Sweet Chick I would not say that Williamsburg, or
NYC in general, needs another southern joint. How much fried chicken can a city
stand (and I love fried chicken)? Battered, craggy and sticky with sweetened
soy like the finest Chinese takeout, General Tso fried chicken, is a different
story. Add a light rice waffle with what appeared by be chopped Chinese
broccoli baked in and you have a fun blackboard special. Lest you think all
this retooled Americana is a young person’s game (jerky fries? purple
drank?) it was good enough for Canadian
Pat Kiernan and family, who'd apparently made the block-and-a-half trek on a Sunday
night.
Laut And then I (or rather my table-mate) spotted
Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova the following night strolling past our window.
I only saw the backs of two tall, skinny people all in black. If an ‘80s
celebrity marriage can last this long, it gives hope for the rest of us. Laut
does the dreaded pan-Asian thing, mostly focusing on Thailand and Malaysia.
Stick with the latter. The laksa and curry mee wouldn’t compete with anything
you’d find in Queens or Chinatown, but where else are you going to get these
spicy soups anywhere above 14th Street? Ok, I take that
back—according to Menupages 12 other restaurants that fit that criteria.
Qi Thai Grill is on Seamless, which tickles me, if
only because it means beef tendon salad and pork belly (not so crisp,
admittedly, after the journey) arriving at my door. Read more here.
Pok Pok And sometimes Brooklyn Thai needs to be
experienced in person. Reports of smaller post-hype crowds may be true, but
there is still likely to be a wait. In my case 45 minutes at 9:30pm on a Wednesday.
Kaeng kradang, a chalkboard special described a cold weather curry, turned out
to be a highly jellied pork terrine, feeling a little more French-Vietnamese
than Thai (though I know it's not). I would eat this on a baguette rather than
with finger-fulls of sticky rice. A duck salad and ribs with a pair of dipping
sauces rounded out the meal, just right for two, despite the server’s warning
that we had under-ordered. Keep your eye out for Columbia Street on a future
episode of The Americans (you’re watching it, right?). Film crews had taken
over a number of blocks near the waterfront. I did not see Keri Russell (who
apparently owns a Brooklyn brownstone, as all celebrities big and small, minus
Pat Kiernan, seem to).
Diner and Dumont While distinct restaurants,
obviously, these two that I hadn't patronized since the early '00s may end up
being Williamsburg old-timers as places like La Villita Bakery and La
Borinquena get pushed out. In the days before 20-somethings regularly dined on
entrees costing roughly their ages, $12 mussels and fries felt fancy (it was
the mayonnaise in lieu of ketchup that clinched it). That was the only thing I
ever ordered at Diner. Dumont still makes a nice burger. Supposedly, so does
Diner but I’ve never tried it (nor the steaks). Because I may be a decade older
but still not free-spending, I didn’t bother ordering any of the specials with
no prices mentioned. I will admit that a squid salad with lentils and fennel and
duck breast with farro and kumquats were definitely a step up from the bowl of
bivalves.
Walter Foods Pretty much the newer but not that new
version of the mid-20s people and prices place. Chicken, steak, pork chops–the
standards–are all ok, but nothing that would explain why the restaurant is
always so packed. While eating steak frites and deviled eggs, I realized that a
Shazam for faces would be a valuable invention. Right before closing, a dude
being filmed showed up and everyone seemed to know who he was. Then again, the
room also appeared to be morphing into a private after-hours space, so perhaps
the room was just filled with his friends celebrating his Kickstarter campaign.
Lodge I would lump Lodge right in with the above or
not even mention it at all. It's always been a non-entity to me, a place with
no appeal. But it was open relatively late on St. Patrick's Day (a blessedly
low-key, non barfy holiday in these parts) and so I stopped in and had my
frequent semi-boring office lunch, steak salad, but jazzed up with pears,
walnuts and goat cheese for dinner. It was certainly better than Flavors and I
give Lodge a leg up for playing My Bloody Valentine’s Ecstasy and Wine and Up For a Bit With the Pastels (neither on Spotify, annoyingly) both my driving to school in the
morning music, taped from record to cassette, of course.
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It didn’t seem right to lump Zizi Limona in with the recent Williamsburg batch. Partially because even though the newish Mediterranean-plus restaurant got
