Turn right, and it’s the door in the fence with the tree leaning over it. Have I forgotten to give directions? Take the L to Halsey Street and walk three lonesome blocks east. They are giving you space and time, not just to eat, but to be. Either way, once the food arrives, you will not see them again until long after you’ve finished eating. Some servers are cheerful and slightly sleepy, others brisk and blunt. (A focused Château de Fleurie gamay was only $29, a mere 50 percent markup from its retail price.) What you linger over is wine, from a brief but respectable list on which no bottle exceeds $35. You may preface pizza with a few nicely underdressed salads and a pleated orb of house-made burrata as plump as a pork bun, already leaking heavy cream below.ĭesserts are more ellipsis than exclamation point: creamy lemon gelato wrapped in icy lemon meringue, and panna cotta under a berry compote in a flute glass. There is no bar, only a table lined with wine bottles and cans of beer and soda, next to two ancient refrigerators and a wall-mounted pinball machine.Īt Houdini (named after the magician, whose grave is a mile away in Machpelah Cemetery, should you care to make an after-dinner pilgrimage), Ms. Floors are concrete under long-stemmed hooded lamps and communal tables meant for 10. Flames rear up inside a wood-fired pizza oven on the far wall. It is simply a restaurant with good food and earnest intent that just happens to be in one of the coolest spaces in the city.Ĭeilings are 15 feet high, windows 9, flung out to breathe summer in. Houdini isn’t an of-the-moment piece of urban theater. (Welcome to Quooklyn.)īut all this is window dressing. You are 10 stops out of Manhattan on the L line, in the borderland where Bushwick, Brooklyn, blurs into Ridgewood, Queens. But to a first-time visitor, clutching a MetroCard, the scene is desolate. Of course, there are now artist studios upstairs, and a free tattoo party may be in swing down the street. loading dock.) On a bleak block of industrial buildings with graffiti palimpsests and rusted drips from what pass for windows. (Better yet, through a fence to the back “yard,” a.k.a. Unmarked entrance at the back of a former brewery. Consider, then, the checklist for Houdini Kitchen Laboratory: No sign. To the trophy-hunting diner, the more difficult a restaurant is to find, the more alluring it is.
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