Brighton Beach Market Hunt
An hour on the Q train may as well be a flight to Moscow or Kyiv. Stepping out at the Brighton Beach station the cacophony of Russian and Ukrainian fills your ears almost immediately. You walk by tables of piroshki vendors and smoked herring lined up outside grocery stores. Of all the “little” India or Bangladesh or Cambodia in the New York Burroughs, Brighton feels the most undiluted. It feels like you could hop back on a train that will eventually end up in St. Petersburg or Odessa. The borscht is excellent, the pelmeni is meticulously handmade and the grocers burst with Russian, Ukraine, Uzbek everything, chocolate, pickles, caviar, smoked fish, chanterelles all from the motherland. It’s an extraordinarily fun place to visit. To write it off as too far or too foreign or too cold or too intimidating would be naive. On almost every corner there is soup and candy and something homemade. It might be the most comforting food in the city.
Episode Intel:
Varenichnaya Restaurant
3086 Brighton 2nd St, Brooklyn, NY 11235
Reggie Ate: Pelmeni, borscht
Little Georgia
3089 Brighton 6th St, Brooklyn, NY 11235
Reggie Ate: Imeruli Khachapuri (Georgian Cheese Bread)
Brighton Bazaar
1007 Brighton Beach Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11235
NetCost Market
1029 Brighton Beach Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11235Tashkent Supermarket
Halal Food 713 Brighton Beach Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11235
