Brooklyn Chefs Provide Some Culinary Inspiration

From the pages of Brownstoner magazine, here are 12 stories of chefs and mixologists who have made Brooklyn their culinary home. The cuisine and cocktails reflect the rich diversity of Brooklyn’s current food scene and each Q&A delves into their inspirations, challenges, and connection to the borough.

Williamsburg Restaurant Shalom Japan Fuses New Traditions

Sawako Okochi and Aaron Israel fell in love over food. For the two chefs set up on a date at a Chinese restaurant, food became a way to get to know each other and learn about each other’s backgrounds. Okochi, who came to the United States from Japan for school, and Israel, who grew up in a Jewish American family on Long Island, shared their cultures through late-night home-cooked meals on Okochi’s Crown Heights fire escape.
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Food for Friends: Win Son’s Founders Dish on the Importance of Chasing Your Dreams

A somewhat unlikely Taiwanese-American eatery in Williamsburg, a labor of love bootstrapped by two fledgling restaurateurs, has taken off – so much so that the prime minister of Taiwan recently visited. A place to try new flavors and inventive combinations, with a charming DIY interior and old-fashioned sign, Win Son is not strictly traditional but the food is fun, flavorful, and approachable.

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Prospect Heights Food Writer Melissa Clark Explains How One-Pot Meals Are Like Haiku

With parents she describes as Julia Child disciples, but who were also riding the 1970s health wave, Melissa Clark wasn’t permitted store-bought cakes and cookies — but she was allowed to make her own.

Since setting up a station in her Brooklyn kitchen at around 8 years old, she’s barely left the bench. She has combined a love for the literary and tasty eats, putting out more than 40 cookbooks and writing a weekly food column for the New York Times.

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Duo Behind Bushwick’s Astrology-Themed Bar Mood Ring Serve Up Tips, Stories, Recipes

Brooklynites and longtime best friends Vanessa Li and Bowen Goh were working at “mundane office jobs,” in Li’s words – Li had worked at a queer and trans youth center and Goh had a background in film and business – when they opened the Bushwick bar Mood Ring in 2017. Intended to be a welcoming spot for LGBTQ and BIPOC patrons, Mood Ring offers a rotating menu of astrology-themed drinks timed to the Zodiac calendar.

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For Fort Greene Chef and Author Carla Lalli Music, Food Creates Family

“Food is a really important part of our family,” says the Fort Greene chef and cookbook author Carla Lalli Music. Before the pandemic, Lalli Music, her husband, and children would have to squeeze in time for meals between daily activities and responsibilities. It was something that always nagged at her. When the pandemic forced her family inside, like so many others, she realized she could not take it for granted. “This was one thing that felt really, really special,” she says. “There was a lot to be grateful for, but this was one of them.”

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Brooklyn Delhi Founder Chitra Agrawal Finds Community Through Food

It all started with a blog. More than a decade ago, Chitra Agrawal began documenting her family’s recipes from India on “ABCD’s of Cooking,” which quickly achieved a loyal following. Agrawal began taking the recipes and making them her own, using local produce and foods she found in Brooklyn, and an idea started to develop. “I was slowly carving out a style of cooking that reflected both my Indian heritage and American identity,” she says.

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Tiki Expert Shannon Mustipher Reimagines the Cocktail

Shannon Mustipher has risen fast in the world of cocktails. Trained as an artist, with a background in hospitality, she arrived at Gladys, a Carribean restaurant and bar in Crown Heights, with a unique opportunity: Make the best rum bar in New York City. It was a challenge. Mustipher had little experience with rum-based cocktails, but dove into the genre with passion. Her artistic background proved to be an asset as she was able to creatively envisage new twists on old forms, including the often maligned tiki category of drinks.

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A Long Life Reflected in Sofreh’s Dishes

By the time Nasim Alikhani opened Sofreh, her highly acclaimed restaurant in Prospect Heights that began service in June 2018, she was 59 years old. In her own words, everything up to that point had been part of “a really long life.” She’s not joking. Her background reads like that of multiple people: She went to law school in her native Iran, where she helped cook for her classmates in the cafeteria during the Iranian revolution. Alikhani came to America to continue studying law and eventually got married and had twins. She operated a print shop in Manhattan for eight years, and in her spare time cooked for Iranian families for weddings and events. She started a foundation in Iran, ran marathons, and took up hiking and mountain climbing. On most mornings still, she goes for a swim.

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Touch of the Unexpected Transports at Greenpoint Mexican Restaurant Oxomoco

Justin Bazdarich is busy. The day before his new restaurant Oxomoco opened in June 2018, his wife had a child. “My life has sort of been upside down for the past seven months,” he said earlier this year. “I’m trying to figure out how to manage three restaurants, and my wife and I have been trying to figure out how to live.”

Those other two restaurants are local staple Speedy Romeo, which opened in Clinton Hill in 2012, and its relatively new Manhattan outpost, which opened in 2015. (To handle it all, Bazdarich has a system in place, he said, allowing him to give equal amounts of time to his restaurants and family, which he learned from an interview with the CEO of Twitter he heard on the radio.)

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Miss Ada’s Tomer Blechman Rethinks Mediterranean Cuisine in Fort Greene

Food wasn’t the first option for Tomer Blechman. Before he came to America at the age of 28, the chef behind Fort Greene’s always packed Miss Ada studied alternative medicine in Israel, where he was born. His interest in shiatsu and acupuncture, he says, came from a place of wanting to heal.

“It was a natural transition,” he says of the move to working in kitchens. “If I couldn’t heal people through medicine I could heal people through what they put in their bodies. What we eat is what we are.”

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Egg’s George Weld Keeps It Local

Thirteen years ago, George Weld was living in Williamsburg, attempting to start a writing career, when he accidentally opened a restaurant instead.

A friend offered him free rein in the mornings at his newly opened hot dog place, and Weld, who had worked in restaurants in high school and college, took him up on it. This is how Egg, Weld’s mega-popular Williamsburg eatery, was hatched.

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Williamsburg Chef Missy Robbins Finds Time for Cookbook, Second ‘Burg Eatery, Life

When Missy Robbins left her well-respected position as executive chef of Manhattan restaurant A Voce in 2013, she had no idea if she would continue to cook. The previous two decades had been spent grinding away in various kitchens, both in New York and Chicago — the Obamas were regulars at Spiaggia, where Robbins served as executive chef between 2003 and 2008 — and she was feeling both the physical and emotional strain.

There was success, certainly: Michelin stars, Food & Wine’s Best New Chef Award, a featured role on “Top Chef Masters.” But was all the hard work worth it if it couldn’t be enjoyed?

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Related Stories

• Gomaae Broccoli or Broccoli With Sesame Sauce
• Win Son’s Chive-Centric Flies’ Head Over Rice
• Melissa Clark’s Baked Lemony Feta With Tomatoes and Sweet Peppers

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