Free Williamsburg

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

Acapulco

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A wonderful, atmospheric Mexican diner at the end of Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint. Start with the fresh tortilla chips and guacamole and move on to the Carnitas (roasted pork) or Chorizo (spicy sausage) Tacos. Portions are huge, so be sure not to over-order. One bite and you’ll be transported to a bustling counter joint in Mexico City. The Tortas — the Mexican version of a sandwich – are stellar as well. It doesn’t get any more authentic than Acapulco.

Featured Reviews

  • The enormous signboard menu behind the counter carries both Mexican and American basics from soft tacos to tuna melts with fries. A few surprises include tacos cecina, a sort of Spanish beef jerky with cilantro, onions and white sauce in a soft corn tortilla, and the Crunch French Toast made with thick fluffy slices of challah dredged in batter and coated in crushed corn flakes. The food’s not San Diego quality, but nothing comes out too badly and it’s all exceedingly cheap.

Getting There

Casa Pública

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Focusing on regional Mexican home cooking with an opening menu of small plates like esquites, ceviche, tacos, and dishes like stuffed squash blossoms. Large plates include pozole verde and roast chicken with chile adobo.

Featured Reviews

  • Truitt — whose experience includes working under the Adria brothers at El Bulli and Stephen Starr at Morimoto — is focusing on regional Mexican home cooking with an opening menu of small plates like esquites, ceviche, tacos, and dishes like stuffed squash blossoms. Large plates include pozole verde and roast chicken with chile adobo. Montagano — formerly at Extra Fancy and La Sirena — is heading up front of the house and overseeing a cocktail selection that’s heavy on micheladas, frozen drinks, and cocktails for two or more.

  • The restaurant’s design is influenced by Mexico City’s rich history of Art Deco architecture… with a menu that blends Mexican home cooking and market dishes…There’s a trompo Truitt will use to make proper al pastor tacos, also offered with fillings like steak with melted cheese, and stuffed squash blossoms with huitlacoche mayo. Tostadas will be topped with crab, uni, and peanut salsa, while more substantial dishes will include chilaquiles with mole, and crispy soft-shell crab with hominy polenta. The desserts will be simple sweets, including a flan made with goat’s-milk caramel, strawberry sorbet, and an ice-cream version of tascalate, the toasted maize-and-chocolate drink from Chiapas.

  • The decor and the dishes are both meant to evoke the past and present of Mexico City. In this interpretation, that means heirloom corn tortillas for carnitas ($8) and squash blossom ($13) tacos; tostadas topped with crab, sea urchin and avocado in a spicy peanut sauce ($20); and Pollo Abobada ($24), roasted chicken in guajillo adobo with fingerling potatoes and a pico de gallo made with nopales (cactus).

Getting There

Guadalupe Inn

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A Mexican restaurant, cocktail bar and supper club from the same people behind Mesa Coyoacan. The menu is gluten-free with shareable dishes including Veal Meatballs, Tacos Estilo Baja (beer-battered fish tacos) and Grilled Octopus. Larger dishes include a fantastic Whole Fish Wrapped in Plantain Leaves ($28) and Roast Spring chicken with Mango and Jalapeno salsa ($36). Be sure to order one of their Mezcal or Tequila cocktails. Check their calendar for live music and burlesque.

Featured Reviews

  • The folks behind Williamsburg’s Zona Rosa and Mesa Coyoacan are putting their Mexican credentials to the test in Bushwick with swanky restaurant and cocktail bar Guadalupe Inn… this 80-seater distinguishes itself by pairing delicious food (veal meatballs and green rice, grilled fish wrapped in plantain leaves) with Manhattan-esque aesthetics (brown leather booths and disco balls hanging next to chandeliers).

  • It’s a surprising scene: a burlesque dancer—clad in sequins, tassels and not much else—lifts her leg until a stiletto heel grazes the top of her ear to the sounds of a live jazz trio. No more than a foot away, groups of men in Buddy Holly glasses and women in Stevie Nicks shawls feast on corn-masa tamales fitted with bone marrow ($11), and dark-plum mole studded with grilled octopus ($18).

  • Guadalupe Inn is a grown-up, fancy-ish Mexican place in a part of Bushwick where you mostly just find bars with beer/shot specials. Up front there’s a bar area, and all the way in the back there’s a dining room with a stage. That’s where host live music – so if you’re looking for a more interesting dinner-date spot in the area, grab a table back there. The food is modern Mexican, and their large-format al Pastor platter is fun to share.

Getting There

La Superior

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One of several fantastic Mexican spots in North Brooklyn, La Superior’s focus is on affordable “Street Style” food — the simple, delicious type you’d find at a cart in Mexico City or SoCal. Start with the Chips and Guacomole (duh!) and one of their Quesadillas, a deep fried tortilla filled with an assortment of choices including steak, chicken, or poblano peppers and cheese. The tacos are simple, as they should be, and our favorite is the Chorizo. If you’re feeling more experimental, try the spicy Lengua Taco (beef tongue). The space is small and there’s typically a wait, but La Superior’s strong margaritas will help to ease the pain.

Featured Reviews

  • Williamsburg is now loaded with pricey new culinary hot spots [but] there will always be a need for Cheap Eats in this part of town, and La Superior has been feeding hungry hipsters and getting them ass drunk ever since they settled on Bedford Street, just a few years after the Dutch showed up. La Superior is a down-and-dirty Mexican taqueria, and it’s a cool one at that. This restaurant has always reminded us of a Williamsburg version of Café Habana, but with slightly less awesome food.

  • The half-moon-shaped “street style” quesadillas are a world apart from the typical gringoized versions; the masa crescents are small but substantial, stuffed with things like stewed chicken or poblano peppers and cheese. Tacos, served singly on mini corn tortillas for $2.50 a pop, are a handy way to round out your order. Try the chipotle-spiced shrimp or the lengua, diced bits of beef tongue with cilantro and onions.

  • … La Superior isn’t much to look at. This small restaurant in South Williamsburg emulates a small-town Mexican taqueria, but it reminded my friend of Southern California. A coat of red paint, a row of dim filament bulbs, and a scattering of posters for Mexploitation films with titles like “El Mal” and “Hijos de Tigre” pass for décor. Four well-worn wooden skateboards propped up alongside the service counter contribute to the Angeleno effect. A room that looks so nonchalantly slapped together doesn’t happen by accident, but you can never quite catch the signs of effort.

  • This comfortably dive bar-ish eatery’s plating up Mexican street/diner food like tacos (carnitas, pollo, hongos, etc), Torta Ahogada (sourdough stuffed w/ pork confit and beans), and Pollo Encacahuatado (chicken in mole peanut sauce). For the next few mon

Getting There

Mesa Coyoacan

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Yet another reason to travel to the Graham Avenue stop, Mesa Coyoacan has amazing, inventive Mexican food that is among the best we’ve had in all five boroughs. The Pollo Pipian is fantastic and we keep going back for the refreshing cucumber margarita. Though the shared tables can at times feel a bit cramped — sit at the bar unless you have a group — the stellar food keeps us returning for more.

Featured Reviews

  • There’s “always something to discover” at this “upbeat” Williamsburg Mexican, a dispenser of “sensational” Mexico City–style cuisine and “absolutely killer margaritas” at an “affordable” cost; a “very cool” staff and “creative” decor help keep the mood “warm” and “inviting.”

  • Chef Ivan Garcia grew up in a borough of Mexico City called Coyoacan; the name refers to the place where the coyotes roam. At his swank Graham Avenue spot, it’s best to poach the juicy street-food items from the range of options on the menu. (Cactus salad, for example, may be popular in Mexican markets as the menu suggests, but we doubt it comes on a bed of mesclun in the old neighborhood.) Garcia’s palm-size tortillas recall Mercadito, where he was executive chef before branching out on his own (he also had a stint at Barrio Chino), but his tacos bundle simple, quality proteins: Juicy nubs of carnitas are made from Berkshire pork; beef is grass-fed.

  • Filament bulbs, vintage wallpaper, traditional ornaments and a staircase lined with votive candles give the space a homey Southwestern feel. It’s the perfect atmosphere in which to enjoy Garcia’s excellent and affordable multiregional fare, a worthy addition to the neighborhood and New York’s Mexican dining scene in general. An addictive appetizer of esquites melded the earthy-sweet flavor of corn kernels with a creamy, chili-spiked mayonnaise and salty bits of crumbled cotija cheese. Tangy, tomato-based seafood stew, meanwhile, provided a warming base for tender head-on shrimp, mussels and other toothsome fish. Building on the experience he gained cooking at Mercadito, Garcia also serves superb tacos

Getting There

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.

Tacocina

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Tacocina is a taco spot from the people behind Shake Shack, which would be pretty exciting on its own. But it’s also located in Domino Park, a new outdoor space on the water in Williamsburg, and they have a bunch of picnic tables with great views of the river and Manhattan.

Featured Reviews

  • It’s the first taco stand for hospitality industry titan Meyer — the guy behind such establishments as Shake Shack and Union Square Cafe — and he’s tapped Barbara Garcia, Union Square Cafe’s former sous chef and an Aguascalientes, Mexico native, to oversee culinary operations at the restaurant. Meyer says that while he and plenty of other people have been eating tacos for a long time, he wanted to involve someone who grew up eating them… She put together a menu of six tacos to choose from, ranging from pork and mango to shrimp and chayote tartar to beef and salsa negra. There are two vegetarian options, too: a mushroom and elote sauce taco and a monterey and cotija cheese taco. Chips and guac, cheese chicharrones, and Mexican shrimp cocktail round out the snacks menu, and there’s a vanilla ice cream sandwich slathered with chocolate crunch on one side for dessert.

    It’s a casual affair, with cocktails — including a mezcal negroni — coming in at under $10 and cans of rosé. There’s also draft wine and a tight list of three summery beers. Horchatas and Coke in glass bottles add to the summer vibes. 

  • Tacocina is a taco spot from the people behind Shake Shack, which would be pretty exciting on its own. But it’s also located in Domino Park, a new outdoor space on the water in Williamsburg, and they have a bunch of picnic tables with great views of the river and Manhattan. So, the wait to order at this counter-service spot can stretch over an hour. Once you do get to the front of the line, get the fried mushroom and shrimp tacos, and some small plates, like cheese chicharrones and chips and guacamole. But the main reason you should come here is to drink margaritas on the water with a group. Have one friend get here early and wait in line, or day-drink here on weekends.

Getting There

Tortilleria Mexicana Los Hermanos

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A family-run spot with homemade tortillas and some of the best, authentic Mexican food to be found in Brooklyn. The atmosphere is without frills and the waits can be longish, but the tacos are well worth the hassle. We love the Carne Asada and Chorizo tacos, but you really can’t go wrong.

Featured Reviews

  • Los Hermanos’ menu is so straightforward, the staff doesn’t even feel the need to take your order. To avoid anything getting lost in translation, the system here requires you to jot down your picks on a piece of scrap paper and slide it across the counter to the ladies working the grill. Grab a Mexican soda out of the fridge, or better yet, crack open your BYO-six-pack and wait for your name to be called. If the main area is full, you can even walk into the factory – mind the parked car and the tortilla equipment – and cozy up to one of the tables on the other side of the glass. With tacos priced at $2.25 a pop, tostadas for $2.50, and a quality sized quesadilla for $3.25, you can have a delicious and filling meal at Los Hermanos for under $15. You’re out for BYOB Mexican food, in a garage, in Bushwick.

  • At the taquería, there are seven different filling options—carnitas, enchilada, beefsteak, cecina (salted beef), chorizo, chicken, and veggie—any of which can be had in taco, taquito, torta, or tostada form. The very best of these choices, and everybody’s favorite, is the chorizo. The ground sausage tastes of cinnamon and red chilies, in a floral-funky way. The mix includes bits of creamy white potato slicked with a flavorful orange chorizo oil.

  • A tortilla factory, cranking out fresh, soft patties of corn and flour from its warehouse just off the Jefferson L stop in Bushwick. But in 2006, the owners wisely added a small cantina to the space, where they serve tasty, super-cheap tacos, tacquitas and quesadillas that have been described to me by far more discerning West Coast taco connoisseurs as “the real thing.”

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