Where to stay

Prices quoted are per night for a double room, based on two people sharing without breakfast.

Wythe Hotel An old cooperage on the Williamsburg waterfront is Brooklyn’s hotel du moment. With good green credentials, the hotel is run with high standards of sustainability, but no room service. The on-site restaurant, Reynards, does superb chops and grills. Rooms from £110. 80 Wythe Ave at N. 11th Williamsburg, 00 1 718 460 8000, wythehotel.com
Hotel Le Jolie is another good choice in Williamsburg, a 54-room boutique hotel with a European sensibility. Each room is custom designed and the rate includes WiFi, iPod docking stations, mini-fridge and high-end products. ‘Advance purchase’ rooms from £71. 235 Meeker Avenue, 00 1 718 625 2100 in Williamsburg, overlooks McCarren Park, and is a hip urban retreat with a rooftop bar and magnificent swimming pool. Rooms from £166. 160 N. 12th Street, 00 1 718 218 7500, kingandgrove.com
Akwaaba Mansion is a beautifully restored 1860s brownstone that’s been converted into an inn. With a lovely garden it’s hugely atmospheric and comfortable. Located in the Stuyvesant Heights historic district. Rooms from £120. 347 MacDonough Street, 00 1 718 455 5958, akwaaba.com

Travel Information

The currency is the US dollar. Brooklyn, New York, is five hours behind GMT. Like Manhattan, Brooklyn has searingly hot summers and very cold winters. Autumn is the best time to visit – from early September to mid November – when the days can be either balmy or crisp, but the first snow has not yet arrived.

GETTING THERE
British Airways (0844 493 0787, britishairways.com) fly to New York 11 times a day, with flights from London Heathrow and London City to JFK and Newark.

RESOURCES
NYC & Company (001 212 484 1200,nycgo.com) the official marketing and tourism organisation of the city of New York, is the best online resource for a visit to Brooklyn.

FURTHER READING
Brit Guide to New York 2012 by Amanda Statham (Foulsham, £12.99). With sections on Brooklyn restaurants, nightlife and attractions.
Not For Tourists Guide to New York City (Skyhorse Publishing, £12.99). Already NYC street-savvy? This handy guide will show you even more gems.

Where to eat

Prices are for three courses with wine, unless otherwise stated, including tax but not tip. It’s usual to tip 20 per cent of the pre-tax bill.

Brooklyn Fare Three Michelin stars, just 18 seats around a D-shaped counter, the 20 plus course prix fixe dinner costs £146 including tax, but without wine or tip. 200 Schermerhorn Street, Downtown, 00 1 718 243 0050, brooklynfare.com
Brooklyn Farmacy Restored old soda fountain adored by locals, famous for its ice cream floats, sundaes and egg creams. A chocolate egg cream (‘a Brooklyn tradition’) goes for £1.60. 513 Henry Street, Carroll Gardens, 00 1 718 522 6260
Egg Sine qua non of Brooklyn laidback hip, Egg is open from 7am for breakfast, lunch and more. A breakfast of pancakes with berries, duck hash, juice and coffee costs £24. 135 North 5th Street, Williamsburg, 00 1 718 302 5151, pigandegg.com
The Grocery Well-established chef/patron joint, showcasing local produce simply but beautifully cooked. Four course vegetarian tasting menu, £26; regular tasting menus, £35 or £55. 288 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens, 00 1 718 596 3335, thegroceryrestaurant.com
Jack the Horse Tavern Terrific neighbourhood joint on a cosy corner site, family friendly, with a great Sunday brunch. One of the best restaurant bars in Brooklyn too. Around £50. 66 Hicks Street, Brooklyn Heights, 00 1 718 852 5084, jackthehorse.com
Parish Hall George Weld’s new, all white, all light restaurant, with salads, braises and great cheese and lots of produce from the restaurant Goatfell Farm. Around £45. 109a North 3rd Street, Williamsburg, 00 1 718 782 2602, parishhall.net
River Café Iconic barge setting under the Brooklyn Bridge. Grand golden oldie with bountiful food, attitude-free service and magical view of the Manhattan skyline. About £85. 1 Water Street, Brooklyn, 00 1 718 522 5200, rivercafe.com
Roberta’s/Blanca Many say the breezily informal Roberta’s makes the best pizzas in all New York. In a new loft space behind Roberta’s and under the same ownership, the newly-opened Blanca does a 22-course menu. Pizzas from £8; Blanca’s prix fixe menu is £120 without tax, tip or wine. 261 Moore Street, Bushwick, 00 1 718 417 1118
Saltie This converted bakery is now a café, offering cakes, pastries and sandwiches with a nautical theme. 378 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, 00 1 718 387 4777, saltieny.com
Smith Canteen Their fried chicken sandwich on buttermilk biscuit is a thing of wonder. £5. 343 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens, 00 1 347 294 0292

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

Facing Manhattan across the East River and nearly four times its size, Brooklyn is having a moment, quite a big moment actually – especially where food is concerned. Sitting in the window of Egg, George Weld’s restaurant in Williamsburg, on a sunny Brooklyn morning in late summer, the old ad slogan ‘Go to work on an egg’ never had more resonance. Opened in 2005, Egg is in many ways a trope for the entire Brooklyn food scene, and Brooklyn can be accurately credited with minting the international restaurant hard currency of ‘local’, ‘seasonal’ and ‘sustainable’.

Egg use only organic eggs, from hens living the good life at Old Field Farm in Cornwallville – 144km from New York on the edge of the Catskill Mountains. The restaurant has its own farm, too, in nearby Oak Hill, which supplies the restaurant with fruit and vegetables. After breakfasting on eggs Rothko – fried, in brioche with Vermont cheddar – you’re set up for the
day, or at least the morning.

If Brooklyn were an actual city and not just a borough of New York (one of the five), in terms of population alone it would be the fourth largest in America. Brooklyn is to Manhattan what Shoreditch, Bethnal Green – the whole of east London, in fact – is to Mayfair, Soho, and Covent Garden. High Manhattan rents and the lure of open spaces drove the middle classes to Brooklyn early in the last century and the docks – those same ones you see in the classic 1950s film On The Waterfront – kept the area’s economy strong for over 80 years. But by the 1980s, the docks had gone and so had the economy, and parts of Brooklyn – East Williamsburg, Brownsville, Bushwick, to name but three – had become no-go areas.

‘I dodged bullets and prostitutes going to school,’ says the strikingly blond George Weld, who looks like a surfer-boy but is in fact a hard-working, farm-to-fork pioneer. Parish Hall, his new, whitescrubbed restaurant that’s two blocks from Egg, belies the fact that ten years ago all the storefronts on the block were boarded up. Now, re-zoning and the opening up of the north Brooklyn waterfront have made Williamsburg and other Brooklyn neighbourhoods a magnet for scenesters, artists, writers and, importantly, chefs. Farm-fresh, food trucks, pop-ups and supper clubs – the four bona fides of foodie insiderism – can all trace their origins to Brooklyn, before they exported themselves to Manhattan, London and the world.

For food-obsessed Brooklynites, Smorgasburg, the Saturday market on the Williamsburg waterfront, is the culinary Valhalla, where farmers, fishermen and tidy wives (to bastardise a phrase from Dylan Thomas, who died just across the East River in St Vincent’s Hospital) all meet. Here you’ll find 100 stall-holders and food trucks. There’s Blue Marble Ice Cream (‘dairy from the happy cows of New York State farmers’), Brooklyn Cured (locally smoked pastrami and Hudson Valley duck sausages with pomegranate molasses) and the wonderful Runner & Stone, whose pastries are filled with Long Island berries to name just three. All converge in a setting that is blithely surreal. This small-scale, rather homely patch of land is dwarfed by the skyscrapers across the river. Manhattan may be watching you, but you couldn’t care less. In Brooklyn you’re part of the city but apart from it, and it’s kind of liberating.

Just north of Williamsburg, in Greenpoint, is another great vantage point, the 6,000sq ft Eagle Street Rooftop Farm. But you don’t come to the Eagle Street rooftop for the views, wonderful though they are. Owned by brother and sister Gina and Tony Argento, and funded by Broadway Stages, their Greenpoint-based sound stage company, the farm is a model for urban farming. Last year, they grew virtually everything here, from carrots, aubergines and Swiss chard through to zinnias, tobacco and hops. There’s also honey from a domesticated Italian variety of bee, raised in the American south. Eagle Street farm runs a Sunday market during the growing season, as well as supplying local restaurants, all deliveries made by bicycle. They also operate a volunteer programme and offer educational workshops covering urban farming and green roofing.

Between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, The Meat Hook butcher shop is a kind of living museum for meat lovers, all the butchering and curing is done on-site by staff who are passionate about their subject. Grass-finished beef comes from Lee Ranney’s farm in Ghent, just over 160km from the city, and pork and lamb are 100 per cent state reared. Devotees rave about the house-cured bacon. If you’re staying with friends and have access to a broiler, buy a couple of Delmonico steaks and have The Meat Hook people show you how to cook them. Or, buy a disposable grill and have a cook-up in Prospect Park – it doesn’t get more Brooklyn than that.

Back in south Williamsburg is Marlow & Sons, the restaurant and grocery store established by Andrew Tarlow and Mark Firth – Marlow being a fictional mash up of their names – that burst on to the Brooklyn scene in 1998, when they opened Diner, their first restaurant. Marlow & Sons has a sibling next door, a butcher and grocery shop called Marlow & Daughters. There’s also a somewhat rarefied Italian restaurant, Roman’s, in Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighbourhood which, while gentrifying, remains relatively eclectic.

Earlier this year, Tarlow, an ecologically-minded father of four, opened the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, a homage to sustainability and sociability, where both the wallpaper and soap are Brooklynmade and room service doesn’t exist because Tarlow finds it antisocial. He prefers his guests to interact with one another.

After a mid-morning pick-me-up at the Wythe’s restaurant, Reynards – a whitefish-filled bialy (a kind of bagel without a hole), washed down with Sorachi Ace beer from the Brooklyn Brewery – you might head back to the water. The East River Ferry, which runs from 34th Street in Manhattan to Wall Street with four stops in Brooklyn, is a great way through the borough.
If you disembark the ferry at DUMBO (‘Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass’ – all New Yorkers love an acronym, the more abstruse the better) you’ll find yourself by the glorious garden outside the famed River Café – pretty handy, if it’s lunch time. This is Brooklyn at its most glamorous, where the East River looks like the Seine, with a kind of futuristic Paris as its backdrop, and the Circle Line boats on the water outside look as if they’re coming straight at you through the restaurant windows. ‘Thank you for coming to see us today’, says long-time maitre d’ Patrick Goupit to walk-in tourists, even though he doesn’t know them from a crow.

The River Café is not a café at all, but a rather grand, oldfashioned restaurant, with a highly-developed sense of noblesse oblige. Octogenarian owner and founder, Michael Buzzy O’Keeffe, still patrols the room each service and pianist Dom Salvador has been tinkling the ivories for 35 years. The food is French-American and many of the herbs and vegetables come from the restaurant’s own kitchen garden in Red Hook, in south west Brooklyn.

‘The thing about The River Café’, says O’Keeffe, ‘is that it’s not pretentious. In some of these new cool places, tell them you’re celebrating a birthday or an anniversary and – whoa! you’ll be hung, drawn and quartered.’ The sad thing is he’s not wrong.

Whether they are swish, laid back or shabby, a lack of pretentiousness is what all Brooklyn’s restaurants seem to have in common. Up the hill from The River Café, on a shady corner site in the fruit tree-named grid of Brooklyn Heights – where Pineapple, Orange and Cranberry Streets run parallel – is Jack the Horse Tavern. With exposed brick, original mouldings and real hardwood floors it’s a great neighbourhood restaurant run by a team that defected from Manhattan restaurant supremo Danny Meyer’s stable. Chef Tim’s macaroni cheese with cavatappi (elbow shaped) pasta, smoked gouda and Gruyère is a great thing to eat here, as is herbed chicken, or grilled pizza du jour. All are delivered with a singular lack of ceremony. ‘I can’t bear those bars where you practically need a password to get in’, says bartender Ryan, deftly mixing a Pimm’s No 2 cup and topping it up with pale ale from Pleasantville, NY. ‘Pretentious is not what Brooklyn is about,’ he says.

Settled in 1636 by Dutch farmers looking for better pastureland than in lower Manhattan across the river, the streets of Brooklyn Heights, with their tall, skinny red-brick houses, feel very much like old Amsterdam, or even some parts of Kensington and Chelsea, with its distinctive ‘Pont Street Dutch’ architecture.

In Downtown Brooklyn, a 15-minute walk south from Brooklyn Heights, Caesar Ramirez’s grocery store Brooklyn Fare, doubles up as Brooklyn’s only three-Michelin-starred restaurant. Just 18 seats around a D-shaped kitchen counter, the dazzling 20 (or so)- course dinner might include fried monkfish livers with tingly sansho pepper or risotto with sea urchin, coconut and ginger. Most of the dishes comprise some kind of shellfish, and many have an Asian tilt. Dinner at Brooklyn Fare (which has a six-week wait for a reservation) will set you back nearly £190 – including tip, without wine – but even among thrifty Brooklynites, get them on the subject of Brooklyn Fare and you’ll hear very few dissenters or cynical voices.

From Downtown Brooklyn you can ride the Subway six stops to the Brooklyn Museum, one of the oldest museums in the United States and the second largest museum in New York after the Met, with around 1.5 million works of art. The stop also serves the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the green open spaces of Prospect Park. Otherwise, a stroll along Smith Street from downtown leads you to the Carroll Gardens neighbourhood, named for revolutionary war hero Charles Carroll, who routed the British here. Notting Hill like in feel, recently down at heel, but where the houses now go for upwards of £1.9m, Carroll Gardens is as redolent with history as it is crammed with food shops and restaurants. ‘Not only are Brooklyn restaurants sourcing everything locally,’ says Morgan Jarrett, chef of Carroll Gardens hot-spot Smith Canteen, ‘some of the food we’re eating is actually micro-local, from within four blocks.’

Although many of the restaurants here are new, the granddaddy of them all, The Grocery, a modest storefront restaurant that opened in 1999 offering market-led American cooking, is still going strong. And there’s even room for the good old ‘red-sauce’ Italians, such as Red Rose and Vinny’s, with their satisfying pasta (with red sauce, of course) primi and petto di pollo or saltimbocca second.

At Stinky Bklyn on Smith Street, the cheese, bitters, salsas, syrups, pickles, chocolate – even potato chips – they sell are all made in Brooklyn, along with lager brewed in Williamsburg. ‘Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free puppy,’ reads a sign which shows that Brooklynites, for all their locavore single-mindedness, also have a well-developed sense of humour.

A few steps away, at 61 Local, a kind of post-modern pub in a converted carriage house on the corner of Smith and Bergen, you can drink Belgian-style ale from Cooperstown, NY, and nibble olives from Sahadi’s, the old-established Syrian grocers around the corner on Atlantic Avenue. The knife which makes light work of the (made in Brooklyn) salami comes from knife-maker Joel Bukiewicz’s aptlynamed Cut Brooklyn shop in Park Slope. In the Brooklyn food world, everything and everyone, it seems, is connected. David Naczycz of Urban Oyster, a company that offers food-related walking tours of New York City, puts it better. ‘In Brooklyn, there’s now a local food eco-system which powers a local food economy.’

Whoopie pies, made here with pumpkin cake and a cream frosting, are the pick of the pack at One Girl Cookies, a bakery diagonally opposite Stinky’s. Their Earl Grey and ginger ice cream, made with hormone-free milk from cows in Lewis County, NY, trumps some of the more traditional flavours at nearby Van Leeuwen, an ice cream maker located in a former church (nearly half the churches in Brooklyn are deconsecrated, most of them turned into condos).

Past tiny Cobble Hill Park, the old literary center of Brooklyn, where Tom Wolfe once lived, you come to Brooklyn Farmacy, a restored soda fountain adored by locals. It’s baby stroller gridlock at Farmacy, but no visit to Cobble Hill is complete without a chocolate egg cream. It’s a drink made with milk, soda water and syrup that oddly contains very little chocolate and no cream and tastes curiously, though not unpleasantly, medicinal. Across the street is the pizza parlour where Nick Cage’s character in Moonstruck worked, only now it’s called Maybelle’s Café. ‘In Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens there are more bakeries and ice cream places than anywhere else in New York’, explains David Naczycz. ‘The kids are definitely over-sugared here.’

It’s Friday afternoon and down in the Boro Park neighbourhood they’re preparing for the Sabbath. In the Strauss bakery, challas (traditional plaited brioche), rugelach (Ashkenazi pastry with a variety of fillings) and babkas (a kind of brioche loaf with coffee and cinnamon) are selling, quite literally, like hot cakes. Over half a million Jews live in Brooklyn, twice as many as in Manhattan, making it the most densely populated Jewish area on earth. And while Jewish – as opposed to kosher – food is traditional and does not actively evolve, it’s impossible to overstate its contribution to New York’s – and Brooklyn’s – culinary heritage. Dishes like cholent (slow-cooked Sabbath beef stew) and kugel (potato cake), along with festival food like hamantaschen (triangular-shaped pastries eaten on the Jewish holiday of Purim), to say nothing of bagels, pastrami and chicken matzo ball soup, have become entirely mainstream.

Next day, back at Smorgasburg, they’re celebrating National Ice Cream Day and 14 local vendors have their produce on sale. You can tuck into locally made Chozen kosher matzoh crunch ice cream, or try stout n’ pretzels from the Ample Hills Creamery in Prospect Heights, which has its own bicycle-powered ice cream churner on display. Across the river, the iconic Chrysler Building glints in the sunshine, almost beckoning you. But as Fran Reiter, president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau wisely says, ‘If you want to see the real New York, you have to go beyond the icons.’

Don’t miss

Brooklyn Museum One of the oldest art museums in the USA, with around 1.5 million works from Ancient Egypt to Post-Modern. 200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Park, 00 1 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org
Brooklyn Botanic Garden The Shakespeare Garden, Fragrance Garden and Children’s garden are just three spots that make up the 52 acre Botanical Garden, one of the best in the world. 1000 Washington Avenue, Prospect Heights, 00 1 718 623 7200, bbg.org
Eagle Street Rooftop Farm The market is on Sundays (1-4pm in the spring/ summer growing season). 44 Eagle Street, Greenpoint, rooftopfarms.org
Smorgasburg Every Saturday (11am-6pm). North 6th Street at Kent Avenue, Williamsburg, brooklynflea.com