Where to Eat in Brooklyn This Week

By Brooklyn Magazine

Keeping up with the culinary action in Brooklyn is almost futile. Even with our help, there aren’t nearly enough meals or minutes in the day to hit them all, which is why we’ve been trying something new these last few weeks, sending some suggested destinations directly to your inbox, so you always know where to eat, no matter which corner of Kings County you might be exploring. 

This week, we’re celebrating the re-opening of a 120-year-old Carroll Gardens treasure with a round-up of (somewhat) recent revivals.

We’re, of course, talking about Bar Ferdinando, the latest iteration of the sacred shop that once served spleen sandwiches to locals and longshoremen in a very different version of the neighborhood. In its new life, Sal Lamboglia, an heir handpicked by the former owner, is ditching the spleen for a fresh menu, brimming with lovingly concocted Italian delicacies, including arancini with bolognese, housemade focaccia sandwiches, and a dessert section you’ll want to make room for.

But Ferdinando’s isn’t the only institution on to new beginnings. There’s also Lundy’s, the former Sheepshead Bay seafood palace now serving a mean burger alongside broiled lobsters, deviled eggs with crab, and a show-stopping clam bisque on Beard Street in Red Hook. And finally, we keep on coming back to Hungry Thirsty, the rightful, blazingly spicy successor to instant-hit Ugly Baby, another hallowed space not far from Lamboglia’s mini-empire that may not have enjoyed a century in its former location, but managed to give the neighborhood a lasting kick all the same (and is itself set for a reincarnation in Williamsburg this summer).

See where to eat this week in Brooklyn below.

Photo by Scott Lynch

The Cafe Spaghetti Team Brings New Life to Ferdinando’s, a 120-Year-Old Carroll Garden Treasure

For more than 120 years, Ferdinando’s Focacceria had been holding it down near the western end of Union Street, serving spleen sandwiches and such to the locals and the longshoremen who once swarmed the waterfront over here. A true Brooklyn institution, to say the least.

So, when Ferdinando’s then-owner, Francesco “Frank” Buffa, announced his retirement in 2024, speculation and fear ran through the community about what would happen to the sacred space.

Enter chef Sal Lamboglia, a Bensonhurst native whose three excellent restaurants—Cafe Spaghetti, Swooney’s, and Sal Tang’s—are all within a block or so of Ferdinando’s, and who also, it should be said, is just an all-around great guy. Buffa reached out to Lamboglia and asked him to take over the place. Lamboglia said yes, and so last week began a whole new era for this historic patch of Carroll Gardens with the slightly revamped, mostly intact, Bar Ferdinando.

“I am not resurrecting Ferdinando Focacceria,” Lamboglia told Brooklyn Magazine. “Some people are worried that it’s not going to be the same, and the reality is, it’s not going to be the same. It’s not. But I have Frank’s blessing. I have his wife’s blessing. And I’m holding on to what he did here, paying homage to the space, and keeping a couple of things that meant a lot to him and mean a lot to me.”

Photo by Scott Lynch

In Red Hook, A Second Life for South Brooklyn’s Legendary Lundy’s

Imagine being transported back to 1920s Sheepshead Bay, to the Emmons Avenue waterfront on a warm summer’s night, back when Frederick William Irving Lundy’s namesake restaurant was the talk of South Brooklyn, serving some 15,000 patrons a day and, legend has it, openly pouring booze in the face of Prohibition. The place must have been nuts! Everyone knocking back bootleg hooch and wolfing their buck-fifty lobsters and twenty-cent slabs of huckleberry pie.

Lundy’s would have many more heydays in the nearly 90 years to follow. In the 1930s and 40s, after the first Lundy’s building was condemned and a second was built—a monster, with room for some 2,800 guests—the restaurant was said to be the largest in the nation. In the 1960s, after Lundy had spent years buying up literally every property along the waterfront and refusing to develop any of it, this stretch of Emmons was a South Brooklyn destination frequented for its retro feel.

And, most fatefully for our story, in 2002, five years before it shuttered for good, Sandra Nicholas, who had just moved here from Virginia, and Mark Snyder, a South Brooklyn lifer, settled into their seats at Lundy’s for a second date. The couple fell in love, made a home in Gerritsen Beach, and had a couple of kids. Then Mark opened Red Hook Winery, and last year Sandra launched a project of her own, signing a lease on the former Rocky Sullivan’s space on Beard Street.

Soon afterward, the couple was chatting about their new, still-unnamed place with a guy named Frank Cretella. As Sandra recalls, “We told him we’d love to have one of those simple, traditional Brooklyn establishments where you know what you’re getting when you walk in the door. Places of pure comfort. Places like Peter Luger’s. Places like Lundy’s.”

Turns out, in a total coincidence, Cretella was the keeper of the Lundy’s name. “He told me ‘You should take it. Take Lundy’s. And God bless,’” said Sandra.

Photo by Scott Lynch

Beloved Thai Spot Ugly Baby is Reborn, Gloriously, as Hungry Thirsty

Brooklyn lost one of its great restaurants late last December: Sirichai Sreparplarn’s delightful, delirious Ugly Baby, in which the chef celebrated, without apology, the melt-your-face-off fiery food of Northern Thailand. According to server Napat Ruangphung, who goes by Angie, Sreparplarn was happy with the success of Ugly Baby, but was very tired and “just wanted to take a long, long vacation.”

Hell yeah, dude. Definitely feel you there.

Fortunately —miraculously— for the neighborhood, before he left Sreparplarn asked his staff if anyone wanted to take over the lease on the Smith Street space, and Ruangphung and her fellow server Thanatharn Kulaptip, who goes by Sun, pounced on the opportunity. In quick succession, they teamed up with Ugly Baby kitchen worker Prasert “Tee” Kanghae to be the new head chef, slogged their way up through the morass of city permits, and this past weekend, just a little over a month after we all lined up outside for one last meal at Ugly Baby, Hungry Thirsty was born.

The blessedly quick turnaround means that the Hungry Thirsty team didn’t change much here decor-wise —the walls are still extremely orange, for example— but other than two holdover homage dishes, the menu is completely different from what Sreparplarn was sending out. “We call this home-cooked Thai street food,” Ruangphung told Brooklyn Magazine. “Which doesn’t mean the food we sell on the street; it means the food that families in Thailand have when we gather, for holidays or anytime we’re all together.”