Fried oysters, Meyer lemon marmalade, greens and bacon. With a side of rosé.

Potlikker, a new restaurant with chef Liza Queen at the helm, opened quietly last Friday, serving a daytime menu, with a night menu to come soon. In a the era of frenzied food buzz about new restaurants, this stands out as the place that chefs, rather than bloggers, have been waiting for and gossiping about over beers since word hit the street last winter that Queen had taken on a 14-year lease in the Bedford Avenue space that was once occupied by Bonita.

It’s hard to find an article about Queen that doesn’t describe her, or her food as “quirky” or “eclectic,” as though she employs Zooey Deschanel and Juliana Hatfield to hand-embroider aprons for the staff and pipe ketchup designs onto meatloaf cupcakes. There’s nothing twee or dear about Queen or her food. Rather, it feels personal–it’s all ingredients and techniques that she loves and has continually added to her repertoire over years of moving around the country as a cook. “Along the way I pick up foods I can’t do without–you’ll always see them on my menus,” she says.

Liza Queen, scanning the room from the kitchen.

One of the newer additions to Queen’s go-to ingredient list (which right now also includes asparagus and English peas, as well as shellfish) is sticky rice, which she learned to love, and consider comfort food while working in restaurants in Vietnam.

Though you won’t find evidence of her time in Asia on the day menu, the night menu, which she plans on starting to serve in a week or so, includes a seafood hot pot. “It’s party food,” Queen explains. “It’s the most convivial, gracious dish around. In Vietnam it was served at any kind of special occasion, usually at the end of an epic meal.” Though her original hot pot idea had diners cooking their own seafood and greens at the table, Queen says that logistics–including how to make the combination of open flame and raw seafood at a small restaurant table legal and safe–changed the dish.
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For the fourth year in a row, the Northside Festival is returning to take over Williamsburg and Greenpoint from June 14-21, and badges are on sale now! Not only that, Brooklyn Based subscribers get a 25% discount on any of th... Read More »

Day drinking in action at Brooklyn Ice House.

It’s that time of year–when everyone wants to be outside sipping their poison of choice. With a beautiful weekend ahead of us, we’ve compiled a list of 17 of our favorite outdoor bars around Brooklyn. Some of these are essential bars to have in your going out arsenal, big places you can always manage to squeeze in a group, or smaller, less traveled spots where you can enjoy a glass of wine without having beer spilled on your shoes. We’ve got spots for beer aficionados, visitors from Manhattan–even non-smokers. Add your favorites in the comments as this is by no means an exhaustive list, but merely our go-tos, favorites and current obsessions. And for all you twitterers, do your fellow outdoor drinkers a service this summer–tell us when you find an outdoor bar that’s packed/empty/great/lame @OutdoorDrinks, and we’ll share your report.

Drinks with a View, South: Bark at Brooklyn Bridge Park
Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights/Brooklyn Bridge Park, at Pier 6 where Atlantic Avenue meets the waterfront
Appeal: The view, the lack of crowds–so far
With up-close views of lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and Governors Island, this newly developed southern strip of BBP is the city’s most underutilized scenic setting. Perched above the sandy beach volleyball courts just west of Atlantic Avenue, Bark’s roof deck bar is just far away enough from anything else that on most evenings it still offers crowd-free, riverside drinking at its al fresco picnic tables. Beers from Sixpoint and tap wines from the Gotham Project can be paired with the eatery’s signature sausages (plus burgers and veggie dogs), or savored while you’re killing time during the hours-long wait for a table at nearby Pok Pok. It’s a quick ride to Pier 6 along the bike path from the more trafficked part of Brooklyn Bridge Park. Opens for the season May 26.–Brendan Spiegel

Drinks with a View, North: Ides Bar at the Wythe Hotel
Neighborhood: Williamsburg, 80 Wythe Avenue, 6th Floor
Appeal: The view, feeling fancy, and an easy sell for friends who are still reluctant to come Brooklyn
It’s hard to overstate how lovely the view from the sixth-floor bar at the Wythe Hotel is, or how amazing and breezy the patio is on a warm night. The bar itself is run by the same team as Reynards (and Diner, Marlow & Sons and Romans), the hotel’s seasonally-focused restaurant. And while it feels fancy, with a tiny-tile floor, fantastically weird wine list and high-end cocktails made from locally-distilled spirits, you can also just order a beer and take in the view. The stone deck looks south to the Williamsburg Bridge, across the river at the tall buildings of Midtown, and the Freedom Tower, rising in Lower Manhattan. It also wraps around so that you can peer deep into Brooklyn, or up into Queens. There are no tables or chairs outside, but there’s a generous stone ledge where you can rest your glass of biodynamic sparkling rosé while you gaze out over the borough.–Annaliese Griffin

Escape from the Hell of Atlantic Avenue: Hot Bird
Neighborhood: Clinton Hill, 546 Clinton Avenue (between Fulton and Atlantic)
Appeal: Feels like a hidden gem; great beer selection.
Housed in an old garage, obscured by a tall red fence, and surrounded by constant street construction, Hot Bird could be totally missed from the road were it not for the party of bicycles chained up near the entrance. This is the dead giveaway that something good is hiding within. Inside that fence lies a fire pit and picnic tables, and space for more than Clinton Hill’s fair share of beer drinkers. Here, the list of drafts, mostly craft and local, change with such a frequency that it’s hard to have the same thing twice. The full bar and prosecco offerings round out the options. In the winter, the glass roll-up doors contain the heat, in summertime, they open wide to allow in the breeze. The fire pit is ablaze year round, the picnic space allows for groups to congregate, and the BBQ joint next door delivers. The space outside is sparse, a beer garden without the garden, but the people watching makes up for it. Hot Bird is surrounded by industrial and commercial properties, and is right on Atlantic Avenue (which the fence shields you from), so noise is not really an issue–you’ll never have to keep it down.–Lauren Bell

Pretty much sums of the spirit of the Gowanus Yacht Club.

Outdoor Dive: Gowanus Yacht Club
Neighborhood: Gowanus/Carroll Gardens, 323 Smith Street (at President)
Appeal: Mellow vibes, cheap beer in an seasonal, bare bones setting–this is a place that will proudly post a photo of their new toilet on Facebook.
Among a certain set, the opening of the Gowanus Yacht Club for the season announces summer in a way that even Memorial Day can’t. The OG of divey summer-only spots, the Gowanus Yacht Club is seasonal because it literally couldn’t exist in the dead of a New York winter–the only part of the bar that’s inside is the bathroom (which isn’t much to write home about). So on those nights when the temperature’s totally perfect and you want a congenially-busy, low-budget, generally good-hearted evening, slide into a picnic table, order whatever’s cheap and good on tap (the Duff wheat beer is a solid choice, they also have a two-random-cans-for-$5 special), and keep in mind that the subway’s just right outside, so stumbling there is totally encouraged.–Casey Acierno
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Students at work at Huge School.

Sara Chipps’ tech education started early. She learned to code when she was still in high school. She studied computer science in college. When she left school, she landed a job at a tech company in New Jersey, where she learned that despite all her training and efforts, her tech skills still weren’t up to snuff.

“Everything I know about software development, I did not learn in college,” she says. “There’s really no university out there that teaches web development. They hired me knowing that I’d never done this before and that they’d need to train me. That’s how I got started. I found people who believed in my skill set, and they taught me.”

Fast forward six years to the present. It’s currently Internet Week in New York, and more than 45,000 people from around the world (wide web) are here celebrating the advancements of the city’s digital culture and tech scene, one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the city.

Yet Chipps on-the-job training is still common because there is a huge talent gap within web companies. By some estimates, there are four jobs in New York for every developer, a shortage that has lead to the creation of new initiatives intended to train the next generation of web developers and entrepreneurs–many of them in Brooklyn.

These ladies got schooled, by Huge.

“One of the biggest challenges with our business is that there’s just a shortage of really great digital talent,” says Shirley Au, President of Huge Inc., a digital advertising agency in Dumbo that started as a web design shop in the neighborhood in 1999. As one of the earliest digital companies to establish itself in Brooklyn, Huge is ahead of the curve in many ways when it comes to implementing training initiatives to attract new talent.
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