By Dennis Holt
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BROOKLYN — I noticed this weekend that there is a new book out called Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York. It is written by William Grimes, former restaurant critic of the Times, and if the review in the Times Book Review is accurate, this looks like a winner.

No one else has even tried to take that subject on, and surely it will lead to various accounts of famous restaurants. Grimes makes note of something I never thought about: Prohibition in the 1920 crippled good dining in the city as much as it crushed taverns, and the restaurants didn’t really recover until the 1960s.

Having not read the book yet, I wondered if Grimes included Brooklyn in the book. If he did, he might only have had passing remarks about Lundy’s, Peter Luger’s and Gage & Tollner. Brooklyn hasn’t yet earned its way into the food hall of fame, but that may change.

According to the editors of L Magazine, it already has. L Magazine is a smallish magazine, a little bigger than 8 by 5 inches. It is published in DUMBO, but not a Brooklyn magazine as it is.

Its main attractions are its calendar of events listings and its appealing ads on the back cover by American Apparel. (It tries a little tongue-in-cheek feistiness now and then.) It is free and usually available from sidewalk stands.

What caught my eye this weekend was the latest issue featuring “The Restaurant Awards.� There were 40 “can’t miss NYC meals.� The word “meal� is a stretch because the awards include the best doughnuts, best condiments, best coffee and the like.

(The “best coffee,� by the way, can be found in Cobble Hill at Cafe Pedlar at 210 Court St. The café, in turn, gets its coffee from the Stumptown Roastery of Red Hook, an offshoot of a coffee roaster in Portland, Ore.).

Having spotted this entry, I took count, and Brooklyn had 23 of the 40 winners, with one for Queens and the rest for Manhattan. Well now!

Then I sorted out the neighborhoods. The Bococa area (Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens) won 10 awards; Williamsburg-Greenpoint won even; Park Slope won 2; and there were one vote each for Sunset Park (best dim sum), Bushwick (best neighborhood pizzeria), the Columbia Street District (meatiest meat pie) and Red Hook (best bar food, which happens to be at Fort Defiance on Van Brunt Street.)

The best hot dog in the entire city isn’t from Nathan’s, but can still be found in Brooklyn at something called Bark Hot Dog at 474 Bergen St. in Park Slope.

These are not tongue-in-cheek reviews. They show the attention the editors demanded from those doing the reviews.

Reviewing restaurants in Brooklyn, on a serious note, is somewhat new. Zagat was first to focus on Brooklyn. It was followed by Michelin, and now one will frequently find a positive and professional review of a new spot in the borough in any number of newspapers and magazines.

The advent of all these new eateries is a direct result of what some people sneeringly call the “Manhattanization� of Brooklyn. Nothing wrong with that; we’ve been welcoming people from Manhattan for some time now — they might as well bring something to the table.

Questions? Comments? Sound off to the Editor

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2009 All materials posted on BrooklynEagle.com are protected by United States copyright law. Just a reminder, though -- It’s not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph,( 40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues. So please keep posting, but not the entire article. arturc at att.net