Food & Drink
Williamsburg/ Greenpoint
I want to skee my balls in it! Photo by Flickr's Michael Baker.
Anyone who grew up around a boardwalk will tell you skeeball is a special kind of winter time fun that made you appreciate the barren arcades before the horrible summer tourist crowds come down. Tonight, you can experience it for free: our friends at Full Circle Bar are hosting a FREE night of skeeball (usually $1 a game) to kick off the Brewskee-Ball Winter Skeeson Kick-Off Jamboree, plus an open bar from 7-9 of Genny beers (Cream Ale, tall boys, etc). You can sign up for the new skeeson, and meet your opponents tonight. And hey, they do regular free skeeball and hot dogs on Tuesdays and Thursdays too. Not bad!
[Via FreeWilliamsburg]
Food & Drink,
Shopping
Park Slope/ Prospect Heights
This is fun. If you buy something at a Fifth Avenue merchant through Feb. 14, you get a free raffle ticket to win a spending spree of up to $1,000 on the Slope’s best shopping strip. That sounds like a mighty fine way to spend an afternoon, maybe even two. Participating places include a whole bunch of shops, restaurants and bars we really like, with the noteworthy absence of Bierkraft. Here’s the list of Fifth Ave. venues where you can pick up a ticket, and All About Fifth has the details on the giveaway.
Chutzpah,
Food & Drink
ReBar photo courtesy of Simply Dazzling Events.
You’ve been there before: unable to work at home, you pop in to the local coffee shop to soak up the wifi and get yourself focused with a cup of joe. The next thing you know, you’re on your third cup, you’ve got the shakes and somehow still aren’t done working. You’ve got to take the edge off somehow, but still don’t want to go home. What’s a girl to do? Fortunately for you, Brooklyn is home to bars that offer wifi AND open early enough to get you back in balance. Happy hour, here you come! 
Food & Drink
The speaker's friends eagerly dive into her moose-face stew.
It’s seriously becoming weird food week around here at Brokelyn HQ. First foraged dinners and now a free lecture about making “beaver, bear and moose ‘mouffle.’ ” And some of you thought Brokelandia was made up.
But we started this one, so we’ll finish. Tuesday night (Jan. 31) is the monthly “Masters of Social Gastronomy” workshop presented by the Brooklyn Brainery. The topic is Strange Meats featuring retro food blogger Sarah Lohman of Four Pounds Flour, and this terrifying moose-face stew recipe. Also speaking is the Brainery’s Jonathan Soma, who will discuss unusual meat preparations, “from how to turn jerky into cotton candy to what to do with a pig’s head.” (Is letting the pig keep it out of the question?)
Tuesday, Jan. 31 at 7 p.m., Public Assembly, 70 N. 6th St. in Williamsburg. “Special beverages” available.
Food & Drink
Even the most committed brokavore has an achilles heel. Schmancy ice cream, farm raised this or that, deep-fried anchovy skeletons. Mine is coffee: oily, aromatic, dark roast, whole bean, utter, hopeless snobbery. I’m so pathetic I recently bought a junky little milk frother to elevate the experience. But after running out of the good stuff for the first time in my adult life this week, it was time to suck it up and embark upon a long-overdue Brokelyn taste test: supermarket coffees.
Food & Drink
Downtown
Pine needles or sap en brochette? Prospect Park photo by Karen Orlando, of the Outside Now blog.
The feast-happy foodies over at Issue Project Room tell are sponsoring a free (multi-course!) meal on Feb. 4, featuring foraged and gleaned local plants and animals. We’re not exactly sure what sort of vegetation to expect in the dead of February when even the feral cats are on the DL, so we’ll let hand it over to them:
Interested in eating a foraged meal but don’t have the time/mycological certification/emergency care insurance to forage yourself? Join Spurse at Issue Project Room on 2/4 for a mid-winter multi-course feast comprised of foraged and gleaned local plants and animals in UNIQUE preparations (think novelty, not decompo-stronomy).
Food & Drink,
News
The menu at Qathra
Qathra, the popular Cortelyou Road coffee house, may take over the former Whisk Cafe space at Newkirk and Westminster, the Qathra owner confirmed today. The Whisk space, which has been shuttered since owner Joshua Rubin disappeared on Oct. 31, is hosting a sell-off this weekend to raise money for Rubin’s family and, presumably, clear the way for a new tenant. (Rubin’s murder remains a mystery.) Yasser Habib, AKA Max, the owner of Qathra, told Brokelyn that his lawyers are in negotiation and that he’s “75 percent sure” that the deal is moving forward. A Qathra outpost would be welcome by many neighbors as Max’s first one, which opened on Cortelyou in 2010, was named best coffee shop in NYC by the Daily News last year. More soon…
Food & Drink
Ditmas Park/ Midwood/ Flatbush
This food is only a representation of next Saturday's meal.
Vegetarians and scarred Food Inc. watchers love to evangelize more than Tim Tebow (especially you vegans), but the point is, the only way you’re going to convert meat lovers is by letting the food do the talking. If adzuki beans and seitan are really all that, then prove it, people.
Next Saturday (Jan. 28), the folks at Sustainable Flatbush are going to give it their best shot at a free (now you’re speaking our language) vegetarian lunch prepared by chefs David Cohen and Alissa Bilfield (The Cookbook Project).
Food & Drink
Clinton Hill/ Fort Greene
Ladies' night, and the feeling's right. Mo's photo via Yelp.
“Ladies Drink Free” sounds like the best idea on paper, but as some of us learn the hard way, it doesn’t always pan out. So I was jazzed to discover that Mo’s, one of Fort Greene’s oldest bars, holds weekly free drink hours for ladies. And they don’t involve tacky Spanish-speaking frogs or an unknowing pledge to dance in the window (the aforementioned ”hard way”). The happy hour applies to cocktails only: 8-9pm on Wednesdays and 11pm-midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. The bar recently re-opened under new owners with a sleeker design, while still paying homage to its previous namesake (Moe’s). How did “Ladiesss niiiight!!!!” get left out of this?
Food & Drink
You had me at "Wisconsin."
Steak ‘n Shake — long a choice for Midwestern road trips and Southern high school outings — will make its first venture into New York when it opens at 10am today. So to gin up support/ensure you a full year of watery poo, it’s giving away free meals for a year to the first 150 people in line. It’s right next to the Ed Sullivan Theater, home of David Letterman, whose staff has vowed to pitch tents and be the first in line. Do you like fast-ish food that much that you’ll commit to a year of it? The rain right now might make it less crowded, at least. NOTE: Steak ‘n’ Shake is not to be confused with Shake Shack, Smash Burger, Cheeburger Cheeburger or any other burger bonanza that has opened of late.
Steak ‘n Shake, 1695 Broadway at 53rd Street.
