NO EAT TILL BROOKLYN

Not so long ago, dining in Brooklyn meant grabbing a hot dog while you watched a baseball game. Not anymore. Across the river from Manhattan, the most exciting—and most hidden—dining revolution in New York
By Alan Richman

No place in America is known more for what it used to be than Brooklyn, yet New York City's most sentimental borough must accept reality: The Dodgers, the streetcars, and the nickel bottles of cream soda are gone, and a new Brooklyn has ascended, one that is better than ever, certainly where dining is concerned. The fiercely independent spirit of Brooklyn lives on in neighborhoods as dissimilar as Cobble Hill (mostly tree-lined streets) and Red Hook (mostly impassable streets), and new restaurants are providing their customary service, anchoring communities and stimulating revival.

Even those of us who recall the glories of a pastrami-on-rye on Flatbush Avenue—for some reason a little more satisfying than a pastrami anywhere else—have to concede that the new restaurants are more appealing than the ones that lingered on long after World War II. If they are alike at all, it is not in cuisine but in a fondness for brick walls, overhead fans, and attached gardens. They're also unfussy, but Brooklyn was always that way......

There is a solution: Move on. Pack up the kids and the Bugaboo Frog stroller and head for a part of Brooklyn that still frightens Manhattanites. The best choice right now is Bushwick. It's what Williamsburg used to be, filled with illegal bars and aspiring artists, and it's almost certainly slated for a high-end revival. The right kind of restaurant is already in business. A pastoral place called Northeast Kingdom (the owners made their way to New York from Vermont) offers potted shrubbery outside, a plethora of forest-animal folk art inside, and an organic-chicken potpie. It's wonderfully oddball, precisely what a refugee leaving new Brooklyn and heading for an even newer Brooklyn hopes to find.

Locanda Vini e Olii (Photos: Mark Peterson/Redux).

Brooklyn has always had borough-defining restaurants. Just mention Junior's or Lundy's, and the dreamy-eyed natives will rhapsodize till the cows come home. And you can always spot a Brooklynite by the way he puffs out his chest while claiming world dominance in sweeping categories like pizza and hero sandwiches (no matter what detractors from Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island might say). In recent decades, immigration has added a wealth of multicultural flavors to the mix, with a bustling Chinatown here, a mini-Mexico there, and a thoroughfare divided harmoniously between Pakistani, Israeli, and Turkish joints. That's modern-day Brooklyn for you.

But so, culinary chroniclers say, is a type of newfangled Brooklyn establishment - one marked by its presence in recently or soon-to-be gentrified neighborhoods, and one connected to the Manhattan restaurant scene by pedigree and ambition. The New Brooklyn Cuisine (or NBC) restaurant is a subspecies of the New American restaurant, and probably originated in Boerum Hill or Park Slope, where aspiring restaurateurs went in search of cheaper rent, leafy streets, and moneyed clientele, spread to Williamsburg and Fort Greene, and is currently making inroads into Red Hook and Bushwick. Typically tiny, often mom-and-pop-run, built on a shoestring, and devoted (ostensibly) to local, organic, sustainably farmed ingredients, the NBC restaurant has become as much a part of the borough's culinary identity as a Peter Luger porterhouse.

With few exceptions, these establishments have no publicist and no celebrity chef, and the do-it-yourself approach extends to everything from construction to checking coats. Stylishly makeshift and family-friendly, they're selling a lifestyle as much as a meal. Movements like this don't appear out of thin air, of course, and a lot of NBC ventures can trace their roots back to two Manhattan breeding grounds: The Greenmarket-obsessed Savoy, which begat fervent NBC chefs and owners like Franny's Andrew Feinberg, the Grocery's Charles Kiely and Sharon Pachter, plus Rose Water's John Tucker; and Balthazar, where a handful of bartenders and managers studied at the McNally school for effortless cool and went on to open DuMont, Ici, Locanda Vini e Olii, and 360. With a chef from Savoy and McNally-pedigreed owners, Diner and its adjacent oyster bar, Marlow & Sons, have all the NBC bases covered.

But that's just the tip of the Kings County iceberg. NBC restaurants are spreading faster in their home borough than illicit immersion circulators on Manhattan's haute cuisine circuit. Here, then, are our top fifteen picks. To pinpoint their exact locations, turn to our handy map on page 96.

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15 Northeast Kingdom has brought deer antlers (an allusion to its mom-and-pop owners' Vermont roots) and sunflower-sprout salads to a bleak Bushwick intersection. Comfort food like lamb stew and chicken potpie isn't groundbreaking, but it is satisfying, as is the friendly, rough-hewn place itself.