Free Williamsburg

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

Cafe Mogador

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An American cafe on the quieter end of Bedford Ave great for a casual, low-key meal. Rabbithole is not a “destination” restaurant and that’s a good thing when you want a reliably good brunch or an unpretentious dinner spot. The Lamb Burger is popular as is the Homemade Potato Gnocci with Wild Mushrooms. They have a small garden for outdoor dining in the warmer months.

Featured Reviews

  • “Everything is delicious” at these “popular” Moroccan “standbys” that are especially known for their “unbeatable” brunches; “tight seating” and “long waits” are part of the deal, but “gentle prices” help, and Williamsburg’s “cute indoor garden” is especially “charming.”

  • It’s a casual place serving Moroccan/Israeli food, although they do a more-or-less standard breakfast and brunch. Weekends get slammed, however, so expect a wait for brunch and dinner. And try to sit in the greenhouse-like area out back. It’s a good place to eat a chicken stew with couscous.

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

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

Diner

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Located near the Williamsburg Bridge, when you step into Diner, which inhabits a refurbished 1926-dining car, you’re immediately transported to another era. Diner was one of Williamsburg’s original “hip” dining establishments and has not lost any of its caché. The menu changes frequently, but expect delicious takes on diner classics and traditional American cuisine.

Featured Reviews

  • “Handwritten menus” announce the daily roster of “consistently excellent” New American bites (including a “phenomenal” burger) at this “funky” local fixture in Williamsburg; set in a 1920s dining car and overseen by a “knowledgeable” crew, it has a “quintessential hipster” vibe that carries over to the outside seating area.

  • Andrew Tarlow’s first restaurant is no longer the Southside loner it was when it opened in 1999. These days, it’s credited with creating and typifying the hip, seasonal, and Americana-mining New Brooklyn restaurant. The kitchen’s alumnus list is an all-star team of the Williamsburg restaurant scene — it includes founders of the Commodore, El Cortez, the Meat Hook, Pies ’n’ Thighs, and Saltie — and indirectly spawned a legion of admirers and imitators. Diner, though, at least pretends not to know it, even if the crowd is more well-heeled and maybe a little more foreign. The servers are still effortlessly cool, the floor remains uneven, and specials will forever be written out on a piece of paper tableside by a server who’ll sit down with you, if there’s room, and explain what’s up.

  • Diner has been a Williamsburg institution for a decade now. Originally built out of necessity by two friends in need of a place to eat, drink and hang out – it soon became not only their home base, but every other recent settler’s home as well. It’s like the hipster Plymouth Rock. As expected, Diner takes the form of, well, a diner. It’s basically a hole in the wall, and if it weren’t for the constant crowds, you’d probably wonder how a place that looks like this stays in business. Everyone inside is most definitely cooler than you, but they don’t think they’re better than you.

Getting There

Dokebi Bar & Grill

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The place to go in Williamsburg when you’re craving Korean BBQ. Less crowded than many of the places you’ll find in Koreatown ( if admittedly less authentic) Dokebi Bar & Grill is a neighborhood staple. Other than the BBQ, which can be cooked in the kitchen or DIY style at your table, standouts include their fantastic Korean Tacos, Tuna Sashimi Bibimbap, and a dish known as Japchae — stir-fried cellophane noodles made from sweet potatoes. Dokebi Bar & Grill is great for groups and even has a fairly impressive cocktail and craft beer selection, so you’re not stuck drinking Heineken. If you’re in Greenpoint, visit the charming Little Dokebi — a smaller, intimate version of Dokebi Bar & Grill with a more focused menu.

Featured Reviews

  • You see a Korean restaurant in Williamsburg, and immediately you think scene over substance. That this is not the case at Dokebi is evident as soon as you start slurping soon dubu, an unapologetically briny, fiery stew of clams, shrimp, and tofu. Fortunately, this dish is no aberration. Except for a flavorless rendition of japchae, the classic glass-noodle stir-fry, the food is fresh and tasty, from the banchan, the collection of little dishes that accompany the Korean meal, to the bibimbap, a pile of rice, meat, and vegetables that cooks in front of you in a scalding hot stone bowl.

  • While Dokebi isn’t as authentic as a K-Town favorite like Kunjip, if the name of your game is comfort, than you’ve come to the right place. You come for three things: ridiculous Korean BBQ tacos, Bibimbahp in a hot stone bowl, and the extremely Chronic Brunch that’ll take good care of your hangover,

  • a thoughtful, health-conscious menu that does not so much forsake tradition as refurbish it, with modern fixings… On a drizzly night, a trio of friends sat down on maple-wood seats hand-built to resemble those in the courtyards of traditional Korean homes. Over yuzu cocktails, the group began grilling slices of crimson kalbi (Angus off-the-bone short ribs) and sashimi-grade tuna, an addition that Kim made to accommodate pescatarians… Next up were Korean tacos, ranging from spicy fish to pork shoulder to tofu. All arrived on corn tortillas (instead of flour, for gluten-free diners), plumped with bean sprouts, lettuce, and radish. The unanimous favorite dish? Samgyeopsal, braised grass-fed Berkshire pork belly that crisps into golden hunks and melts on the tongue like a good dirty joke told by a dokebi: a touch naughty but indisputably satisfying.

Getting There

Egg

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An uber-popular breakfast and brunch joint. The food is fantastic but the lines are excruciating.

Featured Reviews

  • Egg has been in heavy rotation for what seems like decades at this point (probably since 2009). We love this place. There’s no bullsh*t here, just a stark white space with friendly service and reasonably priced, high quality food. The only downside? Don’t even bother trying to compete with the crowds on the weekends.

  • Known for “one of the best brunches in town”, this Williamsburg daytimer packs ’em in for “very good”, “simple” Southern dishes made with ingredients from its own upstate farm; there are “lengthy” waits on weekends, but given the “hip”crowd, at least there’s good “people-watching.”

  • This Southern-accented breakfast-only abode has no parallel in Billyburg or beyond. Perch on mismatched chairs at a paper-covered table, wake up at a leisurely speed to the old-time folk music on the sound system, and tuck into a cheap meal that may include eggs Rothko (a slice of brioche with a hole in the middle that accommodates a sunny-side-up egg, all of which is covered with sharp cheddar) or a terrific country-ham biscuit sandwich.

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

The Four Horseman

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The Four Horseman is a fantastic, minimally designed wine bar that gets attention for the wrong reasons. Sure, it’s partially owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, but the truly interesting thing about this bar in South Williamsburg is its great wine selection and charming atmosphere. The design is informed by Nordic and Japanese minimalism, with wood-lined walls and ceilings and (of course) amazing acoustics. The wine list is extensive, but the staff is friendly and helpful when it comes to selecting one that fits your mood. Charcuterie with house-made bread is available, as are a number of small plates — we recommend the Beef Tartare. If you’re having dinner, the menu leans Italian and New American with typical dishes including Potato Gnocchi ($20), St. Louis-Style Sweet Port Ribs ($20) and a Pork Ragu ($20).

Featured Reviews

  • Fear not if you know little to nothing about natural wine, the Four Horsemen is staffed with knowledgeable servers who will help you navigate the menu and let you taste anything. A focused food menu complements the wine, featuring small plates like cheese & charcuterie plus more dinner-satisfying options like flank steak and potato gnocchi. The Grand St space is small and minimal, with a bar upfront and small tables in the back.

  • Four Horsemen is a really cool little room. It’s the kind of place you walk into and immediately think to yourself, “I can definitely hang out here. Let’s drink.” It feels like a more comfortable version of Momofuku Noodle Bar, and is filled with a hip but unpretentious crowd. The attention to detail is impressive, from the colorful knives and wooden spoons to the subtle design details, like the slats on the ceiling going in different directions, and the super cool texture on the walls. Also, the natural wine list is well-priced and expertly curated.

  • A “killer wine list” filled with “quirky” finds is the headliner at this Williamsburg nook from musician James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), but the seasonal American fare is “spot-on” too; “sleek” and “perfectly dimmed” with a front bar, it draws “hip, but mature” types who keep the mood “convivial.”

  • You’re sipping wine in Murphy’s house, and it certainly feels like home. Cedar ceiling slats and decorative burlap sacks double as acoustics-enhancing sound absorbers for a crowd-pleasing playlist of equal parts Van Morrison and Kate Bush. Warmly personalized touches—cutlery from Murphy and Topsøe’s wedding, eucalyptus-scented bath towels—invite you to stay for another glass. If this is what the apocalypse looks like, sign us up.

Getting There