Calling all Disco Birdies
Matt Diaz is pairing fried chicken and champagne
Here’s a fun story. About five years ago, my son Sam was in first grade and had a morning gathering for presenting schoolwork – folders of simple addition and subtraction, and pages of writing, sentences written in words of assorted shapes and sizes from letters that were more artistic renditions of letters than actual letters, paired with Kandinsky-adjacent crayon drawings of family and pets. SO ADORABLE.
Families were invited to come in for a morning of sharing, and to bring some breakfast to share. On this particular fall morning, the classroom was warm and muggy, crowded with parents and special friends. The buffet table was crowded too-topped with the usual Dunkin munchkins and boxed coffee, store-bought spongecakes, a bunch of under ripe bananas, and some sort of juice. But on this day there was something else. On the edge of the table, past the clamshell of styrofoam-textured chocolate chip cookies, was a massive paper bag, as large as one you might use to collect fallen leaves in autumn, filled to the top with burnished croissants from Bien Cuit. I nearly fell down.
Mornings at Sam’s first grade class were not exactly known for culinary intrigue or excellence; the sweetness came from the heart-exploding pride of pint-sized six year olds beaming about their first pieces of schoolwork. But here were croissants! And not just any croissants – BIEN CUIT croissants, the holy grail of laminated dough.
I grabbed several and sought out the person who brought them – asking parent friends I knew until I found him — Marco Diaz, the father of one of Sam’s best friends whom I had not yet met. I praised his choice, thanked him profusely and knew right away we would become friends. We still are.
A few years later in 2021, at some flag football game or sleepover drop-off, he mentioned that his brother Matt, who had lived in Buenos Aires learning to make wine, was back in town and had opened For All Things Good, a cafe in Bed-Stuy. It was selling masa milled in house on a mollino, and assorted small plates from Oaxaca like tlayudas, tetelas and memelas. Would I want to meet his brother and maybe write about him? Yes and yes. And so I headed over to Franklin Avenue and met Matt and wrote this story about him for Grub Street.
Since then, Matt has built something of an under-the-radar restaurant empire on that stretch of Franklin. He opened Bar Birba, a natural wine bar and pizzeria located in the space that was Nice Pizzeria, and has now taken two more spaces on Franklin opening Disco Bottles (350 Franklin Avenue), a wine shop, and now Disco Birdies at 355 Franklin, a few doors down from his original masa cafe.
The menu at Disco Birdies is built around the restaurant’s drink of choice: $15 glasses of champagne, and leans American with a French twist; so expect bistro burger flavors for the double smashburger (made from waygu and chuck with a bistro burger sauce), a falafel smash (a nod to the North African influences found in Paris), and Matt’s signature fried chicken that’s got a champagne-adjacent flavor profile from milk powder, nutritional yeast and lemon zest to add that bright and yeasty tang. The restaurant’s namesake Disco Fries are all grown up and topped with creme fraiche and caviar, an ideal snack after a night of the disco or Doechi as the case may be. Even the ice cream is flavored with brioche, to mirror champagne notes.
As I mentioned, before opening For all Things Good, Matt lived and worked in Buenos Aires, and had a career in wine, both selling it and making it. So he’s got some amazing wines on his rotating selection by the glass at Birdies, and off beat bottles at his wine shop Disco Bottles, but his hope is that when you come to Disco Birdies you’ll drink Champagne! He’s serving Chavost Brut Assemblage at $15 a glass, “because you should treat yourself more,” he said. The fifteen buck pours of champagne go all night, every night, along with the champagne of beers, Miller High Life. Check it out and be sure to tell Matt I say Hi!
Disco Birdies’s opening hours are Thurs - Sat, 6pm -12am. It is located at 355 Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn. Follow here.
All in my (temporary) 'hood! Have bookmarked them all — can't wait to try!