Bed-Stuy: Black Swan
Black Swan is actually part of what motivated me to start writing more extensively about Bed-Stuy. I visited about a week after they opened up and was totally excited to have something like that in the neighborhood. I wrote about the Black Swan beer list last week on Examiner, but wanted to do a more rounded out post here.
The term gastropub gets tossed around a lot more than it should, so I try to avoid it, so let's just say that Black Swan is a bar with a smart and tasty food menu or a restaurant with an extensive selection of booze. Or, I guess I could just go ahead and call it a gastropub.
The space is all sexy black wood -- the bars, the benches, the walls, everywhere. At night, it's warmly lit and dark as a cave, my preferred environment for imbibing. During the day, the light from the skylights and windows give a rustic, relaxed feeling.
More after the jump...
The thing about the beer list that caught my attention is that, of the 16 taps, none of them seemed to be filler. Even better, a lot of them were beers that I only ever find in one or two places. So, the Reissdorf Kolsch is something I've only found at a couple beer gardens and maybe one or two huge list beer bars. There's also a couple Californian taps, like Bear Republic's Racer 5, that outside of San Francisco, I've only seen at Pacific Standard. The rest of the list is similarly interesting and its rounded out with some local options from Six Point, including one cask conditioned ale they've got on a pump.
The menu is small, but full of bar snacks and finger foods. The menu has a lot of typical bar items on it, wings, calamari and so on, but there's also mac n cheese, cod fritters and deviled eggs. All of it is done very well and with some interesting twists. The wings come in two flavors, Thai spicy and just plain hot. I haven't tried the hot yet, but the Thai is sweet and sticky and really good. They also have a burgers and sandwiches that I hope to sample on my next visit.
Black Swan sits diagonally opposite from my part of Bed-Stuy, so it's not the easiest for me to get to, but I still expect to spend some quality time there this summer.
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