Free Williamsburg

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

Birds of a Feather

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There’s a lengthy menu filled with Sichuan crowd-pleasers. The owners also run the well-regarded Cafe China in Murray Hill (and the less-well-regarded China Blue in Tribeca).

Featured Reviews

  • There’s a lengthy menu filled with Sichuan crowd-pleasers. The owners also run the well-regarded Cafe China in Murray Hill (and the less-well-regarded China Blue in Tribeca)… The decor is a bit weird, but endearingly so, with old, clunky furniture … but there’s also a minimalist feel with the light-wood communal table, booths, and two-tops…  Birds of a Feather has enough winners to warrant your attention even in this restaurant-saturated section of Williamsburg, and Sichuan fans hankering for some heat and tingle should be satisfied with the intensity of flavors here. A solid addition to west Grand Street.

  • Williamsburg locals seeking out classic Sichuan dishes will find some on the soft opening menu at Birds of a Feather. Dishes like mapo tofu with minced pork, braised beef in a spicy chili stew, sautéed string beans, and double-cooked pork are currently available, though the menu will likely see a few changes before the grand opening.

    Birds of a Feather, seating between 60 and 70 people, is the third restaurant for Zhang and Wang. Besides Cafe China, they also own China Blue, a Tribeca restaurant specializing Shanghai cuisine.

Getting There

Falansai

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Street-food Hanoi and Saigon style, with a subtle french twist. An eclectic blend of dishes with just enough French influence to make them decadent. We recommend the Clay Pot Catfish and the Lemongrass Pork Chop.

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  • In a dark, industrial corner of Bushwick, the son of a Chinese refugee has opened a Vietnamese eatery and cheekily named it after his father’s mispronunciation of “français.” As you enter, you’ll see a lightbulb hanging in a pagoda-shaped birdcage and hear loungey French music that quietly fills the sparsely decorated interior. At lunch, you can slurp up beef-noodle pho and munch on Dad’s shrimp roll, which tastes like a crab cake and has a crispy tofu skin wrapping. At dinner, tender little cubes of filet mignon come to your table fresh from the wok.

  • New York’s roster of fancified Vietnamese restaurants is growing, from Nightingale 9 in Carroll Gardens to Bún-Ker in Ridgewood and Falansai in North Brooklyn. They’re a change-up—if not always successful—from the city’s more casual restaurants, many of which in Chinatown, that hunker down with classic dishes like banh mi or pho. Falansai offers both of those things, but plenty more with a sophisticated edge, and they do so in an equally classed-up setting that has plenty for vegetarians.

Getting There

General Debs

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General Debs is a Sichuan restaurant from the same people behind Faro and formerly Northeast Kingdom. The menu is a huge departure from their other ventures, but don’t let this deter you. Expect traditional Sichuan dishes at General Deb’s — hot sesame noodles, bang bang rabbit, twice cooked pork — even though the owners aren’t Chinese. As with their other ventures, ingredients are always fresh and dishes are all made with care. General Debs offers some of our favorite Chinese food in Brooklyn.

Featured Reviews

  • The menu at General Deb’s pays tribute to the provincial cuisine using sustainably raised meats from Autumn’s Harvest Farm in upstate New York, like rabbit that’s roasted whole and slicked with a chile-and-fermented-bean-paste sauce. The bean curd for mapo tofu will be made in-house, and “fish slices in fiery sauce” will employ local seafood like black bass rather than the ubiquitous tilapia. There will also be wontons in red oil, dan dan mian, twice-cooked pork, cumin beef, and gong bao ji ding (a.k.a. kung pao chicken), plus a full bar serving beer, wine, and cocktails.

    Adey is known for his pastas at Faro, which he makes from house-milled flours, and plans to eventually do the same for all his noodles at General Deb’s. But to start, he’ll outsource some from ramen kingpin Sun Noodle for iconic dishes like niu rou mian, the Taiwanese beef-noodle soup said to have originated with the influence of the Sichuan military families who migrated to the island after the Chinese civil war. Instead of the shank and tendon that usually populate that bowl, Adey is garnishing his anise-infused broth with red-cooked cow’s-head meat, in keeping with his whole-animal-utilization philosophy. “Cows have heads, too, and they’re excellent for soup,” he says. “At Faro, we fill the tortellini en brodo with meat from the head, and the consommé we make out of it is insane.”

  • General Deb’s is a Sichuan restaurant in Bushwick from the same people behind Faro, an Italian spot nearby. But unlike that place, General Deb’s is small, dimly-lit, and crowded with maybe one more table than there should be, as well as people sharing wontons in chili oil, pickled vegetables, and noodles. Most things on the menu are both very good and pretty spicy (although the wontons could have used a little more chili oil), so if you enjoy the slow burn of Sichuan peppercorn that sometimes makes your glass of water taste like it’s vibrating, you’ll like the food here. Overall, it’s a great addition to the neighborhood.

  • The “fish slices in fiery sauce” ($18) was a perfect evocation of what is often my favorite dish in the Sichuan restaurants of Flushing, Chinatown, and the East Village: a bowl of red chile oil swimming with fish filets and seething with Sichuan peppercorns. Take drink of cold water after a bite and your mouth feels like stainless steel. Wonton in red oil ($10) was another example of a dish true to its antecedents, requiring only a quick stir to be fully enjoyed.

    Other dishes represent a reworking of traditional Sichuan fare. The rabbit appetizer on most menus is a bony but delicious plate of rabbit slicked with oil and dotted with peppercorns. Here, the bunny is boneless, and a dark sesame sauce has been added. Improvement or unwarranted meddling? You decide….

    Beverages include wine, beer on draft and in cans, spirits, and invented cocktails. As far as Sichuan restaurants go, this one is likely to make you very happy: reverent toward its models, with a few interesting tweaks

Getting There

King Noodle

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A fun, Southeast Asian noodle joint with a kitschy, tropical design and Tikki-style cocktails. Following mixed reviews when they first opened, the owners switched up the design making it slightly more tasteful and paying more attention to the food. Oddball dishes still remain like Mapo Tofu Chili Cheese Fries (pork chili, tofu, cheese and scallions) and Spam Fried Rice but more standard fare like a Whole Fried Fish and Green Curry Noodles are also in the mix. A fun place to take a group for a tasty, low-key meal.

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  • After two years in Bushwick, the owners of King Noodles decided it was to time to revamp their restaurant in 2015. The swirly, psychedelic interior was swapped out for wood paneling and upholstered booths, though the disco ball and mirrored wall remain, giving the place a quirky ’80s-basement vibe. Menu-wise, the kitchen has shed its kitschy touches — so long, Doritos-topped kimchee carbonara — and taken on a more straightforward Southeast Asian focus, with gentler prices and bigger entrée portions. 

  • King Noodle’s MO is all about hyper-Americanized Chinese food, while combining unique ingredients to develop delicious and slightly avant-garde eats. Leave it to the crew that gave us Dorito kimchee carbonara to come up with mapo tofu chili cheese fries, which feature mouth-tingling Szechuan peppercorns, tofu, scallions, and good ol’ American cheese.

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