On a recent Friday night, just past 10, wild-eyed investment banker Omar is wedged between two blondes in the corner of a booth at the Williamsburg bistro Walter Foods. Clad in a bright Paul Smith shirt and designer jeans, he drapes his arm across the back of the weathered leather seat.
Though the 27-year-old declines to give his last name, because “my bosses don’t know I party,” he’s less circumspect about his love for crossing the river from his Chelsea condo to drop cash in Brooklyn: “I think Williamsburg is the coolest place in the city now. It’s like the Lower East Side, the East Village — but less obvious.”
He’s gesticulating a little too enthusiastically over the table, which is littered with $11 cocktails and the remains of a filet mignon. One of his blonde companions is tipsily tapping “Brooklyn Bowl” into her iPhone to try to find its cross streets.
Forget the turf battle between Hasids and hipsters, the artsy young kids who’ve thronged the neighborhood for the last 15 years. Lately, Williamsburg has been invaded by free-spending crowds of Manhattanites like Omar, an entitled tribe that sees the neighborhood as a no-holds-barred weekend party destination — a scrappier, cheaper version of the Meatpacking District.
When the bill arrives, proffered by a waiter in a white shirt and ironic bow tie, Omar throws down two $100 bills, raising his voice to say, “I got the Benjamins, man!” before slapping his waiter jovially on the back. But though night crawlers like Omar and his friends translate to hefty tips and help justify the increasing commercial rents in the environs of the Bedford Avenue L stop, some locals aren’t so enthusiastic about their arrival, which has also brought plagues of stretch Hummers and packs of girls in pastel Intermix dresses to the hood.
Angela Gaimari, who writes the food blog Newyorkavore.com, says that scenesters like these at Walter Foods (along with skyrocketing rents) helped to precipitate her March move from her once-beloved neighborhood to Prospect Heights.
Gaimari first moved to Williamsburg in 2004 and loved its spontaneity, frequenting loft parties and enjoying the homespun feel of foodie spots like Marlow & Sons or Diner.
Now, she says, the newcomers are spoiling the fun.
“I went to Walter Foods, and there was this long table of obvious Manhattanites who were partying with the wild abandon of people who know they won’t run into anyone they know. They were acting like they were in Cancun, doing tons of shots, screaming, falling asleep sitting up. Meanwhile, I’m trying to have a nice dinner with my mom. It was hideous.”
But whether it sits well with the locals, venues in Williamsburg are increasingly making a play for these new crowds from across the East River, realizing that freelance poets crammed into five-person lofts aren’t as likely to pay $60 for a bottle of pinot noir as this affluent tide of Manhattanites.
At The Counting Room, a cavernous wine bar on Berry Street that opened earlier this month, the sleek vibe and sheer scale of the place feels more TriBeCa than
Williamsburg. The two-level space will stay open until 4 a.m. on weekends, perhaps hoping to capture some of the overflow from Brooklyn Bowl, the wildly popular Wythe Street bowling alley-cum-performance venue, where weekend lines to get in past the bouncer can snake around the block. Mercat Negre, a tapas joint on Grand Street, projects its name in lights onto a neighboring building and seems to aspire to be some kind of Miami lounge.
Annie Frebensen, a bartender at Clem’s, a relatively un-sceney dive bar on Grand Street owned by sculptor John Clement, says that there’s an upside to these flashy new spots. The hordes of newcomers seem to stick to the places that get a lot of hype in magazines, or self-consciously cool nightspots like The Woods on South Fourth Street, which boasts a taco truck and DJs.
“On the weekends,” says Frebensen, “The Woods is super-packed with people from the city and Long Island. It’s annoying.”
Clem’s, which opened seven years ago, still seems to draw a predominantly Williamsburg crowd. On a recent Thursday night, several guys with beards and caps were dazedly propping up the bar and ordering Jameson on the rocks. Frebensen likes it this way.
“The Manhattanites tend to stick together around Bedford,” she says.
“I think they might be a bit scared to wander off the beaten track.”
Back at Walter Foods, barman Matthew Fogarty, who came across the river from Balthazar, estimates that about a quarter of the restaurant’s clientele hails from Manhattan. “They’re the bridge-and-tunnel folks!” he says, shaking a cocktail. “It used to be that a certain type of Manhattanite wouldn’t come over here because they’d think, ‘Oh, Brooklyn, I might get killed.’ Now it’s just, ‘Oh, I might get lost, I might not find a cab.’ It’s an accessible adventure now, and everyone seems to think this is where the cool people are, though nobody’s quite sure who the cool people are.” Clearly annoyed at this line of questioning, Fogarty adds, “You’re going to totally blow up Williamsburg with this story.”
Co-owner Danny Minch, another Balthazar alum, says the new folks are welcome. “I always wanted to be a neighborhood bar, but we were never intended to be for just one type of person. I wanted it to be somewhere you could bring your parents, or you could come with eight people and have lobster at 2 a.m.”
Minch, who grew up on the Upper West Side and has lived in Williamsburg for seven years, gets that some locals are sensitive to change. “I get it, it pisses some people off. I lived on the Upper West Side when it started to get fancier, and it was like, who are these new people? But you know what? Things change.”