Eating at Commodore: Late Night Fried Chicken, Still Got It
By Ian MacAllen on Thursday, November 7th, 2024 at 10:44 am
We had dropped the toddler off in New Jersey for an overnight with grandma and grandpa. We had a birthday brunch we planned on attending the following morning, and so we thought we would have the perfect date night. We arrived back in Brooklyn around 10pm, a time when before-baby we regularly went out to dinner. I always enjoyed late night dining because even popular places often can have a last minute walk-in, like how we got into Eyval.
We had a list of popular destinations we wanted to try, all in walking distance. For our first stop, we tried Cafe Camellia on Graham Avenue. It opened in 2023, and quickly hit the New York Times best restaurant list for the year.
In the wake of that article, the small restaurant was soon inundated with lines and wait times. Surely walking in almost two hours before close, we should be able to grab a table easily, even if it was a Saturday night. On the walk over to the restaurant, I was actually worried it would be too crowded.
No such luck. Two people sat at the bar as we opened the door drinking beers. They appeared to know the kitchen staff, who were in the process of washing up. One of the top-50 restaurants in the country can’t keep the dining room open at 10:30 at night? When did Williamsburg become a small-town suburb?
Surely, we thought, our next destination would be hopping. We headed over to Cozy Royale, also supposedly open until midnight. I’d eaten dinner here before as part of a business meeting and the place was both hard to get a table, and filling up after we had left.
It’s an offshoot of the Meat Hook Butcher Shop, an upscale butcher where we buy meat and other fancy foods. Cozy Royale opened originally in late 2020 with an Appalachian influence serving classics like pepperoni rolls.
When I ate there earlier in the year, my takeaway was not that the menu was inspired by Appalachia, but rather casual dining restaurants of the 1990s. The options felt much more like the trend to replicate national chains like Applebees and Ruby Tuesdays and Chilis, but with food that is actually good. When we walked in there, there will still people eating, but the kitchen had closed at some time before.
We headed toward downtown Williamsburg hoping to find better options there. We passed Pecoraro Latteria, an nouveau-Ialian restaurant, but even on the best of nights their listed closing time is 10pm.
A few blocks later we saw the shining light of the Kellogg’s Diner. Long a destination for late-night dining, it had closed last year but recently reopened at the beginning of September. Although the diner eventually hopes to return to 24 hour service, as well as open a bar and nightclub on the second floor, when I walked in at ten minutes to 11, the hostess had disappeared. The dining room was full but it seemed clear nobody was ordering anything from the kitchen. Their official closing time was still 11pm.
Was there really no place to eat dinner at 10:30 at night in Brooklyn?
Apparently not. Pre-pandemic, there were plenty of places serving food late on a Saturday. Two of the standouts were Brooklyn Star, known for a southern-inspired menu, and Northeast Kingdom where the farm-to-table kitchen was open until 1 or 2 in the morning most nights. Both have since closed.
It’s not just Brooklyn where it’s hard to find a late night meal. L’Express on Park Avenue had been our go-to late night haunt where you could find a full French-style bistro menu at all hours. It now closes at 11pm. Ukrainian pierogi destination Veselka had been 24-hours but now closes at midnight despite the promise of bringing back all-night service. A decade ago it was just one of several late night Ukrainian diners like Odessa and Neptune.
My theory on the early kitchen closing times is it harks back to when Cuomo shut down overnight subway service, ostensibly for pandemic cleaning. Staff needed to clean up restaurants after service, and still have time to head home on the last train. The city never recovered from that insult, and it will take years to rebuild the city’s 24-hour culture.
After striking out at the Kellogg’s Diner I decided to consult the internet. The list of late night restaurants was surprisingly sparse. There was just one dot in Williamsburg – The Commodore. We were two blocks away, and it felt like kismet.
The Commodore has long been a favorite destination. During the fried chicken trend of the 2010s, it was high on the list, ranking in the top 8 from Gothamist and made Eater’s Best Fried Chicken. At peak times, it often had long waits for food.
Service is casual. Food orders are placed at the bar, and customers are assigned a number to leave on their table. When it is especially busy, its best to secure a table before ordering, lest you end up with food and no place to eat. We would typically get around this by arriving slightly later than the dinner rush, which could be substantial, even on a Monday or Tuesday night.
The outdoor dining set up here was a great example of how expanding public space for people is just better than free car parking. The patio furniture was a great place to eat with our two-year-old when he was still too feral for indoor restaurants, and I endured a few bitter cold nights with friends who didn’t want to drink indoors during winter resurgences.
Earlier this year the Commodore, long a staple of Brooklyn, opened an East Village location. The team behind The Commodore has opened other bars, like The Drift, a ski-lodged themed restaurant and bar in Greenpoint. They also had operated El Cortez, a Tex-Mex restaurant where “All-American Taco Night” lived comfortably alongside decidedly more Mexican-inspired flavors. El Cortez closed down a few years ago, but it’s soul had died before that.
The original location of The Commodore opened in 2010 on the corner of Metropolitan and Havemeyer Streets. It’s an iconic intersection. Before The Commodore, Black Betty, a bar, restaurant, and music venue had helped to launch hipster Williamsburg.
The Commodore opened a shortly after Black Betty closed. It was something of a dive bar, with cheap beers, but also offering retro-1950s style cocktails, and a food menu hopping on the fried chicken trend. Stephen Tanner, who was of southern extraction and previously worked at places such as Pies’n’Thighs down the block, was the perfect person to help usher in the era of fried chicken. The Commodore offered a fried chicken dinner that included several pieces, plus a biscuit. The honey butter smeared on the biscuits was a kind of primal perfection that is hard to match.
One thing the restaurant also did well was the queso dip, another passing trend in the food world. The smooth cheese sauce was smothered over “Cadillac” nachos that have been the cornerstone of more than one dining experience for me. The queso was also instrumental at El Cortez before it closed.
We sauntered in just after 11 with a warning that the outdoor dining area was set to close soon. Not a problem, we just wanted to eat. The small dining area has just a couple of tables, but they were mostly empty when we slipped into a booth. There is intentional kitsch everywhere here, and an antique arcade game cocktail table. We grabbed one of the standard booths.
The commodore’s physical paper menu is a nod to all those mid-century lounges our grandparents got drunk at. Illustrations of the cocktails and the type of glassware surrounded a drawing of the bar, although the street is oddly replaced with a canal and boats.
We ordered a bowl of standard nachos and a chicken sandwich each. The Cadillac Nachos would have been too much for just two people, unless it was all we were planning on eating. The queso is what I wanted anyway. The chips aren’t anything special, but that creamy, cheesy, queso-y dip is perfection.
The Hot Breast Sandwich is a spicy hot chicken sandwich, also available in medium for those who can’t take the heat. A few years after The Commodore launched their hot breast, the Nashville Hot chicken sandwich became a national sensation. Brooklyn’s spicy chicken sandwich trend probably can be traced back to the Commodore.
The sandwich is well-cooked and the greasy chicken is balanced with pickles and slaw. It comes on a standard sesame seed bun, but there’s not really anything wrong with that. It’s on the pricier side of chicken sandwiches, but given that it was the only game, I considered it a late night tax.
There’s plenty of nostalgic reasons why I love the commodore. My friends and I would come here for casual weeknight dinners and throw back a few beers, or we would come here after a long day at Far Rockaway Beach, sticky with salt and smelling like suntan lotion. We even stopped here a few times for dance parties, although to be honest there wasn’t much success meeting people here.
The Commodore is a classic, and I understand why they brand continues to expand. The chicken holds up, the kitchen is open late, and we still had fun, even if we were the oldest people there by a decade.
