A Williamsburg restaurant has opened in Notting Hill, which is either a joke about gentrification or an extremely confident one
Sunday in Brooklyn is a restaurant from Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, which has opened a branch in Notting Hill.
Four thousand three hundred and ninety-eight reviews. A 4.5. Twenty to thirty pounds. Extremely good pancakes.
And a premise that requires about four seconds of thought before it becomes very funny indeed.
The two neighbourhoods
Williamsburg and Notting Hill are, structurally, the same place at different points on the same curve.
Both were working-class. Both were poor. Both had large immigrant populations and cheap rent and a reputation, within living memory, for being somewhere you did not go at night.
Both were then discovered by artists, then by the people who follow artists, then by the people who follow those people, and both are now so expensive that none of the original three groups can afford to live there.
And now one of them has exported a restaurant to the other, so that residents of the London version can eat a Sunday brunch designed for the Brooklyn version.
The Prat’s urban desk has been staring at this for some time and would like to record that it is not a criticism, because the pancakes are genuinely superb, but that somebody, somewhere, needs to acknowledge what has happened.
The malted pancakes
Which are the reason everybody is here and which we should be honest about.
Hazelnut praline, maple, brown butter. They are not a stack; they are an event. They are extremely rich and they are the single most photographed plate of food in west London, and every table orders them, and every table finishes them, and nobody has ever regretted it in the moment.
They have achieved what almost nothing achieves: a dish that is genuinely as good as its reputation, in a category – brunch – that is otherwise a monument to the triumph of marketing over cooking.
Brunch, since we are here
We noted at Beany Green that Australia and New Zealand did not merely fix British coffee, they also brought brunch, and that Britain accepted the coffee gratefully and the queue less so.
Sunday in Brooklyn is the American branch of the same imposition, and between them the two invasions have produced a country in which it is now impossible to eat a fried egg on a Saturday without booking, queueing, or being photographed.
Verdict
Excellent food, superb pancakes, a 4.5 across a serious sample, and a name that is an unintentional essay on what has happened to both neighbourhoods.
Book. Order the pancakes. And enjoy Sunday, in Brooklyn, in London, on a Tuesday.
The bar, since this is ostensibly about bars
There is one, and it is decent, and it is doing something that almost no brunch operation in London bothers with: proper cocktails, made by people who can make them, rather than a Bloody Mary mix decanted from a bottle at eleven in the morning.
The bottomless offer exists. Of course it does. We established at Big Easy in Covent Garden that the British cannot resist the word, and no group of six has ever left one of these things on schedule, and none ever will.
But the drinks are genuinely made, which is more than can be said for most of the field, and the difference is tasteable by about the second one, which is roughly when it stops mattering.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
