A Hit, Kid-Friendly Pasta Spot in Park Slope Expands Down the Street

When Allison Arevalo opened Pasta Louise in Park Slope last year, she wasn’t planning on having booked-out reservations and wait times at dinner. “We’ve gotten really lucky,” she says. “People have been coming in non-stop since we opened.” More than a year later, the hit, family-friendly pasta shop is now looking to expand and will take over the former Johnny Mack’s space at 1114 Eighth Avenue, at 12th Street, for a restaurant opening next April.

The new restaurant measures in at 3,000 square feet, roughly three times the size of Pasta Louise’s current home, according to Arevalo, and includes plans for a 70-seat indoor dining room and bar. Arevalo’s current menu — one kind of pasta each day, with lots of sauces to choose from — will mostly remain the same, only there’s going to be more meats, salads, and the possibility of two pasta shapes each day, she says.

Rather than running two restaurants, the current location of Pasta Louise at 803 Eighth Avenue, at Eighth Street, will become more of a “neighborhood pasta shop,” Arevalo says, ending its dining services and expanding its selection of pastas and sauces for retail sale.

The Turk’s Inn is back open for indoor dining

Bushwick restaurant the Turk’s Inn reopened on December 3, welcoming customers back inside its dining room — still outfitted with taxidermied peacocks, cat portraits, and other oddities — for the first time since the start of the pandemic. After trying to get the restaurant off the ground for more than a year, co-owner Varun Kataria has now opened its dining room for service Thursday through Saturday from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., and on Sunday from 6 to 12 p.m.

Find a taste of New Orleans in New York

A New Orleans landmark is helping to bring beignets to north Brooklyn. Famed open-air coffee shop Cafe Du Monde has teamed up with local David Leach, who previously operated a coffee and crepe cart at the Standard, to open a mobile cart serving beignets and cups of chicory coffee on weekends, according to Greenpointers. Find Leach on the corner of North 12th and Union streets for the next three Saturdays.

Bro santas can’t drink on trains this year, says MTA

SantaCon will descend on the city this weekend, and the MTA has made is annual, preemptive announcement that alcohol won’t be allowed on its commuter trains for the day. From 4 a.m. on December 11 — the day of the “festivities” — until noon the following day, booze is prohibited from Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North trains and platforms, according to AMNY. The city organization will also be stepping up enforcement at Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal for the weekend.