Photo, The New York Times
Today’s New York Times features an article on Brooklyn’s local chains, focusing on the heart of Smith and Court Streets. Amongst the local entrepreneurs discussed are Loretta Gendville of the Area chain; Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo of Frankies Spuntino, Prime Meats, and Cafe Pedlar; and Patrick Watson and Michele Pravda of Stinky Bklyn, the JakeWalk, and Smith & Vine.
Certainly, this corner of Brooklyn did not invent the local restaurant-retail chain. In Manhattan, Danny Meyer anchored his empire of new American cooking around Union Square; the designer Marc Jacobs is still colonizing Bleecker Street in the West Village; and Bruce and Eric Bromberg rooted their Blue Ribbon restaurant franchise on Sullivan Street in SoHo.
“Management-wise, it’s great to have restaurants near each other,” Bruce Bromberg said. “It creates a certain continuity because you see what’s being made here, and a half an hour later you’re in the other kitchen making sure things are being made correctly.”
But the Boerum-Cobble-Carroll corridor seems even more concentrated, and has attracted people who got their starts in the food business with Manhattan empire builders like Mario Batali and David Bouley. The area encourages this sort of development, local businesspeople say, because its collection of storefronts provides small spaces at affordable prices and runs through several affluent neighborhoods.
“You have a density of population that is for the most part pretty well educated, employed and, obviously, through basic aesthetics, is used to a certain quality of life,” Mr. Falcinelli said. “It’s maybe not the top finance guy at Goldman Sachs – it’s the back office of Condé Nast, the writers, the producers.”
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