A New Red Hook Ritual

Once or twice a month Jesse and I delight in taking a shopping trip to Fairway in Red Hook, where we can stock up on bulk goods for cheap, like organic coffee, beans, rice, and so on.


Now we may have found a new ritual to tack onto our Red Hook trips: A stop at Rocky Sullivan's for beer and a snack outside. We'd been to this bar on an assuming corner before and hadn't thought much of it, just a normal working class neighborhood bar. Then I found out about its roof deck, but we weren't able to take advantage of it until the first nice weather hit this weekend. Now we have truly seen the light.


The bar neighbors Sixpoint Brewery, so we were able to get two of our favorite Sixpoint beers, Bengali IPA and Righteous Rye. And Jesse was able to ogle all the Sixpoint kegs lying around. Rocky Sullivan's has a bar menu, but I'm guessing their best food is their brick oven pizza, made fresh to order. We had the margarita pizza, complete with homemade pesto sauce, and it was delish. The crust had a slight buttery flakiness to it, a little like pastry crust, but not too much.


We enjoyed our afternoon snack on their roof deck. We were the only ones up there, and I can't imagine it ever gets too full, so it certainly lives up to its reputation as "serene" I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the hood, although don't tell all your friends because hidden gems are always better when they remain that way!

Brooklyn Bike Tour II: Destination Red Hook

This is my block in Williamsburg, where new condos are sprouting up everywhere. Notice how much taller the beige building in the top right corner is than all the other vinyl sided row houses?
Around the corner, there used to be an old factory in this lot, now vacant except for one obnoxious piece of machinery. I didn't have a chance to photograph them, but three of the four corners of this intersection are all empty boarded lots, warehouses that were, now condos to be.

We biked down to Park Slope for lunch at Bonnie's Grill. Jesse loves their burgers and I enjoy them as well, but let me just say that other items I've had from their menu were subpar.

Next, we rode down Union Street over the Gowanus canal. Someone created this pretty mini sunflower garden at the gate of the bridge.

The canal itself isn't so nice, but I actually liked the surrounding area. Just look at the golden leaves lining this brownstone street:

We continued our ride all the way to Red Hook. We're not Red Hook newbies, as we drive there frequently to shop at Fairway (best grocery store EVER), but this was our first time biking there. We rode to the waterfront on Van Dyke street and stumbled across this little park.

Those benches are a lovely place to sit, rest, and enjoy the calming feeling of the water. Afterward, we went in search of the Six Point brewery and the attached bar to taste their multitude of beers. Well it turns out that the Libery Heights Taproom I had read about online has been replaced with a new bar, Rocky Sullivan's, that only has two Six Points on tap. It looked empty, so we didn't bother with it. The other strange thing is that there is no signage to even tell you that you've found the Six Point. So we didn't find it, we thought maybe it had moved too along with Libery Heights, but a Red Hook local later confirmed we were at the right corner.

So instead we went to the Bait & Tackle Bar on Van Brunt Street for a drink. It's extremely quaint, decorated on almost every inch of the bar with taxidermy, fishing gear, knick knacks, and so on, and it's a cute place to kill some time.

We had dinner at the Good Fork, which I had been looking forward to all week because I wanted almost everything on their menu. Maybe because I was so highly anticipating the dinner, it fell a little flat. We started with two appetizers, cornmeal crusted oysters and beet salad. The oysters were meaty and well executed with a nice cornmeal coating and a Russian dressing-like sauce. But we decided we still prefer oysters in the raw because the greatest thing about oysters is the salty taste of the sea. The beet salad was skimpy on the beets and walnuts and didn't benefit from the one lettuce leaf it was plated on. Considering that beets are in season now, I was hoping for a richer, sweeter taste like I've experienced before.

For dinner, I chose the paperdelle with pork ragu. The homemade pasta was soft, tender, and delicious. But somehow the wow factor was missing. Jesse felt the same about his salmon over crunchy lentils. Conclusion: The Good Fork is a good restaurant, but we probably won't go to Red Hook again just to eat there.