RESTAURANT REVIEW: Just Plain Good

With little buzz and no influencers in sight, Alma Negra is a perfect neighborhood restaurant.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

Amid the frenzy of highly publicized openings and whwhispered aboutsemi-private debuts stoking curiosity (hello, Frog Club!), a hardworking restaurant critic can go out every night and still overlook some of the neighborhood steadies. I am guilty. I am here to make amends.

I have been to Jean-Georges’s new Park Avenue dining room, and I have occupied one of April Bloomfield’s 20 seats at Sailor; having recommended both, let me now recommend an uninspiring stretch of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, hard by the tire shop and a nondescript liquor store. In an area I called Park Slope, until a Park Sloper of my acquaintance protested that the Gowanus dividing line is right down the middle of the avenue and we were west of it, stands Alma Negra, which opened during the long tail of the streetery era.

Inside, half of Alma Negra’s dining room is taken up by a long, wood-topped bar, around which orbit a bank of tables and a greenhouse’s worth of plant life. I never visited with more than a few hours’ notice and never encountered a problem or an attitude. Most important: I never had anything less than a very enjoyable meal.