Brooklyn Public House

The bacon-wrapped hot dog with cheese, chips and assorted beers

Photograph: Jeff Gurwin

Like a starlet with beauty but no talent, Fort Greene's latest drinking addition, a refined tavern with all the requisite old-timey trappings, offers lots of flash and little substance. Befitting its historic locale—it hosted both a Prohibition-era candy shop and a 1950s bar—Brooklyn Public House drips with appealing period details such as vintage wallpaper, tin ceilings and salvaged-wood tables. Beer is the drink of choice, but unlike hops meccas such as Pacific Standard or Barcade, whose dynamic lists rotate based on seasonality, BPH's 16 drafts are mostly static. Warhorses—think Guinness and Blue Moon—are trotted out alongside treats like Belhaven's gently hopped Thistle IPA and Stone's floral Levitation ale. The brews are served in chilled glasses, and BPH goes the extra mile, using nitrogen instead of the standard-issue CO2 to stimulate bubbles in each keg. Still, the $6 to $9-a-pint price tag seemed inflated—a wallet pinch made more painful by the lack of a happy hour. There's no cocktail list, so don't expect any mixology wizardry, though our Manhattans and old-fashioneds were competently prepared. And the wine selection, while pleasingly priced at $7 to $10 for an ample pour, is skimpy, with just a handful of offerings that read better than they taste. Still, the baby-toting couples and young professionals who frequent this place happily pay a premium for the clean environment (the closest alternative is the dank dive Alibi) and friendly, if overeager, service. During one visit, our waitress kept interrupting our conversation to ask if we wanted more beer—before ours were halfway finished. That, incidentally, is how we left much of our food. The snappy, bacon-wrapped hot dog and crunchy homemade chips aside, the bar snacks are substandard. An onion-ring-topped burger was desert-dry, the cheddar-topped nachos mild and meager and the fish-and-chips a bust: The haddock was the picture of golden-fried perfection, but quickly disintegrated into limp, greasy lumps. In pub grub as in pubs, looks can be deceiving.—TONY

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