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Maggie Brown

Sat., November 3, 2007

The benefit of having a coworker who spends a lot of time in Brooklyn is her restaurant recommendations. I’m still digging into the list she supplied me that led me to try Bonita last month with Vincent and Megan, and then Maggie Brown today for a late lunch/early dinner with Beth. I’d been told Maggie’s specialized in what was termed “fancified mac and cheese” style dishes, home-cooking made with locally sourced ingredients, and including actual mac and cheese, which I ordered mainly because its topping of toasted breadcrumbs, bacon (yes!) and onions, the tastiness levels of which made me overlook the fact it was made with shells not elbow macaroni, as proper homemade mac-and-cheese should be. I started with something called the “deviled egg of the day” which I believe was normal deviled eggs with a touch of pesto in the yolk mixture.

It’s a small, cozy place that does a bang-up brunch business for the locals. I arrived at a dead-zone time when brunch was still being eaten but no new patrons were allowed inside so the restaurant could take out trash and prep the dinner menu. Once seated, we noticed the skull of some unfortunate animal, tastefully mounted on a plaque, eye sockets trained over the room, which pleased Beth, as animal skulls often do. Grandma-style parlor chandeliers hovered near the ceiling and the wallpaper resembled repeated velvet Rorschach blots in time-forgotten shades of purple and green. The floors are scuffed wooden planks and the trio of booths feature distressed leather upholstery and tabletops of heavily lacquered wood slabs that are easily three inches thick. Rustic touches here and there included mason jars of cherries and olives at the bar, behind which the liquor bottles gathered snugly on neatly labeled glass shelves. The music was an 80’s pop combo of perennially hip or hip-with-passage-of-time cuts (David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” “What I Am” by Edie Brickell & New Bohemians) mixed with songs from the same era that certain people may be ashamed to admit appear on their iPods (“Love Is A Battlefield,” anyone?).

We topped the evening with two poorly rolled games of bowling at Melody Lanes in Sunset Park. Waiting for a lane to free up, we knocked back some plastic cups of beer at the bar, staffed by an alternately jovial and angry old Danny DeVito-shaped guy with a New York accent, big eyeglasses, suspenders and receding, slicked-back gray hair who remembered my name then laughed and flipped me off when I couldn’t remember his. Throughout the evening, over the Mr. Microphone-quality PA system, we heard his increasingly surly requests for delivery of clean pitchers. After lacing up and navigating the computerized scoring system, I managed to knock down a few pins here and there, and turkey without capitalizing on the following frame. I mixed it up with a pink 10-pound house ball and, most importantly, had fun. The couple at the lane next to ours featured a young lady with a formless, prim toss that netted an impressive number of strikes, while her guy was aiming more for her attention than the pins as he unleashed a sidearm whip that looked like the beginning of a face-bruising karate move but failed to topple much wood.

Maggie Brown

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2007), Brooklyn | Comments have been closed.