The evening was looking a little nasty. It was not the kind of night where I could get super excited about sitting outside in the cold for a couple hours. In fact, all I wanted was an empty bar where I could sit gloomily over a depressing can of Genesee, and turn my back on windows looking out onto a world of pain and fast-
approaching winter. But here I was, getting off the train in DUMBO, heading to an outdoor bar. I pressed on through the dark.

Head down, following my phone to the supposed location of my destination, I almost bumped into the friend I was meeting, at the Lighthouse, a new beer kiosk under the
Manhattan Bridge from the good people who run DUMBO stalwart Superfine.

Admittedly, I’m not much of a DUMBO person, but I found myself really taken with the scenery around the Lighthouse. One of the Manhattan Bridge’s massive archways stretches overhead, completely shielding the sky from view. There was absolutely no one else around except for a street- sweeper on a nearby bench, and two women standing inside the cutesy, red-and-white striped, lighthouse-shaped structure. A disco ball spun silently inside the glowing purple kiosk, which was lined with kegs, bottles of wine, and bags of chips. We shouted our orders over the trains and cars and trucks rumbling above, grabbed our beers in plastic cups, and sat down at one of the empty picnic tables.

This being a kiosk, there are minimal options to choose from. You’ve got your unremarkable white and red wines, and for beer, there’s Pacifico Clara and Fire Island Sea Salt Ale on tap, both rather summery choices, but hey, we can’t complain about anything that distracts us from our impending wintery doom.

And that’s exactly what the Lighthouse does best. This place has got all the trappings of summer: picnic tables, a kitschy boardwalk kiosk, and outdoorsy minimalism. It’s really just a spot to (legally) drink under the bridge, but maybe that’s all you need. You’re still at one with the city—dog people and panhandlers walk on through and chat you up or don’t—but you’re also sort of hidden. On weekends, the Lighthouse has a lineup of DJs, but it was pretty dead on a Wednesday night.

But hey, that’s just the way we like it sometimes, especially since every public drinking yard we can think of in this city always seems to be packed to the gills. We imagine the place is filled with strollers and even more dogs on a sunny weekend afternoon, but if that’s not your scene, make like we did and wait for the rain.

You have been to a bar like Midwood Flats before. It’s the kind of bar with spare wood furnishings and vintage electric bulbs, the narrow space filled with high tables in the front and a couple booths in the back, chalkboards on the wall announcing a rotating crop of twenty locals beers on draft. It’s the kind of bar that serves traditional bar chow like cheese fritters and chips and dip alongside upgraded comfort food like duck torta and two kinds of lobster rolls. It’s the kind of bar where, if you walk in from a sudden downpour on a recent evening, the waitress will cluck sympathetically and tell you “Aw, sweetheart, you need a drink!” to which you will heartily agree.

In short, Midwood Flats is a gastropub in the manner of many Brooklyn establishments that bear the same description. In a neighborhood like Park Slope or Williamsburg or even a mile further north, on Franklin Avenue, it would hardly be remarkable. But in this particular stretch of Prospect Lefferts Gardens right below the Prospect Park Q stop, it’s something to get excited about. Until now, the bar options in the neighborhood came down to a handful of lounges with unpredictable hours and Lincoln Park Tavern, a decent-but-not-great pub currently in danger of closing, which serves up large, bland helpings of Mexican-American food and which seems to frequently host Evanescence karaoke. Other choices necessitate a hike up to Crown Heights, an increasingly daunting distance for a quick pint as the winter weather settles in.

Which is why on a Wednesday night, Midwood Flats was packed with locals, braving the rainy weather to sample the new bar’s offerings. The draft list, which includes offerings from Kelso, Evil Twin, and Singlecut, was decent if expensive: there wasn’t a beer on the list for less than $6. The whiskey list, which covers the entire back half of the laminated menu, offers an impressive array of bourbons. The soundtrack seemed firmly stuck in the British mope-rock spectrum. Coldplay’s “Yellow” played, by my count, three times in the hour and a half span that I stopped by. Still, if not an objectively great bar, Midwood Flats is a perfectly good place to grab a drink. It would be a find in Midtown and a shrug in Prospect Heights, but it’s a pretty solid thumbs up for the location.




The best thing about a sports bar is that people tend to leave you alone. The muted television mediates conversation so that silences are comfortable, all eyes fixed on the screens with distracted interest. The screens make it bright enough to read, too, which even as I type it I realize is the least sports-aware thing to say about televised sports at a bar. But a good sports bar does not judge—especially not if you arrive undercover, in a baseball cap.

When I pulled up on my bike outside the Grand National, the first thing I noticed was a small plastic sandwich board propped up on the sidewalk advertising “DRANKS.” A set of bi-fold steel casement windows along the front of the bar were open to the street, and from the sidewalk I could see an enormous (and gorgeous) blond wood bar stretching to a back wall tiled in red tin. A raised bank of cozy wooden booths runs along the wall opposite the bar, suitable for any size crowd you might roll in with. The music was fairly standard sports bar rock, with a Black Keys twist. Six impressively sized TV sets hung on the wall behind the bar, with another near the door.

The menu is small, but that’s mostly due to the font size. You can get everything from a Soy Honolulu Dog, served with pineapple, avocado, tomato, and diced onion, to an order of lowly Tater Tots. I ordered pan-roasted broccoli and cauliflower with mac-and-cheese sauce and a pulled pork sandwich. The veggies were tasty, if a bit ho-hum for all the warm, gooey potential of the mac-and-cheese sauce. The pork sandwich, though, was exactly what I’d hoped for—drenched in BBQ sauce on a still-crispy toasted bun, pickles on the side. Other pulled sandwiches on offer included chicken and seitan.

The Grand National drink menu covers a lot of ground, with ten tap lines, eleven cans, a champagne (but no other wine), and ten cocktails that range from standard—Mojito and Rum Punch—to more adventurous—the Number One (bourbon, chili liqueur, ginger, lime, and soda) and a Pineapple Julep. The draught beers range from I’ll-drink-it-if-it’s-on-tap (Stella Artois, Hoegaarden, Yuengling for your incorrigible Philly friends) to more interesting options, both imported (Spaten Oktoberfest, Köstritzer Black Lager) and local (Bronx Pale Ale, Empire IPA). I went with the Oktoberfest because I’m just excited about fall, but the Köstritzer is a rare enough sight on tap lists that it’s worth getting when you can.

The strangest thing about the Grand National is the bathrooms, which are one floor down in a low-ceilinged basement. To their credit, they’ve done a lot to the space, adding bright white subway tiles and exposed I-beams painted fire-engine red. On my way back upstairs I passed a small arcade, which is kind of a super-minor minor league, if you think about it.

As I finished my beer over the book I’d brought, a handsome and affable bartender puttered around. If he thought it was strange I’d brought a book, he didn’t let on. I don’t want to think it’s all because of the hat, but
it’s possible.

Spirited
638 Bergen Street, Prospect Heights

Call us killjoys, but we were not among those who reacted to news of the opening of a “dessert speakeasy” with excitement. There are a few reasons for this, but most prominent among them is the simple fact that we don’t need any kind of gimmick to attract us to a bar. We like to drink alcohol. We like to drink alcohol in places other than our home. And so we are not really such a hard sell when it comes to attracting us into a new watering hole. The only thing we ask, really, is not to be pandered to. We don’t like it when the owners of an establishment feel they need to coerce us to visit, like they don’t trust the inherent appeal of what they have to offer and instead care more about the publicity flurry that comes with announcing that a bar is, for example, boob-themed (or, say, a dessert speakeasy), rather than just a place to go get a solid drink and maybe a bite to eat.

All of which is to say, we were skeptical when we met a friend at Spirited for pre-dinner drinks the other night. Not just skeptical, actually, more like almost immediately regretful about the choice. The bar itself is beautiful, yes—full of dark wood, it has the building’s century-old original tin ceilings and Art Deco flourishes intact—but at 6:30pm on a Wednesday (and for the next hour or so) it was close to empty. And we think we know why: how can a bar function as an after-work or pre-dinner spot when 99 percent of the food on the menu is dessert? The central conceit, we realized, is absurd, and not just in the way that a boob-themed bar is absurd, but in a more disappointing way, because even when everything about a dessert speakeasy is done well (delicious confections and innovative cocktails) it still won’t wind up as a place you’ll want to go to very often, if at all.

But, you know, we were already at Spirited, so we figured we might as well get a drink. We wound up being really glad we did. We felt a little overwhelmed by some of the more elaborate concoctions and decided to stick with classics: a Rob Roy for myself, and a Vieux Carre for my companion. They were easily two of the most beautifully made drinks we’ve ever had; perfectly balanced with subtle and unexpected flourishes, these drinks made us immediate admirers of our exceptional bartender, Bhagaban Sahoo (he told us to call him Bhagi), who is not only a bartender at Spirited, but also the beverage consultant. Sahoo’s deft touch is unmatched as far as any other cocktail bar we’ve been to in Brooklyn (and we’ve been to many), and the excellence of his drinks made the cocktails we had later, at dinner, seem like dirty dishwater. So despite not really understanding the appeal of the whole dessert-only thing (or even the speakeasy thing… that seems like a trend that died half a decade ago), we would happily go back to Spirited for one of Sahoo’s cocktails. We just lament the fact that anyone would feel the need to sell the place on the virtue of a gimmick, when, in Sahoo, they have the real deal.