When Liza Queen opened up The Queen's Hideaway in a quiet corner of Greenpoint in 2005, she was one of the first to popularize the seasonal, local, vaguely southern dishes that have all but taken over Brooklyn menus today. She closed up shop in 2008 after a rent dispute with her landlord, and promptly decamped to Vietnam. Now, she's back and ready for action.
After a summer slinging Vietnamese street food at her Queen's Dahn Tu stand at Smorgasburg, Queen is starting a series of Sunday suppers at a private home in Williamsburg, where she'll be flexing her culinary muscles a bit more while trying out new recipes that might eventually make their way onto a menu at a future restaurant. The first dinner is this Sunday, at a house off the Graham Ave L stop (an address will be provided upon confirmation), and the eight-course tasting menu (plus all-you-can-drink Brooklyn Brewery beer) will cost $60.
Menu highlights for this week's dinner include a cornmeal crepe stuffed with roasted Cubanelle peppers and goat cheese, topped with fried okra; corn on the cob in lobster whiskey cream, dusted with cocoa and chili; rye French toast points topped with hot pepper jelly, sliced peach and Benton's bacon rillette; quail slow cooked with champagne grapes with braised rainbow carrots tossed in chervil; and assorted shellfish, manzanita olives, and grilled radicchio in a tomato-wine broth. If beer isn't your thing, feel free to bring wine.
Tickets are available on weekdays from 11 a.m.- 6 p.m. at Monster Island (210 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn; ask for Karl LaRocca) or from 10 a.m.- 3 p.m. on Saturday at the Queen's Dahn Tu stand in Smorgasburg (N. 6th Street just past Kent Avenue, Brooklyn).
