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 toasting to the kitchens and bars that defy strict categorization. This is inspired by our latest on Bodega Nights, which is not a bodega or a wine bar, but a fun, sophisticated restaurant concept from the couple behind the Lower East Side’s Babysips in a neighborhood that desperately needed a grown-up dinner option. And, from what we can tell, it’s a blast.

But the new spot in Bushwick’s bustling club corridor is just the latest in a wave of line-blurring bistros with elite drink menus and local watering holes with killer kitchens. Over in Bed-Stuy, Matt Diaz’s Bar Birba is still pouring hand-picked Italian naturals and slinging properly portioned paninos and personal pies on Franklin Avenue. And just a few blocks from there, Place des Fêtes, the Michelin-starred Oxalis team’s swing at a wine bar, is not only still connecting, but consistently knocking it out of the park, with picturesque plates, small and big, and maybe the best pork chop you’ll ever eat.

See where to eat this week in Brooklyn below.

Photo by Scott Lynch

At Bodega Nights, Bushwick’s Club Corridor Finally Gets a Grown-Up Dinner Option

Zoe Clifton and David Wilson didn’t plan on all this happening so fast. The couple had only been running their first business, the tiny, “working glass wine bar” Babysips on the Lower East Side, for less than a year when their buddy Matt Etchemendy alerted them to an amazing space right next door to the Bushwick branch of his Ace’s Pizza empire.

“Our goal was always to open another place at some point,” Clifton told Brooklyn Magazine. “Someplace bigger, with outdoor seating, but we assumed that was going to come much farther down the line. And then we saw this space and thought, Oh my god—this is everything we’ve always wanted. The high ceilings, the big windows… It felt so good.”

And we are so happy they did. Bodega Nights is exactly what this party zone of Bushwick needed. It’s a comfortable, totally unpretentious wine bar with a tight list of what Wilson calls “artisanal, small farmer wine; wine that’s made by a person in the fields who is passionate about what they’re doing.” Categories range from no skin to more skin to a little red to a little more red, and prices are gentle enough for you to experiment a little: $16 for a glass, lots of bottles between $60 and $80.

Plus, the vibe at Bodega is one of easy enjoyment, communal conversation, and no gatekeeping allowed. “We love hosting. We love having people over. And wine is the elixir of community,” Wilson said. “This isn’t a bar to get wasted at. I mean, you can get a little drunk, but it’s more about meeting people and sharing wines. As we like to say, ‘The liquid shouldn’t be precious; the moment should be.’”

Photo by Scott Lynch

A Bed-Stuy Pizza and Wine Spot from The Co-Founder of For All Things Good

As far back as he can remember, Matt Diaz always wanted to open a wine bar. In fact, before becoming a fixture on the Bed-Stuy hospitality scene for his popular masa and tortilla spot For All Things Good, which he runs with and Carlos Macias, Diaz spent more than a decade in the wine importation and distribution business. Before that, he went to school to study winemaking.

But while his almost-equal passion for masa won out in 2020 with the opening of For All Things Good during the first fall of the pandemic, Diaz wouldn’t let his wine bar dream die. And in September, when a space opened up right across Franklin Avenue where Nice Pizza had been for some 15 years, Diaz pounced, swooping in ahead of other potential candidates by literally staying up all night to write a business plan that would secure him the lease. And so Bar Birba—the name means “mischievous,” or like a troublemaker—was born.

Photo by Scott Lynch

The Team Behind Michelin-Starred Oxalis Opens a Lively Wine Bar in Clinton Hill

Chef Nico Russell, beverage director Piper Kristensen, and operations guy Steve Wong have all been around for a while now, with time spent at the likes of fine dining mecca Daniel and pioneering cocktail bar Booker and Dax, but their signature move these days, it seems, is turning their own experimental pop ups into hit Brooklyn restaurants.

Oxalis, the trio’s acclaimed tasting menu place in Crown Heights, began life as a roving food-and-wine show, hitting more than 30 different spots around the city before settling in on Washington Street at the end of 2018. It subsequently earned a Michelin star two years in a row.

Place des Fêtes, their excellent new wine bar in Clinton Hill, has more of a Covid-era origin story: The team first launched the concept in the alley behind Oxalis, back in the early days of the pandemic when dining outside was the only option. (Wong and Russell also sold groceries out the front door, hawked breakfast burritos, and personally delivered meal kits to get Oxalis, and its staff, through those dicey times.) The casual small plates format of Place des Fêtes had long been appealing to Russell and Wong, and their makeshift effort in the back of Oxalis turned out to be popular with the locals, so they knew they wanted to make the party permanent somewhere. When a space on Greene Avenue, the former home The Finch, became available, they pounced.

“We really love this neighborhood,” Russell tells Brooklyn Magazine. “I live in Clinton Hill, Steve lives next door in Fort Greene, and we’ve always really loved this space specifically. We knew the previous owners well, we’d eaten here a bunch, and when we saw it was on the market we kind of jumped at it.”