Free Williamsburg

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

Achilles Heel

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A cozy, gorgeous gastropub tucked away in north Greenpoint, just a stones-throw from the East River. There’s a wood-burning stove up front, a small bar and a handful of tables. The hardwood floors, original tin ceilings, old-timey cocktails, and a small seaside-inspired menu hearkens back to an earlier era when Greenpoint was a working port and the space was a pub frequented by dockworkers. Come for an inventive small plate and a fancy cocktail. Achilles Heel is one of many popular restaurants in North Brooklyn created by Andrew Tarlow who also founded Diner, Marlow & Sons, and Reynard.

Featured Reviews

  • In its more peaceful hours, Achilles Heel, a revived waterfront bar with a painted stone facade in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, reminds me of McSorley’s Old Ale House. At both places, you can rub the winter out of your hands near a hot stove (fueled by coal at McSorley’s, firewood at Achilles) whose feet are propped on beat-up floorboards. Neither spot is in any hurry, and time there moves at a pace that is decidedly prehashtag. Their light has a faraway, amber quality you could call cheerful gloom. They are among the most soothing places in the city to cradle a glass while the day shortens and slips into the night.

  • a café and bar meant to evoke the always-open grocery and drinking spot that once sustained Greenpoint dockworkers at its West Street address between 1900 and 1960. Details like the hardwood bar and mirrors are original, and once he had signed on the space, Tarlow took a solitary bar stool he’d found straight to his carpenter and asked him to make a few more. There’s a meat-slicer behind the counter for the domestic cured hams, wooden apple crates loaded with fresh produce for purchase, breads baked at Roman’s for sale, and several hundred pounds of new equipment for the baristas to make George Howell pour-over coffee and espresso drinks.

  • Brooklyn empire builder Andrew Tarlow (Reynard, Diner, Marlow and Sons) extends his reach to Greenpoint for this cute corner cafe that turns into a bar at night, offering a tightly curated drink list focused on beer and wine plus a small menu of snacky food; with its copper-topped bar, intricate wood details and funky little tables, the comfy space feels like it’s already been around for ages.

Getting There

Alameda

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A beautifully-designed cocktail bar with a small, New American menu. The space has a horseshoe-shaped bar and a few tables for dining. An intimate spot with great cocktails and one of our favorite burgers in the neighborhood. The menu is updated seasonally, but if they have it, the grilled octopus is fantastic.

Featured Reviews

  • An upmarket stand-in for your everyday hang. Alameda is the Jennifer Lawrence of bars—stunning yet instantly approachable, with a serious eye on the craft (namely, cocktails) but a daffy sense of humor (namely, those drink names). It’s a place where a tatted, T-shirt-sporting crowd can get a Guinness as readily as a biodynamic wine, where happy-hour specials include beer-and-shot combos and oysters with cucumber mignonette.

  • The knowledgeable bartenders can mix just about any cocktail with ten syllables from brand name spirits and their homemade vermouths and bitters: The Alameda Manhattan leaves an impression that all the Manhattans you drank before should have been called Newarks. The menu is limited, but each offering stands out for its inventive take on classic American fare. The cucumber mignonette sauce gives the oysters a balanced flavor that never overwhelms the natural brininess, and the frisée salad’s pork belly bits level-ups this French-American staple. And the foie gras breakfast sandwich is so deliciously decadent that you’ll dread eating your last bite.

  • A gorgeously grungy staff serves creative cocktails and high-end (yet affordable) takes on American snack fare at this Greenpoint hang; a U-shaped bar dominates the stylish space, which is decked out in white tile and handsome wood.

Getting There

All Hands

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Chef Peter Lipson (Northern Spy, Empellon) is serving up seafood with a view of the Williamsburg bridge in this South Williamsburg cafe. The interior design is rustic-chic and dishes like Passatelli Pasta (littleneck clams, calabrian chili, smoked pecorino) and Monkfish (caulifower, watercress, fennel bisque) do not disappoint. It’s also a great spot to have a drink and a light snack if you’re feeling peckish and want a fancy cocktail in a lovely setting.

Featured Reviews

  • Picturesque views of the bridge with homey plates of seafood on the menu. Chef Peter Lipson—whose resume includes stints around the world in addition to credits in parts of the Empellon empire, as well as Northern Spy—channels his varied career into the ocean, presenting dishes almost entirely sourced from the sea. Bluefish cured in sake comes with hunks of grapefruit doused in fish sauce with herbs. Passatelli—which are noodles formed from breadcrumbs—serves as a base for littleneck clams with rich Calabrian chili, smoked pecorino and more crunchy breadcrumbs.

Getting There

Amami

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Fresh sushi and craft cocktails in a laid-back and chic pub setting. There’s also ramen and an assortment of small plates to share, like Popcorn Shrimp (in a honey-sriracha crema) and Grilled Japanese Squid with a basil-ginger glaze. Everything goes well with a Japanese Old Fashioned (Iwai Japanese Whiskey, Fresh Ginger Mint Syrup) or one of their many Sakes. Best of all, prices are very reasonable.

Featured Reviews

  • If you’re in Greenpoint, expect this to be your neighborhood sushi spot. It’s on the trendier side (as neighborhood sushi spots go) and the menu is big – in addition to sushi, you can find anything from ramen to pork buns.

  •  a pan-Japanese menu of sushi, yakitori, ramen and other snacks. The wasabi and the soy sauce are house-made here, served alongside pieces of fresh sushi and colorful rolls adorned with jewel-toned roe or wrapped in thin slices of raw fish. There are literally hundreds of different options for fish and seafood, whether raw, skewered and grilled, fried, or steamed with vegetables.

  • The caliber of fish certainly speaks for itself–from rose-tinted slips of seabream to buttery blocks of otoro, portioned into austere rectangles of sashimi or tight, rice-padded coils. Wang lets loose when it comes to signature rolls, though, festooned like floats at a Carnival parade–angled on martini glasses bolstered with sprays of baby’s breath, or assembled on platters and decorative, rough-hewn boards, shimmering with a judicious application of day-glo roe. He maintains that sense of whimsy with another surprise element: brunch, besting tired standbys like benedict and pancakes with seafood okonomiyaki, spicy tuna tekka don and organic azuki bean waffles.

  • the sushi here is fresh and affordable, with standard rolls under $7 and the fancier ones hovering around the $15 mark. The menu is a mix of simply prepared fish and casual Japanese comfort food like soy-glazed pork buns and ramen in a red miso broth. With its sleek décor and long bar, it offers a nice space to gather for carefully made cocktails and reliable, straightforward Japanese dishes. 

Getting There

Beco

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A charming Brazilian cafe and bar with live music, traditional cuisine and great cocktails. Try the Maracuja Capiroska cocktail (Vodka, Passion fruit and pressed sugar cane) or a Traditional Caipirinha. For food, don’t miss the tasty cheese bread and the Feijoada (Brazil’s National Dish) which is a hearty, slow-cooked stew made with black beans and pork. Check their calendar for live Brazilian music. We love this place.

Featured Reviews

  • Daniel 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

  • Tucked away from the bustle of Bedford Avenue, this neighborhood gem offers delicious Brazilian food in an intimate candlelit setting. Dinner highlights include a traditional feijoada—smoky and thick stew with ham hock and black beans—and a shrimp stew that gets its bright flavor from coconut milk and cilantro. Brazilian churrasco—grilled meat—is also available, in the form of a simple filet mignon, nicely charred and served with garlicky collard greens.

  • And you can have a meal at Beco, even though there’s no real kitchen. A short-order cook in the corner of the bar quickly turns out satisfying versions of classics, like feijoada ($18), on a small cooktop. That dish arrives disassembled — beans and meat in a cup, rice and collard greens on a plate, toasted yuca flour in a bowl. It’s big enough for two, but too tasty to share. Split the bar snacks instead, both the excellent pão de queijo ($4), a basket of six puffed cheesy breads the size of Ping-Pong balls; and the sliced linguiça sausage ($6), made by a Brazilian butcher in Newark and browned in a skillet, then finished with cachaça.

Getting There

The Commodore

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The Commodore is the place to go when you’re itching for a campy frozen drink, in a retro setting, with some damn good food to boot. The dive feels like a bar you’d find in Milwaukee in the 70s and once you order a Frozen Pina Colada with Ameretto Float you’ll be transported to that very era. People love The Commodore for its Chicken Sandwich – and with good reason since its made by the same people responsible for Pies n’ Thighs. The menu also features nachos, a burger, and many more artery-clogging delicacies. It’s a great bar so, sure, it gets crowded, but don’t let that keep you away.

Featured Reviews

  • It “looks and acts like a dive bar”, but this Williamsburg standby houses “some of the finest fried chicken and biscuits” going, along with other “revisited” Southern fare and “fabulous cocktails”; its “’70s den” look-alike digs are predictably “packed on weekends”, and the “order-your-food-at-the-bar system isn’t ideal”, but “super-cheap” tabs and an overall “chill vibe” go a long way.

  • First came the gastropub, an import from Britain featuring upmarket pub grub in an ale-drinking setting. Now, welcome the gastrodive, which further blurs the lines between restaurant and bar. The Commodore in Williamsburg, with its old arcade games, Schlitz in a can and stereo pumping out the Knight Rider theme song, offers the city’s best cheap-ass bar eats, served in a seedy venue where folks come to get blotto. The short menu—with descriptions as curt as the service you’ll encounter while ordering your food from the bartender—reads like a classic collection of fryolator junk. But the “hot fish” sandwich, for one, is a fresh, flaky, cayenne-rubbed catfish fillet poking out of both sides of a butter-griddled sesame-seed roll

  • The food is the work of Stephen Tanner, a native of Albany, Ga., who spent much of the last decade working in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, restaurants known for straightforward fare and strong flavors: Diner, Egg, Pies ‘n’ Thighs. Mr. Tanner is talented, but the food at the Commodore shouldn’t be cross-examined too closely. It’s mostly fried, or in a bun, or both. Ingredients are repeated. So are seasonings. So what? The Dead Kennedys never needed more than three chords.

  • In case you aren’t already familiar, The Commodore is a Williamsburg restaurant by Pies ‘n’ Thighs alum Stephen Tanner, and it’s bad for you. Bad because merely looking at the food here will jack up your cholesterol thirty points, and worse because everything is so good that you’ll crave it all the time. Eventually you too will be cutting imaginary deals with your organs to justify frequent visits.

Getting There

The Drift

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A stylized dive in Greenpoint (in the former home of Boulevard Tavern) from the same people behind Williamsburg’s popular bar, The Commodore. There are a handful of booths and a long bar with an assortment of taxidermied critters on the wall, lending the place an off-kilter atmosphere. Pretty solid pub grub is available such as The Hangry Man (a Chopped Rib sandwich) and smaller bites including Chips with Onion dip and Deviled Eggs. There’s a small courtyard that’s open when the weather is warm.

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    • Featured Reviews

    • Brief cocktail menus forgo the team’s signature illustrations, although at this point, you’d have to have taken residence under a rock not to recognize The Commodore (a frozen, pineapple and cherry-speared piña colada with an amaretto float), or even the Orange Julio, an equally frosty El Cortez creation of gin and juice, elderflower and aperol. Neither Stephen Tanner nor Dennis Spina had a hand in the food offerings, but Alabama’s Mamie-Claire Cornelius seems to suit the style just fine. Embracing the exuberant, company-wide white trash tradition of pork boats and taco bowls, she’s devised a familiar, southern-leaning lineup of boiled peanuts and pimento cheese plates, and chopped rib, smoked chicken or mushroom sandwiches with mustard, all devoid of elevated, consciously clever chef embellishments. There may be smoked vidalias in the onion dip, but it’s a bit player next to mountains of Lay’s aggressively salted wavy chips.

    • Giving a swanky-looking redo to the former home of Greenpoint’s Boulevard Tavern, complete with tufted leather banquettes and barstools, this hangout from the Commodore and El Cortez team keeps the menu simple, with Southern-accented food like boiled peanuts, a smoked chicken sandwich and banana pudding.

    • Chris Young and the crew behind Williamsburg favorite the Commodore have a knack for opening bars that are fun and well-executed — just silly enough to never be too serious. They brought that to Bushwick with El Cortez a couple years ago, where you can make a meal out of taco salad and piña coladas, and now they’ve opened the Drift on the Greenpoint border. If El Cortez is Commodore on spring break in Mexico, then the Drift feels like what would happen if you moved it upstate or to Vermont. It’s appropriately cozy, with taxidermied animals, wood walls that wouldn’t be out of place in a ski lodge, leather booths, and a couple arcade games.

    • Occupying the former Boulevard Tavern, which closed in 2015, the Drift sits on a grimy strip of Robert Moses brutalism with six lanes of traffic and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway churning overhead. Once inside, the two-room, 750-square-foot rectangle is pleasantly schlocky, with retro signs for Schaefer and Busch Bavarian beer, snowshoe lamps and a backlit picture of a serene mountain lake. Patrons on high-backed chairs unsheathe boiled peanuts at the bar or cluster around aluminum empties in padded banquettes.

    • a homey spot serving breezy cocktails and Southern-style food. Frozen drinks like The Commodore — essentially a piña colada — and the gin-and-Aperol Orange Julio gesture to warmer climates (and the owners’ nearby venues), while cans of Modelo are a reminder that simplest is often best. Tufted leather chairs, wooden walls, and taxidermied animals give The Drift a lodge-like feel and set the scene for comfort first-plates like boiled peanuts, a South Carolina-style chopped ribbed sandwich, and pimento on Saltines.

    Getting There

    Five Leaves

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    Five Leaves sits on the border of Greenpoint and Williamsburg and serves eclectic food at all hours of the day. Fresh flowers are everywhere you look, and the décor is nautically-themed which is always a plus in our books. Though seasonal entrees are sublime don’t miss the burger. Our favorite pancakes are from here on the weekend brunch menu, but we also love the truffle fries. The place has a well-deserved reputation for attracting douchey scenesters and the nouveau riche, making Five Leaves a fun (if a bit irritating) spot to people watch. On the downside, prepare to wait.

    Featured Reviews

    • This all-day Greenpoint “staple” “remains a favorite” in “hipsterville” for “out-of-this-world” burgers, “incredible pancakes” and other “reliable” New American eats; despite often-“crowded” digs and occasional “attitude”, it’s pretty “perfect for brunch” – with the “long lines” to prove it.

    • We still don’t love the food as much as some people seem to, and it can still be very cramped and crowded. But we will say that the consistency has improved – a lot. Brunch is and always has been the best time of day to eat here, but dinner can be a good move too, assuming you know what to order and most importantly – that you can be patient with the scene around you. Then again, I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who is more interested in the eating that goes at Five Points than in the hanging out that goes on at Five Points. If you’re 23, just got a job at Condé Nast, and have yet to taste a truffle fry, bump up this rating considerably. You’re gonna love it here.

    Getting There

    Freehold

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    Freehold has an unusual theme — it’s a hotel bar, lobby, and restaurant, without the hotel. It’s certainly a bit gimmicky, but somehow it all coalesces without feeling like a theme restaurant. First of all, the space is enormous, which makes it a comfortable place to grab a fancy cocktail or have a low-key dinner. Outside, there’s a large, grassy courtyard with tables and ping pong which becomes crowded with a very “New Williamsburg” set during the warmer months. The food won’t blow you away, but is always pretty darn good with standouts including the Chicken Sandwich, a Lobster Roll, and Whiskey Peppercorn Mussels. We especially like mornings and afternoons at Freehold Monday-Friday when it transforms into a comfortable workspace with a clientele that’s largely on their laptops. Breakfast is served daily and there is a weekend brunch.

    Featured Reviews

    • Just as the Ace Hotel lobby did for Flatiron start-up bros, the Freehold offers a community space for Williamsburg’s upwardly mobile set (but with no rooms upstairs). The reception desk is actually a coat check, while the hostess, who lends out Monopoly and Risk, goes by “concierge.” Beneath 16-foot-high ceilings, the freelancing afternoon crowd logs onto free Wi-Fi and takes meetings on mid-century-modern couches. But come sundown, social-media managers let loose with $3 pint specials, outdoor Ping-Pong, and standup- comedy shows.

    • The grassy, spacious outdoor area of this bumping Williamsburg hangout is an apt setting for a cold Bud and a house burger, finished with pickled onions, American cheese and special sauce. Once you’ve had your fill, you can challenge your bargoing buds to a match of outdoor Ping-Pong.

    • The entire space is designed to mimic a hotel lobby, from the front desk/concierge area to the flexible seating design that offers both couches and comfy chairs as well as larger tables for groups to set up. During the day, the large bar offers breakfast and a place to perch while plugging away on a laptop (they offer free WiFi). In the evening, TVs might emerge from their hiding spots and show a local sports game. At night, the music is louder, the lights are dimmed and dancing on all the surfaces is encouraged.

    Getting There

    Grand Ferry Tavern

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    Grand Ferry Tavern is a cozy, under-the-radar Gastropub specializing in great cocktails and fresh seafood. Come for a snack and a refined, old-timey spirit; linger for an entree if you’re feeling hungry. We love their Fried Oysters and Littleneck Steamers. Landlubbers will be happy too with their Wild Mushroom Sheppard’s Pie, Burger and Mac & Cheese dishes. Grand Ferry Tavern, which is a stone’s throw from the East River hearkens back to another era, but without ever feeling too self-conscious about its maritime inspirations.

    Featured Reviews

    • Paisley wallpaper, a mirrored back bar, and ornate chandeliers give the space (from the owners of the Richardson in Greenpoint) an antique feel; while windows overlooking Kent Avenue and the open courtyard in the rear keep the bar well-lit and airy. Come just for drinks or make a meal out of dishes like an Ipswich-clam roll and beer-braised brisket.

    • Outfitted with wood banquettes, damask wallpaper and vintage Harper’s Weekly prints depicting East River life, the bar features 20 Old World European wines and 14 draft beers from all-American harbor towns: Hood River, OR’s Full Sail IPA, Cisco Whale’s Tale Pale of Nantucket and Baltimore’s Heavy Seas Loose Cannon. The seafaring-themed cocktail program includes quaffs like the Hey Sailor, which features navy-strength English gin, Salers aperitif, Aperol and lemon juice; while the Seven Seas Cooler mixes Amaro Braulio, honey, Lapsang souchong tea and 100-proof rhum agricole. Brett Ackerman (Diner, Marlow & Sons) captains the pub-grub menu, lining out a full raw bar (Ipswich clams, East Coast littlenecks), saffron-flecked clam chowder, beer-braised brisket and wild-mushroom shepherd’s pie.

    Getting There