Brooklyn Heights repels and attracts me. I half see it as an enclave whose sole purpose is to house rich white families who can't quite bring themselves to move to the suburbs. I half see it as one of the few places in New York City that you can go and wander around the streets and feel like you've stepped back in time, to a place where you can peer in the windows and see people sitting down to dinner or watch them ensconced on a sofa watching 60 minutes.
Either way, it's quiet. In my beloved DUMBO, it's also rather quiet. And we don't have any restaurants. Sure, sure, we have a few, but we can count them on one hand. And once you've been to each of the five restaurants, oh I don't know, 25 times each, you just give up and never go again.
Jack the Horse Tavern isn't somewhere I would normally go. It looks like a typical Brooklyn Tavern, and it's full of people that either look like they live in Brooklyn Heights (they do) or like they have just come from the small but beatifically art house cinema on Orange Street (they have).
But in their very standard tavern-ness, JTHT appeals to me. The food is rather good, and I can't argue with a good steak, cooked exactly as I ask for it (rare, rare, rare) and their cocktail list. Due to the seeming ubiquitousness of it, they have dispensed with their very nice Brooklyn, a version of the Manhattan, and replaced it with the Man of Leisure. Which I took great pleasure in ordering, you know, being a girl. It's the small victories, I guess. Apart from their signature layer of ice on the top of each drink (it looks like a mistake), the cocktail was right on, and it was all I could do to not order a Red Hook as well. But there's no point in overdoing a good thing on one night. I'll be back to sit with the proper people that live up the road, and share a drink or two at the bar. Perhaps tonight.
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