Williamsburg, Brooklyn and nearby - Where to eat and drink?

My girlfriend needs new tattoos, and since we live in Los Angeles it is of course natural that the best artist to her eye lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We’ll be there four days (it’s a sleeve, so…) and would love to know where we should eat. Prefer a relaxed atmosphere and places for people watching. Also: are there any good wine shops nearby?

Glen

you can’t miss pizza at paulie gee’s in greenpoint. as far as wine shops are concerned, uva across from the whole foods on bedford is pretty solid, but there are many small natural leaning wine shops in that neck of the woods.

Fulgrances from Paris opened in Greenpoint and is great. It has a rotating chef program. The current chef trained at Septime / Clamato in Paris. I have been twice.

Let us know what else you are looking for foodwise and pricewise.

Asking for restaurants recommendations in Brooklyn is like asking for recommendations in LA. There is also a very active NYC thread in the Epicurean thread.

And as for wine Greenpoint is mostly natural wine, what type of wine are you looking for?

Check out the Peruvian food & cool setting at Llama Inn in Williamsburg

This is great - I figured limiting it to Greenpoint/Williamsburg might be like limiting it to Silver Lake/Echo Park, i.e. “manageable” but get what you mean.

I’m a traditional French/California wine guy – the few natural wines I’ve had so far have leaned into the stereotype of “wait, are you sure this isn’t beer?” and I know there’s better stuff, but I haven’t found it yet. I’m open minded. If there’s a place that will sell us something from the Northern Rhone but also has something natural I wouldn’t otherwise know about, yay!

By Open Table standards, we tend to be $$$ but not $$$$ eaters. We don’t always need to see angels with O faces when we eat - a jazz trio backing Stacey Kent is good enough. Peach burrata balsamic but not peach burrata balsamic foam, if that helps.

Helps out quite a bit. First I would suggest expanding your search a bit to the Lower East Side Manhattan.

For Greenpoint / Williamsburg I would suggest the following:

Four Horseman - Mostly natural list but some traditional selections. One of my favorite places in the city. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem is one of the owners. Reserve far ahead.

Ops Pizza - 1000x better than Paulie Gees but an all natural list wine list which you are going to encounter most places in NYC

Lilia - Italian, still have not been but hear it is great.

Rule of Thirds - excellent, Japanese Izakaya

If you want to head over to the LES / East Village check out GEM, Contra, WildAir, Ernestos, Estella, Ko Bar…write ups on all of them in the NY thread in the Epicurean section here.

Big second for Rule of Thirds, and not just because they pour the sake we import. The space is fantastic, comfortable, not loud, with a great vibe. Food is very good to excellent, so much better than you’d guess given how large the space is. Care is taken with detail. Service is warm, attentive, and knowledgeable. Beverage selections are varied and thoughtful.

i like both places, but ops is quite a trek from greenpoint. also your value judgement is a bit like saying egon muller (or julian haart) is 1000x better than jj prum . for what it’s worth when my natural wine loving friend from paris was visiting town he tried both and vastly preferred paulie gee’s not only for the pizza, but for the space. i think he was put off by improper wine service (room temp bottles) and the appallingly bad wine glasses at ops. different strokes i guess…

I was just kidding with 1000x. But in all honesty can’t imagine any serious pizza lover picking Paulie Gees over Ops. Ops is about 20 minutes from Greenpoint so fair point.

I am a pretty serious Pizza student and Ops is in my top 5 in the U.S.

I hear you on the wine service they have recently expanded the list quite a bit and now actually have a wine list and I usually just bring Zaltos.

I have a feeling I’m an Ops kind of guy but my girlfriend, who is a Golden Boy (North Beach’s finest at 2 AM) gal, will likely lean Paulie Gee’s. As my grandfather said on his 75th wedding anniversary, love is compromise.

There is only one way to settle this score! Go to both!

also, keep in mind the paulie gee’s slice shop vs the original location around the corner are very different (reheated ny style slices and squares vs made to order neo-neapolitan style pies). if you are going to go all the way to ops you might as well stop by roberta’s too! the wine shop henry’s is not far either; they have quite an esoteric selection.

the great thing about pizza is it doesn’t have to be the absolute best in order to be immensely satisfying

If you’re able to snag a reservation, haven’t been back since pre-pandemic, Lilia is probably my favorite restaurant in BK. I’d recommend looking about 30 days out from when you’re planning to be there and trying to jump on their reservation system at 12:00 AM EST, at least that’s what we had to do when trying to get any reservation there. It’s in Williamsburg and just an amazing Italian restaurant.

Rule of Thirds was all that you folks said. Thanks for the recommendation. The architectur of the place is really atmospheric and calming, the service on point and the food itself delicious. Our server was very good with helping us choose sake for the meal. At the end, I asked her to pick a sake that a wine nerd would want to try, and she brought us several options. We picked Regal Hawk, which isn’t expensive or anything, but was wonderfully complex.

Paulie Gee’s sit down place is only open at night and we didn’t manage to swing by there - I gave the slice-based corner store a shot, but it didn’t really move me. Sara and I walked down Bedford for a slice at Joe’s and it was exactly the street food we wanted.

For wine stores, as promised, there is a LOT of natural wine here. I found Dandelion Wines on Franklin to have exceptionally interesting stuff and nice people working there – I followed their suggestions and tried my first Chateau Le Puy Emilien, and it rocked a home-make pasta dinner at a friend’s house. You won’t exactly find any winesearcher lows around here, but hey, that’s okay.