The four Brooklyn restaurants ‘America can’t afford to lose’

By Brooklyn Magazine

Are these restaurants we can’t afford to lose?

Lists were invented to argue over, enrage and argue over some more. Enter Esquire, which has compiled this list of 100 restaurants America–as in the entire country—can’t afford to lose.

“We’re raising a toast to these spots around the country—old and new, scruffy and spiffy—because if we lose them, we lose who we are,” they write. It’s an interesting thought experiment. Which restaurants could you not live without? They ask:

What if you were to wake tomorrow morning and learn that that remnant of your life—and that portion of your community’s lingua franca—had been erased? Such a prospect has been a real threat all year, with the relentless tragedy of COVID-19 leaving many American restaurants, even established classics, on the brink of bankruptcy.

Sure, we all have our own opinions about which restaurant-sized hole would stop our hearts. In this case, 12 New York City spots made the list (which means 12 percent of all of the restaurants this country can’t afford to lose are based in New York, for those keepings score). Sadly, the list is not ranked. Esquire is too smart for that. Which, fine.

Four of those twelve (4 percent of the restaurants “America can’t afford to lose!”) are based in Brooklyn, perhaps possibly just hinting at a local bias, which, for the record, we’re cool with. (Two others—Detroit’s American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island—have suspiciously Brooklyn names.)

It’s hard to argue against the four from Brooklyn. They are: Bushwick darling Roberta’s (in spite of having arguably peaked before its messy 2015 ownership divorce), Sunset Park dim sum staple Bamboo Garden, Smith Street’s Bar Tabac (one of the 100 in the country we can’t afford to lose, we remind you), and … Terre in Park Slope.

You may commence arguing.