Are These the Best Places in Brooklyn?

Yes! No! Kind of!

Look, I don’t know all the best places in Brooklyn. And I’ll admit that at times I got anxious about including all the coolest places for this book. I want to be cool. I always have. But also, I’ve never been able to put in all the effort being cool requires. Shopping for cool clothes? I’m one of those people who gets nervous browsing the racks inside cool stores. I’m always convinced the shop clerk is judging my choices (“You think you can rock that?”).

Brooklyn is the largest borough of New York. Bigger than Manhattan. I really wanted to include more Brooklyn neighborhoods in this borough of 2.6 million people, like Ditmas Park, Flatbush, Dumbo, and Bay Ridge, to name a few. However, there’s only so much I could fit in these pages. Instead, you may notice that the majority of the places in this book are in the more gentrified and hipsterly neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. That’s because when this interview series started, it appeared on the New York magazine partner Bedford + Bowery, which is a blog that covers those neighborhoods in particular. While I expanded coverage to more Brooklyn neighborhoods for this book, I also included a lot of places from where I live, right on the dividing line between Williamsburg and Greenpoint. And the thing is, I could do an entire book on all the rad places in my neighborhood alone. In a post from August 2015 titled “Greenpoint’s Boulevard Tavern To Close After a Decade,” DNAinfo.com referred to a Columbia University study that reported, “between 2000 and 2013, the number of food and drinking places in Greenpoint went up from 52 to 172.” And do you know how many cool bars, restaurants, and shops there are in all of Brooklyn? Nobody knows. It’s been a question that has haunted humanity since the dawn of civilization—or at least since the late nineties. I couldn’t feature only the coolest and best places of Brooklyn, even if I tried. So, screw it, I didn’t try.

Really, if you want to know where the cool places are, steal a phone from a twentysomething in Brooklyn and read all their Snapchats or whatever, because I’ve aged out of the scene. Here’s what I believe, though: all these places are worth a visit by you.

Meet the Regulars is about this magical intersection of people and the places they love—the spaces these people go to again and again because these bars, restaurants, and shops mean so much to them. Getting to experience that through the regulars’ eyes, voices, stories—right there in person—that’s what matters to me the most. My goal was to honor the regulars’ relationships with these places and then show that to you. There are always better bars and hotter restaurants—especially in Brooklyn. These are the people that I met. All of them were super cool to me, mostly because they were so open about themselves. They were so inviting to me inside these places that they call their own.

I keep thinking about this one interview I did with a painter at a very popular restaurant on the border of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. The story was part of my original series, The Regulars, and it was posted on Bedford + Bowery in August 2013. It was titled “Ray Abeyta Apologizes If He’s Ever Ruined Your Quiet Brunch at Five Leaves.” Ray was possibly the coolest dude in Brooklyn. A New Mexican man in his fifties, Ray worked on motorcycles and helped build some of the dopest bars and restaurants in the neighborhood. He arrived in New York City in 1986 and basically became a king of Brooklyn. As I said in a later blog post titled “Farewell to Ray Abeyta, Williamsburg Royalty” on Bedford + Bowery in December 2014, “Ray’s imprint was everywhere: he was a partner at fixtures like the bars Union Pool and Hotel Delmano as well as the motorcycle shop Works Engineering. He was an astonishing artist, with works around town and across the country. He was also a father of two.”

Sadly, only a year after I interviewed him, Ray was killed in a tragic motorcycle accident. Unfortunately, his widow did not have the power to allow me to reprint my entire interview with him for this book. I wanted to include my conversation with him so badly because Ray was such a badass, and, in its short time in the neighborhood, Five Leaves has become a full-on fixture. Daily, it draws locals and tourists alike with long waits on the sidewalk. While I can’t reprint the story about Ray (you can look it up online, if you want), I can quote from it. And I will because his interview had so many hilarious and irreverent moments about everything from “pissin’ at the bar” because you “don’t want to go to the bathroom,” Ray said, to his own role in making a neighborhood too cool: “Granted, I’m the fucking kiss of death,” he said. “Because once an artist moves into a neighborhood everything else follows: cool restaurants, cool bars, cool people. And then New York being New York—or any fuckin’ city—all the tourists and the looky-loos, they all wanna come and hang out. You see [Five Leaves] on the weekends; it’s all weekend warriors.”

During our interview, the subject of death came up because one of Ray’s friends, a longtime Williamsburg restaurant owner, had recently committed suicide and that sent shockwaves of sadness throughout the community. On this matter, Ray casually doled out his own eerily prescient philosophy: “We’re not here for a long time,” he said, “so we have to be here for a good time. The present is all we’ve got.”

Upon Ray’s death, I reposted those words on Bedford + Bowery. A friend of Ray’s told me that quote resonated for so many of Ray’s friends and family. What I left out was Ray’s words of wisdom at the end of that quote, which best captured the moment I had with Ray and what inspired me as I tried to capture more moments like that for this book with these people at the places they consider the best in Brooklyn. “Like right now, to talk about the places we love,” he concluded. “What could be better than that?” I agree, Ray.

(Photos by Nina Westervelt)