Morgan Avenue (L)
Big rigs and industrial construction meets sleepy artist vibes by day. Chaotic grunge party by night. Everything is covered in stickers.
Facing the main station entrance is Friends NYC, which specializes in pieces that capture the Brooklyn zeitgeist. Right now, that’s Timothee Chalamet and Guy Fieri devotional candles, bedazzled decorative skulls, iridescent glass bongs, hard-boiled egg fridge magnets, a vintage clothing section, you get the gist. For more vintage and fewer novelty bongs, try Harlequin Vintage, which is especially strong in its home goods collection.
Speckled between giant construction sites are hipster-chic cafes. Sey Coffee is a bright, plant-and-light filled converted garage that has a quality selection of specialty tea brews like delicate whites and smoky oolongs, all properly brewed. All the here patrons were reading, and all the books were either very thick or very thin. No one’s going to be caught here holding a crowd-pleasing bookclub pick. The choices in East Williamsburg/Bushwick are an esoteric small-press novella or Anna Karenina and nothing in between.
Sey Coffee was definitely the odd one out in its airy, welcome-in design. Most of the other bars and cafes in this area are the opposite: dark, grafittied entrances, barely-there-if-at-all signage, closed doors. Swallow cafe’s entrance is like that, but then once you’re in it’s filled with laptops and matcha lattes.
At some point, when you need pizza, Roberta’s it is. It’s got a big, picnic-table beer hall vibe with tangly fairy lights and chairs made out of old skis (covered in stickers, of course). I’d go here for a beer with friends, but the pizza is good enough to warrant a visit straight to the take-out line.
Roberta’s is a good place to start your pre-game, too. Or, I guess, the whole area is. As Yoko from Friends NYC says, this is a neighborhood where you want to start your night (he recommends Syndicated, where you can catch a film over snacks and drinks, or The Narrows, which has that hidden-entrance vibe), but once it gets rowdy its time to move on, deeper into Brooklyn.
What did I miss? Scroll past the pictures and let me know in the comments!
Yoko, who works at Friends NYC. Catch their artistry here.
Stickers are the new graffiti, I said what I said.
Legend has it that if you stand still for too long, you'll get stickered.
Swallow cafe
Walking around here is like, art art art CONSTRUCTION art art art cafe art CONSTRUCTION etc.
A Whole Foods would look ridiculous out here, but this grocery store fits right in
Bye for now, Morgan Avenue (L)! I'll return at night for the chaotic grunge pregame.
