the main focus: The corn tortillas are sourced from Mexico, and fillings include vegan beet “chorizo,” fried soft shell crab, chicken al pastor, pork cheek carnitas, and lamb barbacoa. The oven even makes its way to the drink menu, created by consultant Eben Klemm, with a toasted pineapple cordial, or a mole smoked in the oven and infused into mezcal.

  • The menu is a grab bag of Mexican dishes: It traverses from Tijuana (via the Caesar salad, for which they’re grilling half the romaine) to Ensenada (from which they’ve borrowed their style of tostadas) to Oaxaca (tlayuda with lard) over to the Yucatán (skewered swordfish achiote with habanero salsa for tacos). There’s also a nod to modern Mexican cooking in the tuna tostada, the style of the famous Contramar. “Everyone has sort of ripped off their tuna tostada,” Bazdarich says.

    Here, it’s served with mashed avocado, thinly sliced radish, yellowfin tuna that’s brushed with soy sauce, and then topped with a smoky, sesame-based salsa macha and toasted sesame seeds. Speaking of toasting: “We’re just trying to make sure everything touches the grill somehow in some element of a dish,” Bazdarich says, an approach he’s imported from his pizzeria. Just as they make mozzarella at Speedy Romeo, they’re making giant balls of quesillo at Oxomoco, as well as a Valentina-like house hot sauce of arbol and guajillo chilies, vinegar, garlic, and salt.

Getting There

Oxomoco

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Oxomoco is one of the best Mexican restaurants in NYC, from the owners of Speedy Romero. Their specialty is tacos with wood-fired proteins — our favorites are the lamb and the fish. The space is beautiful with great drinks and a very LA vibe. After being open just a year, Oxomoco received a Michelin star so expect a crowd.

Featured Reviews

  • Once your table is ready inside, you’ll be glad you waited. The dining room is a high-ceilinged space that’s covered in white paint and green plants, which doesn’t make it unique. But some other things do: the big round booths that make you feel like it’s your birthday even if it’s not, the chef’s counter overlooking the wood-fired grill, and the kind of good lighting typically only achieved with a filter.

  • This fanciful venture is the brainchild of the chef-restaurateur Justin Bazdarich who operates the popular Brooklyn (and now, also, Lower East Side) wood-fire-pizza joint, Speedy Romeo. Wood fire, it turns out, is one of the central themes at Oxomoco, too, although this time the specialty of the house — aside from the usual barrage of margaritas, guacamole, and mountains of salty, thirst-inducing chips — is that ancient Mexican art of open-fire cooking called barbacoa. The building of large fires is constrained among the towers of Manhattan, of course, but out here in the relatively wide-open spaces of the city’s great barbecue borough, Bazdarich and his cooks can let their imaginations run wild. The great steel grills in the back of the room (which used to be a plumbing warehouse, for the record) are stocked with stacks of burning cordwood from lunchtime until late in the evening, and during the course of the day, almost everything on the menu is thrown onto it, from whole chickens and chunks of flank steak and marinated lamb to the delicate leaves of romaine lettuce used in the house Punta Verde Caesar salad.

  • Bazdarich has really hit the culinary jackpot at Oxomoco, where the tacos are every bit as good as the ones at Salazar.

    Best is barbacoa. At Oxomoco, lamb that has been grilled over wood, slow-cooked, and then loaded into a coarse-textured corn tortilla that will remind you of Los Angeles’s. A relish made of pipicha — a feathery herb that tastes like dirty mint — crowns the jiggly meat, as does a squash blossom that doesn’t add much but sure looks pretty riding shotgun. Sadly, the price of $16 for two tacos is exactly twice the cost at Salazar.

    Other Oxomoco tacos worth tasting include pig cheek with green avocado salsa, flank steak with smoked eggplant relish and rubbery cotija cheese (now served with caramelized onions), and tempura-fried hake (now it’s shrimp), reminding us that the Baja Peninsula, the original home of the fish taco, is considered part of the Sonoran Desert. But a vegetarian taco of beets and potatoes intended to resemble chorizo is bland and boring. Other antojitos, or corn-based staples, are worth ordering, on a menu twice as long as Salazar’s. Whatever you do, don’t miss the creamy charred-carrot tamales, which come pooled in a verdant sauce. The steak tartare tostada ($16), exceedingly fresh beef cut into a ragged dice, is preferable to a tuna tostada that makes too-lavish use of soy sauce, which clashes with the corn tortilla. In fact, I’d skip anything featuring raw fish at Oxomoco, including the hamachi aguachile. What New York City really needs is a full-blown Mexican cevicheria.

Paulie Gee’s

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The only place in New York where we don’t mind waiting 45 minutes to eat pizza. It’s that good. (Plus we can always meander next door for craft beer at Brouwerij Lane while we wait.) Paulie’s brick oven pies, served up in a beautifully renovated warehouse that looks more like a barn you’d find in upstate New York, are our favorite Brooklyn. Sorry Robertas. Start with the Greenpointer — a white pie with Fior di Latte, Baby Arugula, Olive Oil, Fresh Lemon Juice and Shaved Parmigiano Reggiano — and be sure to try one of the pies that has hot honey on it. Wash it all down with one of the many craft beers they have on the menu. A true Greenpoint gem.

Featured Reviews

  • The “crowds” prove the “hype” at this Greenpoint pizzeria where “seriously good” pies (especially the “addictive” Hellboy) are offered with “original” toppings varied enough “to please anyone”; the “dimly lit” digs feel especially “inviting” when Paulie “drops by to say hello.”

  • Owner Paul Giannone, aka Paulie Gee, channeled a lifelong love of pizza into this charmingly delicious spot that feels as if it has been around forever. Rustic in appearance, the room’s cool concrete and brick are warmed by the glow of the wood-burning oven imported from Naples. From here, Giannone and his son work their magic. The addictive crust is beguilingly moist and chewy, perfumed with smoke, and adroitly salted. Killer wood-fired pies dominate the menu with tempting combinations, excellent ingredients, and whimsical names.

  • Pizza hobbyist turned pro Paul Giannone produces truly original pies at this rustic Greenpoint eatery. The best pizzas here are mixed-media masterworks with gorgeously blackened crusts covered in crispy nooks and pillowy bubbles. The Honey Jones—a frequent special featuring honey from a Brooklyn beekeeper, Gorgonzola, mozzarella, cherries and wispy prosciutto—beautifully balances sweet and salty.

Getting There

Sauvage

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Sauvage is the second restaurant from the people behind Maison Premiere. Where Maison Premiere’s focus is on seafood, Sauvage focuses more on dishes like Heritage Pork with celery root and persimmon or Rabbit with roasted turnips. There’s an abundance of small plates, many vegetarian, and a smaller raw bar. Come for a snack and a fancy cocktail or splurge on a dinner. If you’re a fan of Maison Premiere, you will be very happy.

Featured Reviews

  • But Ms. Giffen’s talents are best used when she abandons the miniaturist mode. There’s a full-throttle thrill to breaking open chilled snow crab legs and dunking their briny flesh in brown butter that’s reinforced with mashed crab liver. There’s undeniable pleasure in slicing open the malakoff, dough mixed with alpine-style cheese that’s lumped on a slice of sourdough and then deep fried. This bonanza of starch, cheese and oil comes with pickled vegetables. It should also come with a small mountain for you to you climb after you finish it…. Like a classic sidewalk cafe in Paris that’s been taken over by young upstarts. Servers are extroverted and able to convey enthusiasm that seems genuine.

  • Sauvage (“wild” in French), the second restaurant from the team of Joshua Boissy and Krystof Zizka, with Lisa Giffen once again serving as chef, set down on the Greenpoint frontier a few months ago. Though sporting a formidable French wine list, it focused more on food than drink. Sauvage spread itself along Nassau Street like homemade butter on the cumin-scented warm roll that is one of the restaurant’s most delicious apps ($2.50). Across the intersection lies McCarren Park, where the crack of the baseball bat punctuates a leisurely meal, at least for those who choose to perch at the outdoor tables. 

Getting There

TØRST

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TØRST is an essential destination for any lover of craft beer. The owners have elevated its consumption to an art form. The Danish bar, partially owned by one of the dudes behind Evil Twin Brewing, has 21 taps regulated by a “The Flux Capacitor” which ensures drafts are served with the right amount of carbonation and at the perfect temperature. Yes, it’s geeky as hell, but the staff is friendly and the impeccable design is Scandinavian minimalism at its very best. The beer list includes all-star brews like Evil Twin, Other Half, and Oxbow and a large selection of cans and bottles to further complicate your decisions. The affiliated restaurant Luksus closed in 2016, but fear not, TØRST now has its own revamped menu. There are about a dozen shareable plates including Littleneck Clams in Country Ham Broth, Pickled Mackerel, Crispy Chicken Skin, Asparagus with Smoked Trout, and some fantastic sourdough bread with a selection of cheeses. They also have sandwiches such as a tasty Fried Main Shrimp Sandwich and the obligatory Burger. It ain’t cheap, but it’s a wonderful experience.

Featured Reviews

  • The 21, temperature-controlled taps at this Greenpoint bar range from light to dark, each handle reflecting the color of the beer it pours. There is beer and only beer here, and it’s served in wine glasses. The inside resembles a 70’s-style model home. Yet, while the interior design harkens to the past, the brew selection is a foamy vision of the future… Only the best, most obscure brews are penned on the mirror above the marble countertops, which may as well include the message: “Serious Beer Drinkers Only.”

  • Started by a consortium of “hardcore beer and food” types (including a Momofuku research lab chef, a former beer sommelier from DBGB, and the guy behind Evil Twin Brewing), this temple to all things brew is dedicated to bringing you some of the tastiest and rarest suds. Torst is a Danish bar boasting over 20 carefully-selected beers, which are all kept fresh through a high-tech, temperature-regulating system.

  • The menu is divided into snacks, sandwiches, and small plates, but no matter what else you’re getting, you should also get some bread…. a knee-buckling reminder of just how good a bite of bread and butter can be… The Crispy Chicken Skin is a fun and satisfying riff on the classic plate of wings, with its crackling pieces of skin flattened and forged together, it’s served with a generous bowl of thick Point Reyes bleu sauce for dipping (this goes nicely on your bread, too), pickled slivers of celery, and a squirt bottle of Crystal hot sauce. For something more complicated and Nordic, order the chunky Beef Tartare, which may have been the single best dish I had across two meals here.

  • Scandinavian food is hotter than a Finnish sauna right now, so praise Odin that the same culinary Vikings who made gravlax sexy are out to conquer the bar scene as well. On the front line is new Greenpoint drinkery Tørst—Danish for “thirst”—helmed by legendary “gypsy brewer” Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø and chef Daniel Burns, formerly of the planet’s hottest restaurant, Noma in Copenhagen. These warriors are laying waste to tired ideas of what a great taproom should be, with a minimalist space that looks and smells like a modernist log cabin, and rare brews from thoughout Europe and North America.

Getting There

Vamos Al Tequila

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A fantastic and authentic Mexican restaurant in Greenpoint serving the family recipes of the married couple who owns it. The ambiance is drab, and the drinks are weak, but the food is always made-to-order and satisfying. The tamales are made in-house and are a standout. We love the Chicken Enchiladas in Green Tomatillo Sauce, but everything on the menu is pretty darn good. Brunch is available on weekends – and yes – they have a fantastic Huevos Rancheros.

Featured Reviews

  • Vamos Al Tequila sets itself apart by avoiding the hipster vibe of the neighborhood and focusing instead on authenticity. Native Mexican couple Cirilo Luna and Joaquina Flores brought their family recipes with them when they came to the states some 30 years ago. This shows in the very first bite of the complimentary salsa, spicy with abundant jalapenos. The somewhat cheesy décor is better thought of as festive, with flags, sombreros, a cactus, and even a fake taco stand between the dining room and the kitchen. Green, white, and red bulbs shine from above the bar, where flavored margaritas are served alongside Mexican beers. Tamales make for the best appetizer, with a jalapeno and steamed cheese combo or chicken with not-too-sweet mole sauce.

Getting There