Which New Brooklyn Restaurant Was Deemed One of the Best in America?
The Elm! It was The Elm. And even if it’s not a massive surprise that King & Grove’s new restaurant made Esquire‘s short list of the year’s “Best New Restaurants”—it was launched with much fanfare and the help of Michelin Star winning chef Paul Liebrandt, after all— it’s still pretty exciting. Improbably (depending on who you ask), they were the only Brooklyn institution to do so.
Manhattan-based Betony took this year’s top honors, but other than that, no other New York restaurants made the cut. We’ll (mostly) ignore the article’s embarrassing mention of the very most expensive part of Williamsburg as the “heart of Hipsterville, America,” because the rest of their praise for the restaurant is fairly extravagant: “[Liebrandt’s] homage to chicken Kiev is a marvel: a juicy, seasoned chicken breast that, when cut into, floods forth a gush of butter. Such triumphs are the result of the intellect going beyond the sensational in search of true excellence.” Well, that butter-stuffed chicken does sound pretty great, even at 9:30 in the morning. Congratulations, guys. Job well done, tasty-sounding chicken achievement, etc.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.