NYC Ferry Restaurant Tour, Part VIII: Boutros (Atlantic Ave. Route)
Most NYC Ferry stops are named after neighborhoods. Atlantic Avenue, on the South Brooklyn Route, is one of the few named after a street. The part near the ferry is a veritable restaurant district: I was pleasantly surprised how many good dining options were near the water. This blog will offer a smattering of them before it gets to the Lebanese-Syrian culinary bonanza that is Boutros. I boarded as usual at Wall Street Pier 11. Today’s boat was the Cyclone Shark.
It left me at Atlantic Avenue Pier 6, at the western end of the street. Atlantic runs pretty far, stretching from the East River to Jamaica, Queens. To the north of it are neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Cypress Hills, Woodhaven, and Richmond Hill. Some of those are loaded with choice brownstones and/or redolent of rap music history.
To the south, evolving socioeconomically as it goes, it passes through Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Brownsville, East New York, and Ozone Park. Some of those neighborhoods have gentrified while others remain low-income. This is just an extraordinary swath of New York City. It is also Brooklyn’s only east-west truck route.
Pier 6 is located in Brooklyn Bridge Park, offering a green interlude between the quiet aquatic environs of the East River and the hurlyburly of Atlantic Avenue. The park stretches north to the brownstone paradise (if you can afford it) of Brooklyn Heights and sexy post-industrial DUMBO, between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.
As I hit the street, I was offered a poem.
Passing over Atlantic Avenue is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, known to locals as the BQE, one of the civic wounds Robert Moses inflicted on the city.
Beneath the civic wound, I found civic art.
Though the art was wounded itself, by taggers.
Restaurant options quickly emerged. The western end of Atlantic Avenue is something of a sweet spot. Among its attractions are some venerable-looking bar & grills, like Montero. Dig the older sign above the newer sign.
Diem Eatery, one of the street’s Vietnamese joints, offers sandwiches, noodles, and gelato. Extra points for using the word eatery.
Table 87 (that’s also the address) is the Home of the Coal Oven Slice. I may return for Martini Mondays.
Long Island Bar/Restaurant is another funky looking bar & grill whose simple food menu contains a sprinkling of idiosyncratic items, some relating to trout, such as a smoked fish spread and pan-seared rainbow trout. I like people who have specific ideas about fish.
Colonie is high-end Italian with prices to match.
The al Badawi Family Style Palestinian Restaurant has three locations, including the Upper East Side and Somerville, NJ (not far from where I grew up). I have seen a lot of middle eastern menus and theirs has at least a dozen items of which I’ve never heard.
I nearly ditched my lunch plans when I ran across Brado Thin Crust Pizza…
…with its two slices for $5 lunch special. Just the thing before or after your $10 martini from down the street!
At sushi joint Mikado, an order was being handed off to the delivery guy at the door.
Two Yemeni establishments, Yemen Cafe and Hadramout, are duking it out at 176 and 172. I thought I was clever zooming in on the former without having to cross the street, not realizing that it had a competitor right next door! I have sampled the cuisine of Yemen elsewhere in Brooklyn and might do so, here, again.
Unless the Damascus Pita & Pastry Shop gets me first. This is the place for pitas, pies, dips, and sandwiches, among other things.
Get your burgers and hotdogs at two 8 two, another restaurant seamlessly blending its name and address.
Southern and Caribbean cuisine is offered at The Soul Spot. Their motto, from the menu: “It ain’t gotta be all fancy, but it does taste good.” Note what are apparently two Brooklyn artists carrying blank canvases past the bail bondsman and Halal grocery.
French Louis pretty much explains itself, or should I say himself?
It / he was one of the few restaurants considerate enough to display a menu in the front window, so as a public service, here it is.
The Someday Bar offers “craft beer, kitchen, cocktails” and its logo is an upside-down lavender flamingo. The name makes the West Side Story song ring in my ears. Perhaps that was the idea.
El Zason is a Mexican restaurant and bar. The menu embraces everything from tacos to 40-ounce steaks.
The FedEx guy lingers in the doorway of The Little Pig, a place for light eats: small bites, flatbreads, paninis. Maybe he’s thinking, shouldn’t there be three of these?
Masala Grill offers Indian cuisine at what are, for modern Brooklyn, reasonable prices. Ask about the combo dinners for 2 or 4. But not for 3. Don’t ask me why.
If you’re at the Atlantic Terminal, shopping at Target or Uniqlo, there’s always Chuck E. Cheese.
Let’s backtrack to this episode’s featured restaurant before taking in a few of the neighborhood’s miscellaneous non-culinary sights. That is the Boutros dining shed, which I’m told will be coming down, thanks to a new city law that imposes onerous fees and requires that the sheds be broken down every winter and rebuilt every spring.
Within a few months, this will be gone forever.
Boutros is a Lebanese-Syrian restaurant that combines the best of two very different middle eastern cultures. Their tumultuous and intertwined histories are too much to summarize here. But on Atlantic Avenue, they live in harmony.
View from my table, near the front door.
Looking up, this is what I saw. The books are more than decoration — they seem to be talismans that have informed the kitchen.
Titles include A Very Serious Cookbook, Kitchen of Light, Tastes of North Africa, and Mouneh: Preserving Foods for the Lebanese Pantry.
I’ll skip my out-of-focus shot of the bar. But here’s the back seating area, where a long table may accommodate a large group.
And you can see into the kitchen.
The menu gives backgrond information on Chef Allen Dabagh and the restaurant’s family roots in Lebanon, Syria, and New York City.
The lunch menu offers elaborate bread dishes, mezze appetizers, shawarmas (sandwiches), and a few entrees.
I’m not one to reproduce entire drinks menus when they go into multiple pages but a good cocktail menu, redolent of creativity, is always worth the virtual space.
Even in the dimmish lighting of my seat, my appetizer looked pretty good. That’s Fig & Olive Toast, from the menu’s Breaking Bread section.
The ingredients: whipped feta, black mission fig, lardo, coffee gastrique, and pistachio. It looked even better when I temporarily relocated it into the sunlight from the now-vacated table in front of the window. Despite the shadow.
And better still when I got around to the other side, without the shadow. Lardo, in case you were wondering, is a buttery-tasting cured pork fat.
And the second part of coffee gastrique refers to a carmelized sugar.
My Cauliflower Shawarma was less photogenic but just as delish. In addition to the marquee ingredient, it was stuffed full of pickles made on-premises, parsley, onion, sumac, and zhoug — a cilantro sauce enlivened with green chiles — on house-baked pita. I inspected it in the shade…
…then moved it into the sun for the shoot. Removing the toothpick keeping the two halves intact, separately and together, I noticed a little something clinging to the toothpick and licked it. Waste not, want not.
It was an immediate taste sensation, with a sumac-induced tang and a definite spicy kick from the zhoug. Babe, you’re a sandwich star.
Though thin and porous, the pita was thick enough for structural integrity, and delicious in itself. A few pieces fell out but not because the pita was falling apart. Shawarmas can just be a little unruly. I picked up the pieces and ate them with my fingers. The empty plates testified, as they usually do.
Before and after the meal, I took in some other sights and businesses. Across the street from the restaurant was the John Curtin Sail Makers building at 164 Atlantic Ave. Part of an industrial past that evokes clipper ships on the high seas, it is now a condo.
Newer buildings on the avenue might be nicer places to live but their street-level retail tends to be of less interest to diners.
At Earth Speaks I found a message that never goes out of style.
Atlantic Avenue is served by numerous subway lines. This is not among them.
Why did I shoot this? Just because.
The only house of worship at this end of the avenue was the Belarusan Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Troubled Belarus is run by a Putin-friendly dictator who has said that Russia and Belarus “could unite tomorrow, no problem.” His perpetual re-elections have not been recognized by the EU or UK.
The blue and yellow flag was that of the Ukraine, clearly a statement of support for another beleaguered nation. And poll-worker training class was available.
The House of the Lord Church is a Pentacostal congregation presided over by Rev. Leah D. Daughtry, daughter of Rev. Dr. Herbert Daughtry, a major figure in the civil rights movement.
The Out of the Closet Thrift Shop offered free HIV testing.
While Optimum Physical Therapy — one of several, it turns out, on the avenue — offered a snazzy retro storefront.
Colorful facades offered a vision of Atlantic Avenue as it is today…
…while more historically hued plainer ones hint at the avenue’s former appearance.
As I got close to my subway trip home, I passed a Brooklyn landmark, the Williamsburg Savings Bank Building, located at the intersection of three major arteries: Atlantic, Flatbush, and Fourth avenues. The area is known as Times Plaza, not after the New York Times, but after the Brooklyn Daily Times, published from 1837–1937. Note the juxtaposition of an early-1980s city bus with a newer one. The latter will remain rare thanks to Gov. Gridlock.
The local pigeon defecation facility was formerly the Atlantic Avenue Control House, associated with the earliest years of the IRT subway system, which opened in 1904. It is now registered as a national landmark.
The Atlantic Avenue subway station was upgraded as part of the once controversial Barclays Center redevelopment. I’m not against arenas — seeing Paul McCartney here was everything I’d hoped for, from the artist, from the venue, and from the transportation infrastructure.
The grand Barclay-inspired transit hub is part of Brooklyn’s, and New York’s, story of perpetual hope and renewal.
The transit hub serves both the nine subway lines listed in the picture — including the 2 and 3, one of which was my ride home — and the Long Island Railroad, which is also operated by New York State’s chronically underfunded Metropolitan Transit Authority. Whenever I come here, I feel as if I am making a grand entrance or exit.
Incidentally, I entered the neighborhood from its western end by water and left by rail to save walking and waiting — trains run more often than ferries. I was tempted to grab a pretzel for the trip home. But don’t you just hate people eating on the subway?
Follow-ups: I did return to Atlantic Avenue for a few more meals. Table 87’s coal-fired Sicilian was excellent. And I had a rare chance to shoot it in the sun:
The thin-crust pie at Brado’s was also exccellente.
And the price was right:
At al Badawi, the Palestinian restaurant, the lively party of eight or ten people behind my table included a young man wearing a yarmulke. Coming in felt like the right choice. The chicken shawarma was thin-sliced, lightly seasoned, and perfectly done. I could have added more seasoning from the little cup almost visible at left but I avoid whole sesame seeds; I did add the entire contents of the little cup of olive oil to my plate. The hummus, baba ghanoush, and salata filistini sides were fresh and tasty.
Previously on the NYC Ferry Restaurant Tour:
Part I: The Wharf (Rockaway Route to Rockaway Park)
Part II: Kimo’s Kitchen (Rockaway Route to Rockaway Beach)
Part III: Big John’s (Rockaway Route to Sunset Park)
Part IV: Salty Dog (South Brooklyn Route to Bay Ridge)
Part V: Crown Cafe (Statue City Cruises to Liberty Island)
