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). 
News
Downtown
Good news, healthy and helpful Brokelynites! After a long closure due to one of the blizzards collapsing its roof last winter, the Brooklyn office of the New York Blood Center is reopening Sept. 8! So remember that post from last month where we told you all the sweet swag you get from being a blood donor, from Mets tickets to air hockey tables to racks of lamb? Now you don’t have to lug your big veins full of human juice all the way up to midtown to do it: the Brooklyn Donor Center is at 120 Lawrence St., near the Jay Street-Metrotech station. And if you make a donation before Sept. 30, you get 50 bonus points, which will put you well on the way to that new air hockey table.
Food & Drink,
Shopping
Downtown
Photos by Christine Herskovits.
By now you’ve heard of the Dekalb Market, where local artisans and foodists peddle their wares in shipping containers parked on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Willoughby Street. But are there deals lurking in those the steel-encased shops? Here’s what we found on a Brokelyn-style scout…
News
Downtown
Is your art at home in this Hotel 718 room?
“Hotel art” is used as a slur against less-than-great paintings. But this is Brooklyn, and hotels here aren’t exactly the Red Roof Inn in Norman, Okla., so you’ll probably get a good shake with something on the walls of a new boutique hotel. The Brooklyn Arts Council is seeking artwork by Brooklyn artists to be purchased (as in, for moneys) for Hotel 718, a new hotel on Duffield Street downtown opening this fall. The deadline to be considered for the 128-room hotel is June 14.
free stuff
Downtown
She's donating.
Dying to see Inception at a big theater in Brooklyn, but you can’t dream upon dream of dropping $12.50 for the ticket? (And that’s not even counting the sustenance you’ll need for the 2.5 hour extravaganza). Well then, plant this idea somewhere deep in the ice fortress of your subconscious: You get a free movie ticket every time you donate blood at the bloodmobile on Court Street. And you can do it today.
Sales & Deals
Downtown
Planet Fitness on Duffield St.
We just got turned onto to this hot offer from a new gym near Fulton Mall: the recently opened Planet Fitness on Duffield Street is offering you the ACT NOW deal of $29 to signup and $10 a month after that. The deal is good through Feb. 26, so you’ve got less than a week to talk yourself into doing it (ladies, two words: swimsuit season. Dudes, three words: Board short thighs).
The gym looks brand new, with spiffy yellow-and-purple machines everywhere and a bank of flatscreen TVs against the treadmill wall, each labeled to what station they were turned to (The Fresh Prince was a popular eye-grabber this a.m.). Planet Fitness is open 24 hours Monday-Friday and 7 a.m.-7 p.m. on the weekends.
Outings
Downtown
Why not wire some summer shoes? Pumps by Poly Verity.
Annie get your glue gun: NYC Resistor, a hacker collective located in downtown Brooklyn (397 Bridge St., Floor 5), is saying goodbye to its old space with a 48-hour hack-a-thon starting Friday, Feb. 12, at 6 p.m. To those unfamiliar with the concept of a hack-a-thon, think cyberpunk knitting circle where you can end up with a wristwatch, new speaker, tricked-out Ham radio, mysterious brain wave machine or other novel gadget.
Outings
Downtown
The Flea in One Hanson Place, photo courtesy of Racked.com
Holy letterpress cocktail coasters! Racked, the essential NYC retail blog, has some choice photos from the Brooklyn Flea’s debut in One Hanson Place in Saturday, in all of its landmarked art-deco glory. Vendors in teller windows, pupusas in the vault—it’s all too too Brooklyn-fabulous. Izzy Greenspan of Racked (love her, btw) writes:
“The mix of vendors isn’t much different from other Flea locations—there’s the usual vintage coats, grandmotherly furniture, and pressed-tin mirrors, plus a sprinkling of young artisans with homemade bags and clothes. But all of it looks a hundred times fancier under the soaring ceiling.”
The photos from inside the 1895 building, former home to the Williamsburg Savings bank, certainly suggest as much. As Racked points out, it’s a “perfect marriage of market and location.” To us, it’s looking like the perfect place to lose your kids on a freezing Saturday. See more photos on Racked.
Outings
Downtown
We get excited just looking at this photo of One Hanson Place.
Maybe you’ve been to this building for a root canal or orthodonture. But put those painful memories aside, because starting tomorrow (Jan. 9), One Hanson Place—the dentistry capital of Brooklyn for reasons we don’t really know—will be hosting the Brooklyn Flea for 12 weeks, and the setup sounds totally whack, in a good way. From 10 to 5 Saturdays and Sundays, the flea will take over the ground floor and basement of the former Williamsburg Savings Bank building, where “vendors will present their merchandise at teller windows, banking kiosks, secret rooms, and even the former vault located within the landmark space,” according to the press release. How cool is that? If you’ve never been, the Art Deco building, with 63-foot vaulted ceilings, giant stained-glass windows, and 40-foot mosaic of New York as a Dutch colony (OK, we took that from the press release too) is worth a gander, even without nitrous.
Services
Downtown
The hygienist suits up. Photos by Sara Katz.
Here’s a question you might not have bothered asking: What’s even cheaper than a teeth-cleaning from our third-year dental student at NYU? Apparently, one from a dental hygiene student at New York City College of Technology. That’s where I ended up earlier this month after two and a half dentist-free years had left noticeable evidence of all those cups of coffee and glasses of red wine. It was time for a cleaning and, based on one very sensitive little spot, I feared even more.
