If Greenpoint’s Five Leaves serves as a sort of community center for the hood, with daytime food, a coffee window, and a lively bar scene at night, the owners’ new venture, Nights and Weekends, which opened last night, tells you in the name that it’s different. “It’s primarily a bar … we’re doing smaller bar snacks over there,” explains co-owner Kathy Mecham.
Small plates by Five Leaves chef and co-owner Ken Addington range from a daily changing seafood cocktail to a “croque señora,” a Cuban-sandwich riff topped with a fried egg. Five Leaves’ Dan Sabo and Fidel Garcia-Reichman are behind the cocktail program, which breaks drinks down by spirit and offers plenty of summery frozen options. Big spenders (or big drinkers) might like the $17 “Millionaire’s Margarita,” made with top-shelf tequila and served in its shaker with a black-lava-salt rim. As you’d hope, it’s several drinks in one: “It’s very, very dangerous,” laughs Mecham. The clean and airy look of the place, with concrete walls and weathered wood, is meant to suggest that “maybe back in the day it used to be a car or motorcycle garage,” Mecham explains. The bar is open till 3 a.m. (and the kitchen till 2 a.m.), with dinner served daily and brunch on weekends.
Dinner Menu [JPG]
Brunch Menu [JPG]
Cocktail Menu [PDF]
Drinks Menu [PDF]
Nights and Weekends, 1 Bedford Ave., at Manhattan Ave.; 718-383-5349