Free Williamsburg

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

Bamonte’s

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If you’ve never been, a trip to Bamonte’s is a must. This classic Italian restaurant has been in operation on Withers St. since 1900. Founded by Pasquale Bamonte, the restaurant is now run by his grandson Anthony who has kept the look and traditions true to its history. Hey it’s even the place Gerry got wacked on The Sopranos. The old world American-Italian setting feels straight out of a movie, making the mediocre food worth the visit. Stick to tasty homemade pastas (ask which ones are made in-house, since they vary) and absorb the scenery.

Featured Reviews

  • Perverse perhaps to name an Italian restaurant with undeniably middling food as one of Williamsburg’s best, but to the extent that Bamonte’s captures something essential — and evaporating — about the neighborhood, to the extent that it serves both as a memento mori and a testament to longevity, it certainly belongs. To understand Carbone, one needs the 116-year-old Bamonte’s. To understand the refulgence, now dulled, of the Italian-American community centered on Graham Avenue, one needs Bamonte’s. So what if the food is strict red sauce and mid-century? Bamonte’s is among the best. Eat, if one must. Drink, if one can. But go at all costs.

  • Think white table cloths, waiters in tuxedos, and as much talk about family in Rome and Naples as Manhattan. And while its Williamsburg hood certainly changed over the last hundred-plus, the dining room at Bamonte’s has remained essentially the same.

  • Forgo the hipster stigma of Williamsburg eateries by heading to Bamonte’s, a classic red sauce joint that serves as a time capsule in both product and presentation. The waiters are tuxedoed, the dining room tables are draped in white cloth, and the menu features every item you’d expect an Italian grandmother to make. The price point is reasonable, so stock your table with the classics in a space that’s been around longer than most in this city.

  • It is the continuity from plate of pasta to plate of pasta, from generation to generation that makes Bamonte’s such a vital, quintessential part of the story of the city of New York. Eating there feels as much a ritual as a meal, and it’s a fuss-free taste of Italian-American cuisine that we rarely see these days. If you live in New York, or just want to understand the city better, you owe it yourself to eat at Bamonte’s, if only once. You won’t only be tasting history—you will become a part of it.

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

Brooklyn Star

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Brooklyn Star specializes in comfort food with a N’awlins twist. Must have dishes include the Molasses Brined Pork Chop and their fantastic fried chicken. Their brunch is very popular and offers up a mean bloody mary. On Sundays and Mondays, they serve fried chicken family-style. A Williamsburg gem. One warning: vegetarians will not have any options here.

Featured Reviews

  • A supremely juicy half roasted chicken offered flavors both delicate (lemons, sage and thyme; a side of verdant pea-shoots) and robust (rice, with curls of—you guessed it—bacon). What a good bourbon could do for this food we’ll never know; a liquor license is forthcoming for beer and wine only. Also in development: dessert. When we visited, the sole sweet was a seemingly improvised dish of strawberries dipped in corn-bread batter, tossed (why not?) into the deep fryer and served with a scoop of vanilla Hagen-Dazs.

  • “Come hungry” to this “excellent” Williamsburg Southerner where “interesting takes” on “good ol’” American food are served up in “plentiful” portions; though it’s “perennially packed” for brunch, the “reasonable” bills, “jovial” staff and “homey” vibe all add up to one “lucky find.”

  • Fools gold, that’s what Brooklyn Star is. The menu reads like an Infatuation wet dream, listing all kinds of unhealthy hotness like fried steak and a molasses pork chop.

     

  • Chef Joaquin Baca’s handiwork at Brooklyn Star displays a fun and creative streak that yields admirable results. Pork chops are brined with molasses, striped bass is poached in duck fat, and roasted chicken is glazed with sweet tea and plated with dirty rice. Gluttony will convince you to bolster a meal here with bacon-jalapeño cornbread or buttermilk biscuits… Though the focus is on the eats, the room is comfortably outfitted with brick red terrazzo floors and grey-trimmed walls. 

Getting There

Casino Clam Bar

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The most unique thing about Casino Clam Bar is the seating arrangement. There’s just one u-shaped bar with about 20 seats, and pretty much every person in the restaurant has a full view of everyone else at any given time. But that’s just part of the fun of this place, and if you enjoy shellfish, it’s worth checking out. Here, you can of course get clams casino – but they also have small menu of things like oysters, ceviche, and uni pasta.

Featured Reviews

  • The most unique thing about Casino Clam Bar is the seating arrangement. There’s just one u-shaped bar with about 20 seats, and pretty much every person in the restaurant has a full view of everyone else at any given time. But that’s just part of the fun of this place, and if you enjoy shellfish, it’s worth checking out. Here, you can of course get clams casino – but they also have small menu of things like oysters, ceviche, and uni pasta. 

  • When Williamsburg’s leading American-regional-food guru, Joe Carroll (of Fette Sau and St. Anselm fame), gets hold of a restaurant space he likes — especially one that comes with a relatively forgiving rent — he tends to hang on to it. So, where once stood Carroll’s Baltimore-style cheese-fish-sandwich shop, Lake Trout, and after that his vegetable-forward tasting room, Semilla, which closed in March, now there is Casino Clam Bar, an homage of sorts to the clam shacks and dive bars the Bergen County native and Jersey Shore aficionado has known. Think old-school meets new-school, or maybe Randazzo’s crossed with ZZ’s minus the $20 cocktails. There are raw littlenecks on the half-shell, shrimp cocktails, and chowder by the cup or bowl, but also bottarga crackers, uni pasta, hamachi collars, cod cheeks, white clam Grandma pizza, and Petrossian caviar.

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

Extra Fancy

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A New England-style seafood pub that’s more of a laid-back dive than its Extra Fancy moniker would suggest. The bar up front is spacious and isn’t usually too crowded. It’s a nice place to have a Narragansett Lager and some Littleneck Clams. Salt Cod Fritters, Lobster Roll and the Steamed Mussels are standouts on a menu that’s mainly from the sea but also features a few Southern classics like Deviled Eggs and Cornbread. In the warmer months they have a patio with frosty frozen drinks and snacks.

Featured Reviews

  • Williamsburg’s Extra Fancy serves fried, grilled, and raw seafood, like fish & chips and lobster bisque fries, plus a notable secret sauce-topped burger. It’s open late — until 2am every night — and its special late-night menu will have you covered should you ever get a midnight lobster roll craving. The brick-and-wood interior is reminiscent of a New England seafood shack, albeit a hipster one.

  • lthough pedigreed chef Ross Florence, late of Le Bernardin, recently parted ways with Extra Fancy, the spot still turns out some seriously tasty seafood snacks. The Cape Cod clam fritters ($9) arrive at the table piping hot and golden brown, accompanied by a tangy chive-buttermilk sauce. Each fried nugget is studded with meaty littlenecks, sweet corn kernels and spicy bits of chili. Landlubbers can chow down on a juicy, grilled kielbasa ($12) served with tangy red-cabbage sauerkraut and swipes of caraway-mustard butter on a hot-dog roll.

  • Williamsburg “meets New England” at this “swinging” seafood joint whose clam shack–inspired menu features “fine oysters” and “fun comfort food” backed by “expertly made” cocktails; the “lovely” garden makes it a “perfect day-drinking” destination, but it’s also “great for late-night nosh.”

Getting There

Fette Sau

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Brisket, pulled pork, ribs, sausage! Fette Sau is a meat lover’s paradise. This Williamsburg institution is just what you’re looking for when you have meat on your mind. We recommend the pulled pork, smoked on premises with a delicious dry rub. All meats are served by the pound. Grab a beer, served in a Mason jar (this is Brooklyn after all) and sample one of there many sides including potato salad, baked beans or broccoli salad.

Featured Reviews

  • Owners of the inimitable beer bar Spuyten Duyvil, had been scouting locations for their second venture when they learned that Tony & Sons, the auto-body repair shop across the street, was renting out part of its fenced-in lot and cinderblock building. The couple preserved the shop’s industrial vibe, outfitting the driveway with picnic tables and the wood-beamed, cement-floored interior … Head chef Matt Lang, late of Pearl Oyster Bar, swaps surf for turf with a rotating menu of pork and beef ribs and shoulders, pigs’ tails, flank steak, leg of lamb, pork belly, and pastrami, all sold by weight and served on butcher paper, sauce on the side. 

  • It’s the “quintessential Williamsburg experience” to “join the hipsters” at this “serious foodie” “heaven” for “awesome” dry-rub, by-the-pound BBQ paired with “artisanal” beers and bourbons; no rezzies means “crazy lines” for “cafeteria-style” service in a “former garage” outfitted with “communal picnic tables” – but to most it’s so “worth it.”

  • Lean baby back ribs come tender and pink in the middle, the tasty meat carrying a hint of smoke and a light rub of espresso and brown sugar. Lang cakes a coriander black-pepper rub onto his thick-crusted pastrami, which gets a sweet, fatty coating from the drippings of its ovenmates…. more ambitious options were comparatively bland, including flank steak and pork belly (save a pulled lamb, beef and pork are Fette Sau’s two exclusive muses). The steak came extra-lean, and the belly was all fat and no marbling. .

Getting There

Kings County Imperial

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Wonderful Chinese-American food served up by two old friends who’ve traveled extensively throughout China and fell in love with the cuisine. The space is warm and cozy with a small bar specializing in Tiki-inspired cocktails. All the dishes are fresh with quality ingredients but we keep coming back for the crispy garlic chicken which is one of our favorite dishes, well anywhere. Our top choice for Chinese food in the neighborhood.

Featured Reviews

  • The best thing on the menu is “crispy garlic chicken” ($24), a half bird with skin like a copper-colored potato chip that seems to float above the tender flesh. It rests in a generous pool of the restaurant’s soy sauce, which has been laced with honey. “My bees made that honey in Pennsylvania,” Young told me one evening. The marriage of East and West is subtle and terrific. There are some misfires, too. Sichuan marinated duck ($13) isn’t the tea-smoked whole specimen you might expect, but a wok-seared breast that rests upon a sprout salad laced with smoldering fresh chiles and sided with the scallion-ginger relish that usually accompanies Cantonese charcuterie. This trans-regional assortment seems like three separate and unrelated dishes.

  • This is a modern, incredibly satisfying approach to classic Chinese cooking with excellent takes on everything from dumplings both long and soupy, to spring rolls, to crispy garlic chicken, to mu shu duck. On top of excellent food, Kings County is a fun place to hang out: they make great cocktails, and also have a nice outdoor/patio situation for warmer months. Dim sum brunch al fresco? We’re in.

  • Local ingredients go into the “delicious”, “eclectic” Chinese fare at this “lively” Williamsburg hangout, where a “warm” crew serves family-style plates and tiki-inspired cocktails; decked in mahogany, the “cool” digs feature red booths, a curved bar and laser-cut light boxes with vintage Chinese landscapes.

  • The second restaurant from Tracy Jane Young and Josh Grinker (the first is Stone Park Cafe, in Park Slope), Kings County Imperial is the result of the couple’s long romance with Chinese cooking, and their time spent traveling throughout that country, particularly in the central region. The menu doesn’t strive for “authenticity,” and offers both familiar dishes as well as interpretations from all over the cuisine, but there’s no mistaking the emotional connection between the food on your plate and the people who made it for you.

Getting There

Lilia

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You’ll need a reservation, but buzz restaurant Lilia, is not to be missed. Stand-out dishes include the Grilled Clams appetizer, Sheeps Milk Cheese Filled Agnolotti, Veal Steak with Long Peppers and Rigatoni Diavola but you really can’t go wrong. The dining room is elegant and large and the chef, Missy Robbins, is famous for being the Obama’s favorite restaurateur. When the food is this exquisite, it would be a shame to only enjoy Lilia on special occasions.

Featured Reviews

  • Missy Robbins’ “mind-blowing” housemade pastas and wood-fired entrees are declared “exactly what Italian food should be” at this “outstanding” arrival to the Williamsburg dining scene; the “spare-but-warm” space – complete with “lovely open kitchen”, “sweeping bar” and plenty of “buzz” – is overseen by an “excellent” staff, so the only real problem is “getting a reservation.”

  • …Pasta made by Ms. Robbins is a direct route to happiness that has been shut off to New Yorkers since she left the two A Voce restaurants in 2013. Slip a fork into the pappardelle with veal Bolognese. Shiny with just enough herb-flecked sauce that one noodle peels away from the rest as you lift, they are rolled so thin that they’re almost weightless. Taste them, and you notice their delicacy along with the naked simplicity of the chopped veal gently cooked into tenderness with dark and meaty dried porcini. There is no milk in this Bolognese and no tomatoes apart from some juice, but nothing is missing.

  • …New York culinary world might be running out of ideas. But then, at Lilia, Missy Robbins shows up and transforms the dish into a life-changing bite.With the fritters in one hand and your beer in the other, all of a sudden the 90-minute wait for a table (the quote on a Thursday) doesn’t seem so bad. A fire-breathing wood grill sears lamb steaks a stone’s throw away from the bar. Chefs toss rich pappardelle bolognese in the open kitchen. And in back, a soft serve machine waits to be called on as a first-aid tool to counter the restaurant’s markedly spicy rigatoni diavola.

  • Robbins’s cooking throughout is exceedingly smart, assured and refreshingly consistent. The chef holds court at a counter that separates the bustling open kitchen from the sprawling, skylit dining room, performing quality control on the tenderness of a lamb leg as it’s pulled from a roaring wood-fired grill and the spice level of the salsa verde that coats a dish of black bass and roasted Yukon Gold potatoes ($27). (It’s just right, FYI.) That attention to detail renders even the most straightforward preparations—like crimped mafaldine barely dressed in Parmigiano-Reggiano and pink peppercorn ($18)—stunning in their simplicity. Ingredients are sparsely listed on the menu, but not out of some coy Brooklyn minimalism—what you see is what you get at Lilia. And trust us, you’ll be happy with what you get.

Getting There

Llama Inn

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The Llama Inn is a Peruvian restaurant with shareable dishes and South American-influenced cocktails. They serve Anticuchos, which are skewered meats and a popular street food. Try them, they’re delicious here. You can also share a Peruvian rotisserie chicken ($42) which is one of Llama Inn’s highlights. On the downside, the spot can get a bit loud when crowded.

Featured Reviews

  • Behind the windows on this triangular lot, the Llama Inn is something different. There are skewered beef hearts under a red mash of salsa that rattles with the heat of rocoto peppers. Bites of goat neck, thickly seared and braised until tender, are dark under a glaze that gets its mouthwatering tang from chicha, a beer brewed from Andean corn. Together with a fresh cilantro sauce, it makes the goat so compulsively good that we were all clamoring for the last forkful. Chilly and firm pieces of fluke ceviche, starting to go opaque in the acid of a smoky dashi, are wonderful to eat with soft bits of fried sweet plantain and crisp chips of green plantain.

  • The warm, open space channels a classic Peruvian corner bar. Natural wood furniture, tiled floors and steal beams decorate the room, and there’s a bar that’s great for coffee or dessert. Think traditional fluke ceviche, served tart with lime, dashi, plantains, sweet garlic, red onion and cilantro, as well as savory duck sausage with farro, butternut squash, beer, cumin and spinach. Adventurous eaters might opt for beef heart with garlic and rocoto salsa and queso helado for dessert.

  • You’ll probably want at least three people to do justice to those platters, but Llama Inn needn’t be a feast-only destination; excellent cocktails, many that plumb the hidden depths of pisco, the national grape-brandy spirit, make the bar a destination in its own right. (The Peruvian grilled-meat skewers called anticuchos are ideal bar snacks — try the fermented-soybean-slathered chicken thigh or the char siu pork.)

  • The food is Peruvian, or at least Peruvian-inspired, and it’s all highly tasty. It’s a place to get adventurous, if you want, with beef heart skewers and goat’s neck, but it’s also a people pleaser of a restaurant, with some roast chicken and ceviche ready and waiting. We actually ate our way through the menu with some friends who grew up in Peru, and while no one thought it was exactly an authentic taste of home, everyone agreed the food all tasted good. By the way, if you’re looking to take a trip to somewhere with amazing restaurants, go to Lima ASAP. In two days, we had four of the best meals we’ve ever had.

Getting There