Kickstarter

Littleneck is opening for business starting Wednesday night October 26. We are gonna do a soft opening--just dinner service for the first few weeks--with a limited menu but we are done building the place and the health department was here this morning so we are now totally ready.

And the other big news--as noted earlier this week by Eater, Grub Street, The Brooklyn Paper--is that we now have Alan Harding in the kitchen. Alan is (and in some cases was) the driving force behind Patois, the Gowanus Yacht Club, Sweetwater, The Farm on Adderley, and the Hot Bird food truck among others and stepped in a while back as not just a chef but also as a mentor to Andy and myself. He has also done some light plumbing and carpentry work.

So we open tomorrow with a limited menu for the first little while and then we are gonna roll out the full on thing plus brunch, lunch, delivery....all that stuff. So swing by....t-shirts and tote bags are in and you can finally collect on your free "beverages", raw bar, whatever....those of you who pledged at the level for the private tasting event look out for an invite under separate cover around the time we roll out the full menu.

Hours are Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday 4 pm - 11 pm and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 4 pm - 1 am. We're closed Tuesdays. 

We are at 288 3rd Ave. between Carroll and President Street in Brooklyn and are conveniently located near the R train at Union Street and the F/G trains at either Carroll or 4th Ave.

Hey everyone! First off apologies for the lack of updates the last little while. We have been putting in 16-20 hour days every day finishing off Littleneck and we are pretty close to being there at this point!

I know we initially said (and subsequently missed) a mid-September opening. We still do not have our gas line turned on which is actually proving to be harder than one would imagine (and for more details on what we have been going through to make that happen check this out). We need to have a larger service line run in from the street to accommodate everything in the kitchen and that is what has been holding everything up. 

But I just looked out the window yesterday and 2 months, 6 inspections, and 3 different crews of plumbers later the gas company was out there digging up the asphalt which means we should :::FINGERS CROSSED::: have it by the end of the week. Which means that opening is probably just 2 weeks or so away. Which means I have to figure out how to run a restaurant now.

I will send another update around as soon as we are ready to open and then you can come in and pick up your t-shirts, tote bags, free "beverages", and whatever else we owe you. 

And stay tuned for more updates over at our website Littleneckbrooklyn.com

Hey everyone we are almost at the finish line now for this Kickstarter thing which is good because there are some serious bills to start paying down so thank you again for all the love and support. I am hoping we can get the place open by or around September 15 :::FINGERS CROSSED::: and you can swing by and dig into some serious bivalves, brews, burgers...whatever you want!

Speaking of which, we have been meeting with seafood purveyors all week and tasting all sorts of really deeeeeelish clams and oysters for the raw bar. I know, I know, I know...it is a really tough job but someone has to do it. Fortunately that someone is me because I am totally prepared for the task. That particular batch above--a mix of wild clams and several different varieties of oysters--came out of the Duxbury Bay in Massachusetts. We shucked a bunch of em up and ate em raw for lunch.

I wanted to cook a few up too but since the kitchen is not fully installed yet we had to resort to some serious MacGyver-worthy tactics using a blowtorch and a soda can. If ever in doubt just look to Richard Dean Anderson for inspiration.

And while we are on the subject of the kitchen Littleneck is now the proud owner of 450 cubic feet of ice cold refrigeration. Now if i could only figure out how to assemble this thing.

And all the ventilation and fire suppression systems including the hood and duct work was welded and installed this week. 

That guy right there...his name is Tree and he installed a lot of the duct work seen looming in the background. Dude rules!

We also hit a few scrap yards to look for materials to refashion into tabletops. Currently we've got our eyes on that big pile of twisted metal up above which I am hoping will really tie the dining room together. But seriously, there is a lot of really cool stuff out there that we are finding new uses for and for the stuff we don't need, our neighbor down the road Mr. Rubbish (don't think that's his birth name but that is how he introduced himself to us) has been mega-helpful in discarding a lot of it and helping us come up with some eco-friendly solutions for when we are up and running. He uses all hybrid electric trucks with a zero emission and maintains the highest recycle rate in the industry--currently at about 83%--so nearly all the debris that is picked up is diverted from the landfill and finds a second use. My man Mr. Rubbish has also graciously offered to recycle all of our cooking grease. Whatta guy!

OH YEAH! And we also got our first piece of press that is actually printed on real live actual paper from the aptly enough titled Brooklyn Paper! YEAH BUDDDY!!!!!!!!!

"I really love beer."

I'm sure my folks are gonna be super proud of that little gem of wisdom but, yep, that's yours truly quoted in this story about Littleneck which reminds me, we are starting to whittle down a short list of really killer beers we wanna serve so if there is anything you'd like to see on tap please do let us know in the comments! We'll have 8 tap lines and an extensive bottle and can selection so if you got something you wanna drink let's hear it!

The Brooklyn Paper also had some really nice things to say about us recently so go check it out! 

Aside from all that it has been a very busy (and extremely messy) last few weeks. We enlisted our old pal Jack to help trench out a hole in the floor where the kitchen will be in order to install new gas and drain lines...so for every school principal, gym teacher, and guidance counselor that ever told me that the only thing I'd amount to was digging ditches, OK, you were right. But hey, digging for buried treasure (and old waste lines) ain't so bad...

When we started to trench out the floor all sorts of cool stuff hidden under the concrete slab started popping up. Most of it, I would assume, is debris and rubble left over from the previous building that stood in this location so this stuff has been underground for literally over 100 years. Check out these cool old beer and medicine bottles that we were able to dig up still intact. Hoping we'll be able to somehow incorporate them into the design of the place and starting to really wonder what else we are gonna find as work progresses. One man's trash is another man's treasure...

Looking to get all the holes in the ground sealed up soon but in the meantime we are starting to put together the "executive washroom" and the rest of the back of the place. We got our eye on a big walk-in cooler which I am hoping will be installed soon too...but first we gotta re-hab these walls.

That's the update for right now. Please do leave a comment and let us know what you wanna see included in our beer selection and keep spreading the good word on Littleneck! 

More good news coming soon!

Hey Everyone!

Happy middle of July! Hope you are reading this from a beautiful and distant tropical locale. Just another quick update. As you probably know we met our funding goal last week which is gonna help us get Littleneck open quicker and in turn bring you closer to all those free clams, oysters, and "beverages". So first off a huge thank you for helping to make that happen so fast. Of course we can still use any help we can get and I, for one, am waiting for some generous soul to splurge on the free "beverages" and raw bar for life deal. Gonna be any day now.....

Also, a few people have gotten in touch with offers to help with build out and leads on recycled construction materials and a few others have popped their heads in and introduced themselves in person which is totally cool.

And a couple more websites have given us some love. You can check it out at Black Book, Nona Brooklyn, Gowanus Your Face Off, and the somewhat-NSFW F**Ked in Park Slope.

Oh yeah, and our pals over at Norton Records who are getting ready for their 25th anniversary blowout at The Bell House later on this year gave us a little love! We are going to be running some cool specials during the festival (and I personally will also be moonlighting all 4 nites in the fabulous NOR-TONES, the band comprised of Norton Rec. employees past and present) so be sure to check it all out.

In the meantime, we're making some serious progress with construction. We have rehabilitated the original wood floors which were in pretty rough shape as you can see from the before/after picture below. They were buried under a stick-on parquet and some cheap carpeting for several decades and had a ton of nails and staples and grime mashed up into them but we were able to bring em back to life anyway. Looks pretty slick, right?

And check out this reclaimed sink we scored which will also double as a Duchamp installation in the executive washroom:

Aside from that, the walls have all been furred out, the kitchen framing is up, and we just got the hook-up on some low-VOC paint which means it is very low-impact on the environment.

There is still a long way to go but that's the news right now!