Carroll Gardens is the hottest restaurant neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Untable, Swoony’s, Gus’s, Popina, Laurel, Cafe Spaghetti, and more have made it lit.
I’ve lived in Carroll Gardens several times in my life. The first time was back in 1991, when I moved here after college to attend Brooklyn Law School. I was 21 years old and lived on Carroll Street between Smith and Hoyt in a huge one bedroom floor-through apartment on the top of a brownstone owned by a guy named Sal. I might have been the only person on the block who had not grown up there.
I had wanted to live in Brooklyn Heights, closer to the Law School where most of the students lived, but the rents were too high, and my father had found this place out in what I considered the boonies of Brooklyn. “Andrea, it’s safe, and it’s $600 a month,” said my Dad. “But Dad, no one lives here! It’s so far from school!” I remember whining to him. He didn’t care.
I remember us driving down a forlorn stretch of Smith Street pockmarked with burnt out storefronts and shady bodegas. I didn’t see the wide sidewalks with brownstones set far from the quiet streets, the lovely park on the corner. I was blinded by annoyance that I was living in this very odd and unhip neighborhood.
And then, of course, I loved it. I found it was a place where people sat outside on the sidewalks in waxed plastic woven beach chairs and chatted. It was a neighborhood where little old ladies dressed in moo moos craned their necks to peek into my grocery cart while I shopped at the Met Food, and offered advice like “Andrea, the Comet is on sale, don’t get that Ajax!!!!” (This actually happened. Many times.)
I loved going to The Red Rose, always lit with Christmas lights, where a hearty Sunday gravy seemed to be constantly simmering on the stove. When I had to move my car for alternate side (by move I mean double park it) and would inevitably forget to move it back, I’d hear Mario from down the block call to my top floor window from the street, “Andreeya, ya gotta move ya cawr!” I should have stayed after graduating, but I moved to the city, started a life there, and didn’t return until I was married with two kids.
The Carroll Gardens I came back to was both different and the same; it had a lot more people who were not raised here, a lot more toddlers in fancy strollers, dads with well-groomed beards and moms in designer clogs, but it's true personality remained rooted in its old timers.
In my small nook of the neighborhood on Henry Street, there’s Hollywood, whose legs turn the color of toffee in summer from sitting outside with his cigar on his lawn chair with an old CD boombox playing Sinatra; there’s the group of ladies, some in housecoats, some in blouses and elastic waist pants, who gather at the Mazzolla Bakery bench. They chat all day long, no matter what the weather, their voices raspy and gravely, textured from smoking. They keep the neighbors up on the gossip and check in about your family. There’s always a “Hey Andrea, How ya been?” coming from some corner of the street.
My favorite friend from the ‘hood is Guy, a Korean war vet who strolls the streets using a large sanded tree branch as a cane, chatting and asking after you and yours. I’m pretty sure we have very little by way of politics in common. He doesn’t get that my child, assigned female at birth, uses he/him pronouns, but somehow it doesn’t really matter. Eiji loves Guy. He’s our neighbor, part of our family.
Over the past few years, things have changed a bit; chefs have discovered our part of town. They’re moving in in droves, finding that the mix of families and old timers makes the best recipe for a neighborhood restaurant that is also a destination.
I don’t want to say it started with Popina, which James O’Brien and Chris McDade, veterans of Maialino, first opened in 2018 in a tiny shoebox on Columbia Street with a ramshackle backyard. Pok Pok had its run over on Columbia way beforehand, but Popina started something different, opening a city-ish Italian restaurant with a pedigreed chef serving Hot Chicken Milanese with Ranch Raddicho and a serious wine list in the middle of nowhere.
Since then, they’ve opened Gus’s (now solely owned by Chris) on Union Street, a place for elevated steaks and fancy hash browns, but also a really good bowl of pasta, a two-handed burger, a well-priced glass of wine.
Then came chef Sal Lamboglia, an alum of Andrew Carmellini’s team, who, as you know, has grown a little restaurant empire here in Carroll Gardens: first Cafe Spaghetti, which became an instant hit, then Swoony’s, and now he’s doing a new concept at Veksler’s by September.
A few blocks away, we had Untable open on Henry Street, earning Best Restaurant accolades and lines down the block that rival Lucali (Oh yes, we can’t forget Marc, he’s an OG). And just a couple of weeks ago, the Michelin-starred team from Oxalis opened the all day cafe and bakery, Laurel, around the same time as the folks from The Meat Hook took a space on Sackett Street for their whole-animal butcher shop and takeaway. (Have you had @dudertaco original— a big fat sammie made from house roast pork, broccoli rabe, lemon zest, fennel mayo, and Opal apples on @caputobakery? GO!)
I’d like to say the culinary migration is because chefs realized I live here, but maybe, just maybe there are other reasons? “I think people are moving in because rents in New York are insane across the board,” says Popina’s owner, James O’Brien. “As a first time owner, the rents here, especially on the side of the BQE where we are now [Columbia Street] are easier, more favorable.”
But for O’Brien, the neighborhood’s appeal goes well beyond the lower rents. During the pandemic, when Popina pivoted to takeaway and wine to try to stay afloat, they found out just how much their neighbors cared. “Our neighbors came out to support us during COVID, coming for bottles of wine and dinners to-go. One guy gave me a pile of cash just to help me through. He said, ‘You make our lives better and I want you to be here after the pandemic.’ That’s the kind of place it is.”
The restaurants popping up along the waterfront are not only a boon to neighbors, but to the community of owners trying to make it work in a rather hard to access part of town. “When we opened, all we had was vacant storefronts,” O’Brien told me. “Pok Pok was here, and Andy (Richter, the owner) said, ‘Anything you need, let us know.’ Then when Sal was moving in I did the same. ‘You need carting, you need flour, to-go bags, c-folds, whatever you need, let me know.’ The Carla Hall space that Laurel went into was vacant forever. Now I can go support them, have lunch there, order bread from them for the restaurant. That mentality is part of the community here.”
“It is great to see so many people coming in, and seeing the buzz in the neighborhood,” Lamboglia told me last week when we chatted. “Smith Street used to be Restaurant Row when The Grocery was there. Then Frankie’s opened on Court, but that hype died down a bit. In the last year or so though, the action is here. People are more curious to eat here.”
Lamboglia is a big part of the reason folks are there is so much curiosity. He moved to the neighborhood four years ago when he was working with Carmellini, but his aunt has lived here for decades, so he was familiar with the rhythms of the neighborhood. “I love it here. There are a lot of families, a lot of that old school feeling. It’s very tight knit, it feels like a safe place, and the people, the neighbors are tremendous.”
The birth of Café Spaghetti goes like this. He had been looking for a space for years in the neighborhood, never finding anything that was quite right. Then Tom, his plumber, recommended he check out the former Canteen space, a small all-day cafe that closed during the pandemic. “It was too small, but that’s what I like. Small restaurants.” The next day, he had a lease signed, and Cafe Spaghetti was born. Influencers and the food media pounced, as did neighbors. You’ll still find them walking in a line down Union Street from the Carroll Street F stop, like ants to a picnic, all the way down, nearly to the water.
Swoony’s, which he opened in 2023, also came from a bit of serendipity. “The owners of the Longshoreman came in to see if I might want to take over the space literally the first day we opened,” he recalled. Twenty years ago, the building housed Cucina, a restaurant where his father worked; the deal felt like kismet.
It took some time but a year and a half later, he signed the lease for what is now an American bistro where neighbors come together for Deviled eggs and double smashburgers, and folks routinely cross bridges and tunnels to get a tables where proper cocktails are served under the pressed tin ceiling, and dinners go long and late into the evening starting with Asparagus Caesar, moving to short ribs au poivre and Manhattan Clam Chowder-style dorade, and finishing with Vanilla soft serve, and “French Toast.” A few weeks into Swoony's opening, Sal got a call from the owners of Veksler’s. “It seems I have become this guy where if you are selling your restaurant, ‘Just call Sal.’ I love it.” He will open another concept (TBD) in that space on Degraw and Hicks late summer, early fall.
“I’ve been cooking since I was 12, and I have wanted to open a deli, a coffee shop, an Italian restaurant, and a pasta shop,” he told me last week. “I am still going, but slowly I’m checking all the boxes. To be honest, I can’t believe where I am at. I am very happy and grateful and a little surprised because that was not the plan to open a restaurant every year.”
For owners like O’Brien, who moved in when the neighborhood was fairly unchartered territory, the burgeoning restaurant scene all along the Columbia Waterfront and through out Carroll Gardens is not seen as competition; quite the opposite actually.
“The more people that realize that there are great restaurants over here, the better. Folks used to gravitate toward Smith or Court, now you are going to maybe look down this way. I am rooting for everyone. All boats rise with the tide.”
It'd muumuu not moo moo
Met a couple of friends last night for dinner last night and we had a conversation about this very topic. You must have been listening. Sharing this with them now!