Casacara has a favorite tin ceiling in Brooklyn. It's in the restaurant Bar Tano. which also serves her new fave burger. Nice.
That's the place we had Hepcat's birthday party last year. But there's other news in this story, too. The Bar Tano/Bar Toto (11th Street and 6th Avenue) people are venturing to the South Slope and opening Bar Tini on 8th Avenue and 13th Street and 8th Avenue. Here from CasaCara:
on Third Avenue and 9th Street in Gowanus, a pioneering location hard
by an auto body shop, with plenty of free parking under the El.
Bar Tano almost replaces the late Uncle Pho on
Smith Street in my personal mythology. Alan Harding’s French-Vietnamese
place was my go-to for watermelon martinis and spring rolls, until it
unceremoniously closed and was replaced by a generic Indian restaurant.
This was quite a few years ago, but to me, the demise of Uncle Pho was the beginning of the end of Smith Street (which is now practically over, with the coming of Atomic Wings to the Boerum Hill Food Company’s former space).
The other night, my friend Nancy and I sat at the bar at Bar Tano, where I admired, as always, the phenomenal job they did re-creating old-fashioned ambience
— a job so good that even I, veteran old-house person, was initially
fooled. “Everything you see in there is brand new,” said the owner,
Peter Sclafani, “believe it or not.” (Sclafani also owns 7-year-old Bar Toto in Park Slope and the forthcoming Bar Tini, opening in mid-April at 8th Avenue and 13th Street in the South Slope.)