Brooklyn (New York City)

God Bless Americana: Brooklyn Athletic Club's Sinful Blend of Comfort Food and Class

Brooklyn Athletic Club celebrates with its Americana menu mixing gourmet and comfort food delivered in generous portions.

Max's Wine Dive Moving to Montrose

What does that mean for Houston?

James Coney Island Unveils Line of Chef-Designed Hot Dogs on June 1

James Coney Island is one of the oldest restaurants in Houston, founded in 1923 by Greek immigrant brothers James and Tom Papadakis (this explains the Greek-influenced chili that remains on the menu to this day). But although the chain is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, the food is anyth ... More >>

Chef Chat, Part 2: Jeff Axline of Brooklyn Athletic Club, On "Americana" Style Food, His Menu, and How the Houston and Austin Food Scenes Compare

This is Part 2 of a three part Chef Chat series. You can read Part 1 here and Part 3 in this same space Friday. EOW: Tell me about Brooklyn Athletic Club. JA: This was originally Shepard's idea. He's had the idea for a long time, but it was hard to come to fruition without having a property tha ... More >>

Chef Chat, Part 1: Jeff Axline of Brooklyn Athletic Club, on Moving Around as a Navy Kid, and The Sexy Lifestyle of a Free-Standing Restaurant Chef

This is the first part of a three-part Chef Chat series. Come back to read parts two and three, which will run in this same space on Thursday and Friday. On a sleepy corner of Richmond, close to the Spur and around the corner from Montrose, the Brooklyn Athletic Club -- which took over the space t ... More >>

Kris Kristofferson's Favorite Place on Earth Is In Texas, But Not Houston

Rocks Off spoke to Kris Kristofferson by phone from his home in Hawaii where he describes living a life as spare and literal as the records he makes with producer Don Was. Twice he told us that he's old, once he told us that he's brain-damaged and then he told us that his favorite place on Earth is ... More >>

This Week In Food Blogs: Of Moon Towers and Branch Waters

29-95: The big news of the week is that David Grossman is leaving his space at 510 Shepherd and taking the name "Branch Water Tavern" with him. Grossman plans to stay on for two months while a new management team leases the building, but will then depart at which point the restaurant will take on a ... More >>

First Look at Brooklyn Athletic Club: Shepard Ross and Jeff Axline Partner Up Once More

"It's like someone created a tiny, unpretentious country club and smacked it down in the middle of Houston. And there's a nice restaurant attached." This is how I found myself attempting to explain Brooklyn Athletic Club to my mother the day after I'd dined at the new restaurant on Richmond for the ... More >>

Shmaltz Tap Takeover Tomorrow at Hay Merchant, Plus the Shmaltz Holiday box

The Hay Merchant is a "Chosen Bar," according to Shmaltz Brewing Company. The Houston beer spot has been selected to help celebrate Shmaltz's 16th anniversary as well as the beginning of Hanukkah tomorrow afternoon by tapping a special selection of 18 different kegs from Shmaltz. With four "Chose ... More >>

Dysrhythmia

Where Are We Drinking?

Yes, that's a Saint Arnold pint glass, but inside it is Brooklyn beer Sixpoint. And this tavern was one of the first in Houston to stock a Sixpoint selection, including my personal favorite: Sweet Action, a cream ale that might just make you forget about all other beers for at least a few weeks. Th ... More >>

Fang Island

Top 6 Rap Songs That Criticize the USA

Word to your mamas, sucka emcees. It's the Fourth of July (or, as the Native American guy that I went to college with used to half-jokingly refer to it, "The Most Fucked Up Holiday I Can Think Of... Why Don't We Just Go Ahead And Start Celebrating 9/11, Because That's Basically What This Is For Me") ... More >>

"Mie Olise: Crystal Bites of Dust"

Openings & Closings: Making the Most of Main Street

It was a week full of news items, both big and small, starting with the big news that Ronnie Killen of Killen's Steakhouse in Pearland has leased the old Stella Sola space in the Heights. He plans to open a second location of his steakhouse in the spot after it's remodeled, after which he'll serve a ... More >>

Can Domino's Pull Off "Brooklyn-Style" Pizza?

No! 1000 percent, N-effing-O. Maybe my expectations were raised too high by the promise of hand-stretched, perfectly foldable crust, and by images of the flavorful, thin, crisp crust conjured by the word "Brooklyn." Or maybe it was the fact that I just wasn't drunk. Anyway I look at it -- my experi ... More >>

Eleanor Friedberger

Southbound Pachyderm: A Mixtape For An Elephant

Elephants are awesome. Science surely has a more in depth way of expressing mankind's fondness for our giant pachyderm friends, but, "Elephants are awesome" does the trick just fine. I postulate that if you don't like elephants then you must be a terrorist. Scratch that -- even terrorists like elep ... More >>

Brew Blog: Red Hook Eisbock 28

Usually, Red Hook is one of my in-a-pinch beers. I'll drink it if the next best offering is Shiner, maybe, but rarely on other occasions. I don't even have that much familiarity with the stuff, having only had the ESB prior to this bottle. It's just that my beer-drinking dollars are precious to me, ... More >>

More Texas Cities Considering Bans on Plastic Grocery Bags

Brownsville set a trend last year when it became the first city in Texas to ban the use of plastic grocery bags in nearly all consumer settings. Brownsville mayor Pat Ahumada told the New York Times that the ban had eliminated 350,000 plastic bags per day, a decrease that "transformed our city from ... More >>

Cops Sexually Abusing Teens Learning to Be Cops

​What could go wrong with young kids learning to be cops by hanging with them as they do their jobs? Lots, according to this week's cover story. The Explorer program is administered by Learning for Life, a subsidiary of the Boy Scouts of America. Teenage girls and boys take part all over the ... More >>

Odd Pair: Asparagus and Wine

Today we think of asparagus as one of the standard vegetable side dishes in the contemporary canon of American gastronomy. But in another era, asparagus was considered one of the world's greatest delicacies: The insatiable King Louis XIV built greenhouses so that he could eat asparagus all year rou ... More >>

Night After Monsters: Winner and Craft Beer Labels Announced

Brooklyn's Oktoberfest: the label that proved toughest to guess.​We had 29 entries for last week's Night After Monsters contest, in which we asked our readers to identify 15 craft beer labels which had been edited to remove all identifying text. And of those 29 entries, an impressive 19 got al ... More >>

This Just In: SXSW Announces First Round Of 2012 Showcasing Bands, Including Fat Tony and Something Fierce

Photo By Marco TorresFat Tony at a day show at SXSW '11​Sweet lord, it's not even Thanksgiving yet and South By Southwest is making us excited for March in Austin already. Today the industry festival announced a few bands coming to the capitol city next year, and a few Houston names and Rocks ... More >>

Tasting Notes: This Week in Wine Blogs

​Another Wine Blog: "Don't be a Wine Spectator," writes Amy Corron Power this week on the blog she co-authors with her husband Joe. Amy and Joe often express their skepticism when it comes to wine reviews and wine blogging, and Amy offers some good advice in this post: "The best way to tell ... More >>

Tasting Notes: This Week in Wine Blogs

​This is the first of a series of wine blog roundups. Know a blog we should be paying particular attention to? Leave the address in the comments section below. Wine Camp: Craig Camp out on the west coast is always at the top of our Google reader feed. This week he ponders the nature of wine c ... More >>

Javelin

Brooklyn's "Fourth-Largest City" Boast Threatened By Us

Brooklyn's boast may be in contention soon​ Way back in the benighted `70s, there was a (terrible) sitcom called Welcome Back, Kotter, starring Gabe Kaplan and a young John Travolta (just to indicate clearly its levels of terribleness).The opening credits each week featured a montage with the abov ... More >>

Early Man

People Think A Plastic-Bag Ban Is Terrible, Plastic-Bag Industry Reports

Brownsville is getting ready to implement a ban on plastic bags in supermarkets, under an ordinance passed earlier this year.You know who doesn't like that? The American Chemistry Council, which we're sure just deals with the wonders of chemistry and how it can improve lives, through the use of, say ... More >>

The Anachronistic Chef: Egg Cream

jenniferrt66Junior's in Brooklyn still makes egg creams. ​This is one in a series of posts in which I sample recipes from the days of yore (i.e., not the 1990s). The dishes featured were mainstays of 19th-, 18th- and even 17th-century tables, but for one reason or another (unusual taste, archa ... More >>

Awesome Color

More Guerrilla Bar Fare with Jersey Mike's Super Italian Sub and the Brooklyn Brewery's New Summer Ale at Hans' Bierhaus

​It was one of those-super gorgeous spring days in Houston. What better to do than ransack some bar with food from another joint? Hans' Bierhaus doesn't have food, anyway, except for some chips behind the bar. This was actually the first time we tried Jersey Mike's or Brooklyn Brewery's Summ ... More >>

White Rabbits

Robb Walsh's 100 Favorite Houston Dishes: #80 A Bowl of Chili at James Coney Island

​Over the course of the next few months, I'm counting down 100 of my favorite Houston dishes. I chose some because they are such quintessential Houston creations, others for their cultural or historical significance, and others because they are just so damn tasty. Share your own nominations in ... More >>

Cymbals Eat Guitars

The Mexicanization of the Hot Dog

​In Houston, as in Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver, Mexican-style hot dogs have been increasing in popularity. But when the mainstream hot dog chain James Coney Island introduced a Sonoran hot dog last year, you could feel the seismic shift as the tectonic plates of German and Mexican culture ... More >>

The H-Town Countdown, No. 1: The Geto Boys' We Can't Be Stopped

Roughly 84,000 rap albums have been released in Houston since 1989. We're counting down the 25 best of all time every Thursday - or we were. Got a problem with the list? Shove it. Just kidding. Friendship. Email it to sheaserrano@gmail.com. Note: With all due respect to Prince Johnny C, Raheem, K-9, ... More >>

"Weird" and Proud, Preemo Understands the Meaning of "Hustle Town"

​ We think "Weird Al" Yankovic screwed it up for everybody. There aren't lots of times you can use the word "weird" in a good way. That's one of those words we need to take back, on the real, because when you put "weird" into the right context it can be a positive thing - a differentiator from th ... More >>

Lymbyc Systym

The BQE

Wait a minute, nothing could be as ugly as I-45

"Paper Or Plastic": You Won't Be Hearing That In Brownsville Anymore

​Brownsville is never going to be confused with Portland, San Franciscio or some other bucolic tree-hugging liberal city, but it's home to just as many crunchy ecological activists as any yurt-living commune, apparently.Yesterday its version of the city council voted to ban merchants from usin ... More >>

Curse Your Branches: The Top College-Rockish Records of 2009, Part 2

​5. Booker T., Potato Hole (Anti-) Booker T. Jones, as usual, is having exactly as much fun as he appears to be - in a word, lots. Here he's backed by the Drive-By Truckers, an inspired pairing of sweet and surly garage R&B atop which that exuberant organ emotes more exquisitely than do most v ... More >>

BEDFORD'S AGAVE SOUR

“Perfectible Worlds”

Sage Sohier looks at obsession

Dan Kopp and Jay Davis

Two Brooklyn artists show off their new works

The Busy World Is Hushed

Main Street Theater presents a regional premiere inspired by the region

A Tale of Two Brooklyns

Teen Spirit

Dog Days

How to find a real Chicago hot dog without flying to O'Hare