Bed-Stuy on Tap for its First Beer Garden

Bedford-Stuyvesant is about get its first beer garden!

Brooklyn Tap House, located on the corner of Myrtle and Classon Avenues, will be opening its doors around the third week in December.

“Fingers crossed,” said Vincent Visceglia, the beer garden’s head chef.

Visceglia was the only one on hand this afternoon to offer up any details. He said the beer garden’s owners, Hugo, Ray and Steven, were out and about the borough attending to some last-minute details.

At first glance, its exterior looks not unlike a chic furniture warehouse-- a large and well-ordered mass of black, painted bricks, with a fenced-off outdoor lot and a few stylish fixtures around the entrance that soften it up.

But upon further survey, even for an untrained eye, you realize the building was erected with something more special in mind; something about the outside of it tells you there might exist a gigantic adult playground inside (even before reading the sign "Tap House").

Step through the front door, and the inside rolls out for you like a large carpet.

To the left are rows of four-foot-high, long wooden tables; shorter dining tables line the middle aisle; and a ginormous bar to the right cradles perhaps the longest tap faucet in recent memory (I think I stopped counting how many at about 50…).

High above your head hang four industrial-size ceiling fans, sharing space with an equal number of jumbo skylights.

A bright red couch in the corner adds another fun detail, right next to a neon digital music jukebox that will carry all of the greatest hits. And according to Vesceglia, six 56-inch flat-screen televisions will be installed.

And wait until you hear the menu:

“Nothing about this menu will be conventional,” said Visceglia. “Originally, the owners were thinking just chicken wings and hamburgers and I was like, ‘no way!’ We’ve got to do something original.”

Of course, there will be chicken wings made with homemade hot sauce, along with organic hamburgers and sausage ground and spiced on the premises. Crab cakes, mac-n-cheese spring rolls, and Latin, German and American tapas also will debut.

But it’s the vegan menu that may surprise patrons most: vegan bratwurst, tempeh reuben sandwiches with vegan Russian dressing, vegetarian chili and garden burgers made of Portabello mushrooms.

“I wanted to do a full vegan menu, because there’s a demand for vegan food in this neighborhood,” said Visceglia. “And our sauces, our mayonnaise and mustard will be  all organic and made in-house. And I’m a pastry chef so I will be making pastries in-house, a few crepes and maybe even a crème brûlée.”

Oh yeah, the beer: There will be 49 beers from all over the world on tap and 100 different bottled beers.

Inside, Brooklyn Tap House seats about 90 people at capacity with an additional 100 seats in the outdoor courtyard.

“This beer garden is really amazing, very non-traditional, and I promise you the food will be the best food in Bed-Stuy you're gonna taste,” said Visceglia. “And we will be the largest beer garden in Brooklyn.”

There was only one point of discrepancy: On Brooklyn Tap's website, they claim they are "at the edge of the heart of Clinton Hill," when in truth, they are east of Classon, in Bed-Stuy.

"It was a joke," Steve, one of the co-owners, later explained in a phone interview. "We put 'lol' after it. But anyway, we did our research and asked around and decided it would be better for us to say 'Clinton Hill.' But we don't think it's a big deal. What's more important is that we're bringing the neighborhood good beer, good food and great service."