Ozersky: Brooklyn as a Restaurant City 'Sucks'

In a rant over on the Observer, food writerperson Josh Ozersky takes 2,470 words to explain everything that's wrong with the Brooklyn dining scene and the people who like it. Though he reserves some praise for a small handful of restaurants in Kings County, like Vinegar Hill House and Seersucker, he writes that most of the beloved new Brooklyn restaurants "are, unmistakably, Manhattan restaurants, created by Manhattan chefs and restaurateurs." The rest are something altogether different:

The quintessential modern Brooklyn restaurant, as we all know, has little in common with its Manhattan cousins. Instead, it's more likely to have a name like Testicle or Mutton Hut and specialize in off-cuts three days old, executed unevenly by dedicated but unsupervised young line cooks, and served with habitual insolence by ex-Suicide Girls in the flinching light of small-batch Edison bulbs. The prices generally are fair for what you are getting, but you're not getting that much.

For now, people are instead just touting Brooklyn so highly "as a defense mechanism against the anguish of exile," because nobody actually chooses to live in Brooklyn, while the food media at-large has a professional interest in hyping whatever's newest.

Lacking diversity and true quality even when displaying "its own proud, and in some ways admirable, character," Ozersky writes that, to really compete with Manhattan, "Brooklyn needs to step up."
· The Truth About Brooklyn's Overhyped, Undercooked Food Scene [Observer]
· All Coverage of Josh Ozersky [~ENY~]