Brooklyn’s Bar Beau Is the Latest Hidden Hotspot You Need to Visit
Tucked under a bustling underpass in Brooklyn, there’s a thin storefront sandwiched between two run-of-the-mill apartment buildings. There’s a bright yellow doorway accompanied by a neon sign, and to unknowing passerby, it looks like a simple coffee bar. That is, until you venture through a curved portico and into a softly lit dining room.
Discovering Bar Beau doesn’t involve speakeasy passwords or secret doorways, but simply being in-the-know. Guests who fill the newly opened eatery tend to fall into two camps—neighborhood regulars, or those who made a trip to this still-emerging corner of Williamsburg seeking the latest from Claire Chan, the fashion buyer turned restaurateur who has launched Bar Beau as her second venture, following The Elk across the bridge in Manhattan.
Unlike The Elk, which serves up coffee and light bites to a fashionable West Village crowd, Bar Beau shakes the Williamsburg archetype of weathered walls and reclaimed furniture in favor of stark modernity and a mix of soothing earth tones designed by the Greenpoint-based architecture and design firm Isaac-Rae.
The food selection, created alongside Executive Chef and New York native Gemma Kamin-Korn, follows suit, purposefully crafted to be an irreverent and wide-ranging selection. “Each item serves a specific purpose and has much thought put behind it,” Chan explains. “Both the food and the cocktail menu were designed to pair different tastes, textures, and formats together in a way that allowed our guests a ‘choose your own adventure’ type of experience. On a chill weekday, I love a nice glass Syrah and snacking on our marinated olives and the burrata. On the weekend, I’ll go for a cocktail paired with our deviled eggs to start, then followed by the udon—and maybe another cocktail.” A cold night might call for scallop corn fritters; a quick date, the shishito peppers with thai basil.
Chan has also added her own personal touches on both the food and cocktail menus, like the Tonka Truck, a fluorescent yellow cocktail presented in a petit jelly jar. “We drew from the things we tasted and loved, and reformatted them in a way that made sense for Beau,” Chan says. “For example, the Tonka Truck came from a love of Calpis, which is this milky Japanese soft drink I used to have in my childhood, and then we incorporated that into a kind of reimagined whiskey sour.”
Altogether, a morning, afternoon, or evening spent at Bar Beau is one full of aesthetic pleasures, and yet they don’t stand in the way of truly tasty food. It’s a combination Chan says she learned from her past life as a buyer for Bergdorf Goodman, where the presentation and atmosphere surrounding luxury products are often just as important as the products themselves. The same, she says, goes for food. “When I finally made the decision to pivot from fashion into hospitality, it was of course scary, but I knew in my heart it was the right move for me, and that some of the same skills I had from retail carried over really well into hospitality,” Chan says. “Now I feel like I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”
