A new restaurant has opened in Bedford Stuyvesant, Alice’s Arbor, located at 549 Classon Avenue on the corner of Fulton Street.
The rustic restaurant offers indoor/outdoor seating – just in time for the summer months – and serves breakfast all day, as well as full lunch and dinner plates of classic rustic-American dishes with an international bend.
The store’s four owners—Richard Cadet, Mike Ranvetti, Dimitri Vlahakis, and Stephan Gerville— came together with a vision to launch an eating outpost that marries the outdoorsy feel of a provincial countryside with the flavor and gusto of Brooklyn’s own unique, urban ethnology.
The sit-down café, which opened late April, doubles as a miniature grocery that offers organic packaged goods.
“Everything here is built with recycled materials,” said Gerville. “And we do the same with the food—not recycled food, but it’s local, farming, organic… local, local”
The store’s architecture is entirely unique, with many of its essential fixtures purchased from antique vendors and then re-purposed into something entirely different. For example, the bar’s entire front panel and even some of its benches are made from vintage door frames. The lights hang from old anchors, and the chairs at the high tables swing out like the seating in an old stadium circa 1950s.
“We want the place to feel natural, organic, green,” said Cadet. “The whole design concept was around reclaimed work. A lot of the work we got here was from a barn in Pennsylvania, whether it was the beams, the sidings, the posts. We try to use as much recycled material and conserve as much as possible.”
The restaurant’s menu features an ample number of the sophisticated American dishes we’ve come to know and love, with a cosmopolitan touch, including the mixed bean salad with pecorino and lemon-shallot vinaigrette; entrees like the hangar steak with “cowboy fries” and tomatillo pepper salsa, wood-oven trout with fennel, Yukon potatoes and creole sauce; or the mac and cheese special made with gluten-free pasta and cheddar, pecorino and goat cheese.
There are daily dessert and breakfast specials, and from 5:40 p.m. – 7:00 p.m., the restuarant offers a special on Oysters for $1 each.
Also, if while visiting the restaurant, you just so happen to spot a pink bull head hanging from a wall high above, that's "Alice."
Alice’s Arbor is open Monday through Sunday, from 8:30 a.m. until midnight “and sometimes as late as 1:00, if people want to stick around,” said Gerville.
