Brighton Beach (Brooklyn)

Dining Summer Guide: NYC Shoreside Eats for When You Tire of the Sand Which Is There

Beach blanket Bureks

Killer Picnics for Brooklyn Beaches at Brighton Bazaar

Who can argue with bacon-wrapped bone-in chicken parts as perfect picnic fare? The first picnic of the spring season is pending. I recommend the Brooklyn beaches, as laid-back as they ever get, including plenty of places to hunker down and dine with a surreptitious bottle of wine, with sand or wit ... More >>

Conditions Still Bad in Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, Most Restaurants Closed

The Gorilla Cheese truck dispenses free toasted cheese sandwiches to the storm-beleaguered of Brighton Beach. Bad as things are in Coney Island, they're worse in Sheepshead Bay, as my bike ride Friday demonstrated. The concrete-lined bay and quarter-mile-distant town center have a restaurant econo ... More >>

RUSSIAN 
BLANKET BINGO

There will be vodka

This Week in the Voice: Victoria Jackson, Tea Party Princess

This week in the Voice, out today: Gus Garcia-Roberts profiles Victoria Jackson, chronicling how the former Saturday Night Live star became a Tea Party darling: "Her comedy career, which took her from Johnny Carson's stage in Los Angeles to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, long ago squeaked it ... More >>

7 Best Things To Eat at Elza Fancy Foods

Kuksu is a noodle soup whose name means "noodle soup" in Korean. This week Counter Culture rolls into one of the city's most unique restaurants, Elza Fancy Foods. The menu represents the Uzbek-Korean-Russian cooking of Uzbekistan's Korean population. Much of the food is cheap, fascinating, and del ... More >>

Why Not Pig Milk?

For years, every time I see a pig farmer at one of the Greenmarkets, I ask the same question: Why is there no such thing as pig milk? Usually, I get an equivocal answer, but for once I got what sounded like a convincing response.

Brighton Beach Russians Can't Watch Show About Brighton Beach Russians

​By now, you've read and enjoyed my column about Russian Dolls, the Lifetime reality show about varying generations of Brooklyn Russkies angling for their lump of caviar in the sky. Well, I just got a call from a Brooklyn Russkie who was brimming with rage mixed with a healthy sense of irony. ... More >>

This Week in the Voice: Anatomy of a Bike Accident, Plus Kenny Chesney and Beyoncé

​This week in the Voice, out today: Camille Dodero explores the fallout from a bike accident in Greenpoint that happened in October. A Brooklyn couple, James Paz and Michelle Matson, were hit by a car on McGuiness Boulevard, and Michelle was severely injured. They've learned that if you get in ... More >>

Russian Babe Goes All Reality TV

​Here's my new column about Marina Levitis, the sumptuous star of Lifetime's new show Russian Dolls, centering on a bunch of colorful people pursuing their dreams in naughty, bawdy Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. With her husband Michael, Marina owns the Rasputin club/restaurant, where people swill ... More >>

Iloune Driver, 19, Arrested in Brighton Beach Shooting

via​Nineteen-year-old Iloune Driver has been arrested for the shooting of five last week at the Brighton Beach Boardwalk in Brooklyn. A 16-year-old bystander, Tysha Jones, was killed in the attack and four boys were injured. Police believe there were two men firing on Thursday, when local city ... More >>

Our 10 Best Legal and Sort of Legal Picnic Spots

Robert SietsemaViewed from Inwood Hill Park, New Jersey is beautiful.​ Despite this week's sodden weather, spring really is upon us, which means that picnic season is too. New York harbors untold numbers of excellent picnic spots, be they in midtown pocket parks, an empty soccer field, or you ... More >>

Corrupt Carl Kruger's Crony Michael Levitis to Star in Brighton Beach Version of Jersey Shore

Michael and Marina Levitis​We warned last year that Jersey Shore could be coming to Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, with Russian-Americans instead of Italian-Americans, but now the plot has become juicier. Michael Levitis, a confessed criminal, but also a lawyer and the owner of a nightclub called ... More >>

Posts of the Week

A Friday at the end of a short week. Here's a parting glance ... We ranked our 10 best tofu dishes in NYC. A battle to the death between Elevation Burger's two veggie burgers. Ask the Critic addresses the issue of Valentine's Day chocolate.

Weekend Brighton Beach Barbacoa Run

​We tried in vain to calculate how many goats the massive barbacoa pot held at El Jarochito. Alongside Sunset Park, East Elmhurst, and Corona, Brighton Beach and Coney Island are collectively becoming one of the foremost destinations for southern Mexican food. That was confirmed last weekend ... More >>

Brooklyn's "Jersey Shore"-Inspired "Brighton Beach" is Really Coming to Your TV

Putin​Rumors of a Brooklyn-based show, Brighton Beach, doing for Russians what Jersey Shore has done for Italians, were not just talk. Lifetime has ordered twelve episodes of the reality program, the Daily News reports, with it set to air next year. Hopefully robot cars will have killed us all ... More >>

Our 10 Best NYC Chinese Restaurants, 2010 Edition

​The "boiled beef with hot-spicy sauce" is every bit as mouth searing as it looks, but there are plenty of blander options -- such as "special spinach pancake" -- on Lu Xiang Yuan's menu. Like an arcing missile, Chinese cuisine in New York moves so fast, you can barely keep track of it. Thus, ... More >>

Improv Everywhere Gets Sand Up Their Formal Wear (Video)

via Improv Everywhere​Just a slight shifting of established social norms -- wearing a Speedo to work, for example -- can make something entirely routine into something completely wacky. Improv Everywhere uses this theory in their latest stunt, which involved recruiting several hundred folks -- ... More >>

Omak 'Honey Nut' at Brighton Bazaar in Brighton Beach

​Brighton Beach food stores abound with great gifts for your foodie friends, often available nowhere else. A case in point is Omak's "Honey Nut," a big jar of honey prettily lined with nuts, including almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, walnuts, peanuts, and coconut chunks. There are also more cr ... More >>

WALK THIS WAY

Exploring Brighton Beach

Ladies, There Are Many Delights Which Await You at the Beach This Summer

Here is but one. We call it "Ponytail Surveys Realm"... (The photo, after the jump, is worth it. Promise.)

Fat Pants Friday: Gold Label Gourmet Food's Raisin and Cheese Pastry

​There's something about being handed a warm pastry through a shop window that makes it taste better than it would if it were just plucked from the confines of a glass display case. Such is the case with the specimen above: it's a raisin and cheese roll purchased from Brighton Beach's Gold Lab ... More >>

Even the Watermelon Gets Pickled at Skovorodka

Russians overwhelm the Japanese in Brighton Beach

Vegetarian (and Vegan) Delights of NYC: Karisik Meze Tabagi at Village Kebab in Brighton Beach

​The karisik meze tabagi is a wild farrago of short dishes and bread dips, and everything is vegan except for the garlic-flavored yogurt and cucumber in the upper righthand corner. There are certain types of restaurants where you can depend on getting a spectacular vegetarian meal, including ... More >>

Hungover at Coney Island with the Beachniks (Plus MP3!)

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent. ​Lo-fi sunshine stealers Beachniks make music so radiant, enthusiastic, and joyful that it's almost confrontational. An extended, sunburned arm of New York's thriving post-kiwi jangle-punk scene, the ... More >>

Somebody Got Murdered: Cops Want Public Help in Solving 2009 Brighton Beach Slaying

View Larger Map DATE: March 14, 2009 at 2:30 p.m. LOCATION: Inside a parking garage at 149 Brighton 11th St., Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. In what is a relatively unusual event, the NYPD is asking the public's help to solve a murder dating back to March of last year. The victim, Vlad Tolstykh, 35, ... More >>

Beachniks

Our Ten Best: Brooklyn Bars

​The best thing about drinking in Brooklyn is how incredibly diverse the options are. You can belly up the bar in an old sailor's hangout, or a place where they make their own bitters, a spot with 19-century charm, or one with no charm at all. A stellar Brooklyn bar might be a neighborhood tim ... More >>

Cromer Darkens Simon's Memoirs; Marber Misdates Miss Julie; Ordinary Days are Just That

Pix from KeBeer, a New Russian Beer Garden in Brighton Beach

​ The tap beers at KeBeer are cheap, and the decor positively medieval. This week, Counter Culture surfs Brighton Beach on a wave of foamy beer. The beer garden in question is called KeBeer, and it's one of those indoor beer gardens that have become standard in New York City. The selection of ... More >>

Brighton Beach's KeBeer Bar & Grill

A Russian neighborhood gets a German beer garden and roadkill chicken

Vegetarian Delights of NYC: Pickled Mushrooms at Kebeer in Brighton Beach

​ ​The pickled 'shrooms at Kebeer are meaty and amazing--without containing any actual meat. It seem like the Russians will pickle anything. In this case, to spectacular effect. Oyster mushrooms and shiitakes are extensively vinegar-soaked and strewn with fresh dill and sweet onions at ... More >>

How Do You Spell G-U-T-B-O-M-B? Chicken Tabaka at Kebeer in Brighton Beach

​ Crisp, greasy, garlicky, and resting counterintuitively in a pool of broth--chicken tabaka is the pride of Georgian cooking. ​How apropos that fried chicken should be the centerpiece of the cooking of both Georgias. Chicken tabaka--sometimes facetiously called "road kill" chicken--fea ... More >>

BROOKLYN ROCKS

Charles L. Mee's Coney Island Avenue

Strange Snacks of the World--Dried Wild Fish

The colorful and cheap vegetables stands of Brighton Beach Avenue also provide displays of snacks, many unfamiliar to Americans. One such is called "Dried Wild Fish," on a package that is headlined in Russian cyrillic type. The package shows two dancing figures--they may be identical twins--w ... More >>

Organ Recital--Sheep Intestines and Trotters

Our friend and far-flung correspondent (and former Gourmet food editor) Lillian Chou picked up and moved from Jersey City to Beijing in February, and you can read about her exploits in the blog Chinagirl. Periodically, she sends us pictures from behind the Bamboo Curtain. She posts these p ... More >>

Bart Got a Room May Be the Year's Most Unambitious Comedy

James Gray Gets Goofy in Two Lovers

Get Your Cool On

From free cookouts to urban beaches, the best in New York's summer scenes

Chewing the Pork Fat

Brighton Beach does lardo?

New York Stories

Brooding city dwellers populate a muddled post–9-11 ensemble piece

The Life Aquatic

You can go in the water again!

Close-Up on Sea Gate, Brooklyn

Close-Up on Brighton Beach

Nothing Is Elucidated

Lipkin's fantasies collide with the Russian Brighton Beach

Perfect Picnics

Grab some eats, spread a tablecloth, and get lost in the landscape

Close-Up on Brighton Beach, Brooklyn

Close-Up On: Coney Island

Crocked

Georgia on My Mind