We're starting to really feel the end of summer, that last stretch where time feels suspended, like the neighborhood is holding its breath before snapping back into its rhythm.

We've always loved this time of year for that reason, the regular routine returning, the neighborhood coming back to life.

Wherever you're spending this last weekend of summer, savor it.

Now Open / Coming Soon — A 96-year-old restaurant finally gets a reopening date, a beloved bakery raises funds for a new home, and a new café takes over a longtime Union Street space.

The Big Story — Four tenants are moving into Society Brooklyn's ground floor. We tracked down every one of them.

Things to Do — A festival finale, a puppet circus, and a benefit show worth booking a month early.

The Local — 96 years, one new owner, and a chef who had to rebuild the menu from memory alone.

Development Watch — New plans on 4th Avenue, a redesign on Union Street, and two blocks quietly climbing higher.

Quick Hits — The kids are heading back sooner than you'd think.

Sam's Restaurant Sets a Reopening Date
Sam's Restaurant
238 Court Street
Coming Soon!!
Sam's reopens September 10 under new owner Georgia Fulton, the first time in 96 years the restaurant has passed out of the Migliaccio family. Full story in The Local, below.

Bạn Bè Is Raising Funds for a New Storefront
Bạn Bè
Columbia Street Waterfront
Coming Soon
Bạn Bè, NYC's first Vietnamese American bakery, is raising money on Kickstarter for a new storefront on the Columbia Street Waterfront. Founder Doris Hồ-Kane built a large following almost entirely on cookie tins; more than 100 people were on the waitlist for them on Instagram before the shop even opened back in 2019, alongside bánh, chè, and other Vietnamese pastries rarely found elsewhere in the city. The bakery has been pickup-only for months from its old Sackett Street space. Back the campaign before it closes September 22.

Café Wands Replaces Gus's on Union Street
Café Wands
215 Union Street
Coming Soon
Gus's Chop House, the Popina team's second spot, closed for good on New Year's Eve after three years on Union Street. Taking its place is Café Wands, a craft coffee house and all-day café from Justin Wands, an opera singer-turned-restaurateur who's a partner in Chez Fifi and came up through The NoMad and Thomas Keller's kitchens. Coffee Director Rohith Ram left med school to build the program, sourcing beans with an eye toward traceability and seasonality. Chef Grayson Brower, formerly of Seminary Hill Orchard and Cidery in the Hudson Valley, is doing all the baking in-house: buckwheat choux buns, a fig "Newton," a house PB&J, and breakfast sandwiches on homemade brioche or English muffin.

Society Brooklyn's residential towers have been open and partly leased for a year now, but the ground floor retail sat mostly empty behind glass. That's finally changing. Four tenants have signed leases for some of the retail space wrapping the base of both buildings, arriving on two different timelines: two of them this year, two of them not until 2027.

Tuned Bicycle Service Studio is the tenant you might know. The shop spent five years on Nevins Street, between Union and Sackett, before that space closed. "We really wanted to stay in this neighborhood," Tuned's team told us. "It was crucial to continue serving the customers who've supported us for five years." Their new spot will be at 494 Degraw, with build-out wrapping in October per the lease, and doors opening more realistically in November or December. Their old spot didn't stay empty long: it's now home to Hidden Rivers, the beer garden we covered back in Issue #19. Tuned will also have a new teammate, a new shop dog, Ginjo, who happens to share a name with a premium-grade sake, which is fitting considering what will be opening down the block.

SakeBrooklyn is the more unexpected addition to the mix: a full production brewery and taproom, opening in 2027 on the building's northern corner, the stretch of storefronts that runs right up to the canal, ending at 508 Degraw, the last retail space before the water. Co-founders Dutch Fox and Leslie Fox said the choice came down to the neighborhood's character. "Gowanus felt like the right place to introduce that experience," they said, "authentic, creative and community-driven."

GoodVets opened its doors in late spring at 507 Union Street, which is part of the larger Society Brooklyn development. The clinic's veterinarian, Dr. Sodergren, has lived in Gowanus for years. With so much new housing coming to the neighborhood, he felt it was a good time to open a clinic to serve all the new pets moving in.

Devoción, the Colombian coffee roaster, is targeting a 2027 opening. The company built its name on speed, flying beans from small farms in Colombia to Brooklyn within ten days of harvest.

One condition of the 2021 rezoning plan was the city's Gowanus Mix program. This program requires buildings like Society Brooklyn to set aside space for smaller, local-facing tenants instead of national chains. The point of the program is simple: it lets a shop like Tuned actually afford to operate here, instead of losing the block to whoever can pay the most. Whether the rest of the floor fills in the same way is still an open question, one we'll keep watching.

STAMINA: Blackout at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Sat Sept 5 · 11pm–4am · 21+
The biggest night of Brooklyn's Queer Caribbean festival happens to be landing a few blocks from you. Dancehall, soca, black and gold dress code, five hours long. Nobody's making you stay for all of it. Nobody's stopping you either.

Shaunak Does Improvised Standup at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Sat Sept 5 · 10pm, doors 9:30
No prepared material. No safety net. A comedian building the whole set live, which sounds like a bad idea until it isn't.

Ritual Day-Into-Night at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Sun Sept 6 · 4pm · 21+
A Sunday party that starts at 4pm and doesn't apologize for it. House music, a queer-friendly crowd, and a lineup that knows where the genre actually came from.

The Bell House Stand Up Showcase at Bell House
149 7th Street
Sun Sept 6 · 7pm
A rotating lineup, a Sunday night, no other plans required. Exactly what a comedy showcase is for.

Please Don't Destroy at Bell House
149 7th Street
Tue Sept 8 · 7pm & 9:30pm
The SNL sketch trio, Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy, doing two live sets to benefit Food Bank For NYC. Not a bit. They will not be destroying the venue.

PRETTY MAJOR at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Tue Sept 8 · 7:30pm, doors 7 · 21+
Jay Jurden hosts a rotating lineup of the kind of comedians who are about to be much harder to get tickets for. Get in now.

Joe Dombrowski at Bell House
149 7th Street
Fri Sept 11 & Sat Sept 12
Named one of Variety's comics to watch, fresh off Colbert. Two nights, three total shows. Book ahead.

Sam Newsome / Megumi Yonezawa at iBeam
168 7th Street
Tue Sept 15 · 8pm
Two sets of serious improvised jazz in a room the size of your living room. Not background music. Sit down and pay attention or don't go.

Bread & Puppet's Upside Down World Circus at Old Stone House
336 3rd Street
Fri Sept 18 · 4pm & 8pm · pay-what-you-can, $20 suggested
Giant puppets, a stage full of questions the show has no intention of answering cleanly, two shows so you have no excuse. Take the kids to the 4pm. Take yourself to the 8pm.

Liz Phair & Sleater-Kinney: The Flannel and The Fury at BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn!
Lena Horne Bandshell, Prospect Park
Sat Sept 19 · 7pm
The season finale of BRIC's 47th year closes out the summer with two of alt-rock's most enduring names sharing one bill. Most of BRIC's summer shows are free and first-come, first-served. This one isn't. Get tickets now, this is a ticketed benefit show and it's the last one of the year.

David Cross & Friends: A Benefit for Little Essentials at Bell House
149 7th Street
Tue Oct 20 · 7:30pm
Yes, this is over a month out. Yes, we're telling you anyway. David Cross headlines this annual benefit for Little Essentials, a nonprofit that provides diapers and basic supplies to NYC families in need, and it tends to sell out well before the date arrives. Buy now, thank yourself in October.

Sam's Restaurant
238 Court Street

Sam's has a reopening date: September 10. It's the first time in 96 years the restaurant has passed to someone outside the Migliaccio family.

Danny and Sam D'Arco opened the restaurant in 1930 on Court Street. Sadly, Sam died before it opened. Danny named it for him. Their nephew, Mario Migliaccio, arrived from Italy two decades later and ran the place with his wife, Rose, for six decades. Their son Lou grew up in the apartment upstairs, close enough to the kitchen that he became as much a fixture as the pizza oven.

Georgia Fulton showed up as a regular in 2021, after twelve years behind the bar at Long Island Bar. She kept coming back until Lou put her to work. Six months later, he handed her the keys, the change we first wrote about in Issue #15.

The smart move here was not trying to fix what wasn't broken. The brick oven stays. The vintage murals stay. The wooden phone booths, somehow still standing, stay. What's new is mostly around the edges: a few barstools, a partition splitting the bar from the dining room, a handful of menu additions, including a rigatoni alla vodka that Lou never made. The classics aren't going anywhere. Celery and olives, baked clams, the veal parm, the pizza that's anchored the place since Prohibition was still the law.

One detail says more about this place than any renovation could. Andrew Halitski, the chef brought in to reopen Sam's, spent time as a sous-chef at Flora Bar and ran La Rose Pizza on Smith Street before this. Migliaccio never wrote a single recipe down. "There was no recipe book," Halitski says. "Lou showed me the special coffee cups and dishes he'd use to do the measurements." Halitski had to taste his way backward to rebuild the menu.

Half the tables will be held for walk-ins when the doors open September 10.

A New Plan Surfaces on 4th Ave
Something new is coming to 546 4th Avenue. Word is a 17-story building with 99 units. Early days still-we'll have more once the site itself shows signs of life.

Redesigned, and Earthwork Underway
The two-building plan we told you about at 601 Union Street in Issue #18 didn't survive contact with reality. It's now a single 8-story building with 125 units, designed by Morris Adjmi Architects and developed by Avdoo. Earthwork's been underway since late July.

A Tower Rises to Two Stories
Worth a glance next time you're on that stretch of Bond Street: 200 Douglass Street is up to two stories now.

Retail Build-Out Begins on 3rd Ave
Retail build-out is underway at 274 3rd Avenue. No tenant visible yet, we'll keep watching the windows.

School's back! NYC public schools start Thursday, September 10, a notably late calendar this year, but school is almost back in session.

That's the issue. Go check out Bạn Bè's Kickstarter for us, we'd appreciate it.

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If something's happening out there, we want to know about it.
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Exploring Gowanus · Every Saturday