Brooklyn Star (Re-visited) Visited 4/22/2011 4 Forks

Brooklyn Star 593 Lorimer St., (between Metropolitan Ave & Conselyea St), Brooklyn, NY 11211

 I went to the original Brooklyn Star a few years ago at the location on Havemeyer Street and thought it was fine, nothing earth shattering.  But that might have been because it was 10pm on New Years Eve and Dan had worked all day and we were both in a shitty mood and just wanted to have dinner and go to bed.  Unfortunately, that place burned down and it took a while for them to get back on their feet.  It has since re-opened a 5 minute walk from my place and while it has a pretty different vibe, the menu is fairly similar (although not exactly the same). The front bar section is packed and claustrophobic feeling but after you walk through the bar, you get to the actual restaurant.  It's pretty different from the original restaurant in that it's very open and airy and the structure lends itself to being super noisy. All you can hear is the tin of background noise all through dinner.


Luckily, Dan and I were able to get a table right away at 8:30pm on a Friday night but shortly there after, the place became totally packed.  The menu hasn't really changed too much from the original menu. It's mostly Southern fare food: corn bread, country fried steak, mac and cheese, rib eye steak and shrimp and grits type dishes.  Dan and I thought it would be a good idea to split the mac and cheese ($9), the hot meat loaf sandwich, and the country fried steak ($15).  The mac and cheese came out first and it was delicious! It was the size of a small skillet and you could tell it was made with a nice combo of cheese (and not the veleeta kind, although there is definitely a time and place for that).  It wasn't super gooey but you could definitely taste the fresh, non-processed cheese in it.  It came with big shell pasta instead of elbow macaroni which was kind of a nice change.  But the BEST part of the meal was the bacon. So freakin good and salty.  They should make it as a big entree option.  Shortly after wards, the hot meat loaf sandwich came out.  It was on a white bread and came with chips and pickle.  I am generally not a huge fan of meat loaf, but I thought it was pretty decent, although I wasn't a huge fan of the white bread because it was kind of thin and you could feel the meat loaf soaking through.  But how I feel about crab cakes is how Dan feels about meat loaf (meaning very seriously).  He thought that there was a bit too much filler (either chickpeas or mashed potato) and not enough meat, but none the less, we both thought it was pretty good.  We should have just stopped our meal there and let our veins deal with all the oil and fat flowing through. 


But no, we had to go one step further and order the country fried steak.  When it came out, the couple next to me was like "uh, omg, is that the country fried steak? That looks amazing!"  And they were totally right.  The country fried steak was the size of Dan's foot (so huge) and covered in a white gravy.  The breading was nicely crisp and not overly fried.  Although after a while, we had started to pick off the breading because it was just too much fried-ness.  When you do that, you get to the base of the steak,which in all honestly wasn't amazing.  You have to eat it with the fried breading and gravy or else it just doesn't taste the same.  I actually love the mashed potato (probably because it had about 5 sticks of butter) and the hot slaw was strangely addicting.  I would have totally just had a dish of mashed potato and cabbage.  I actually had the country fried steak last time at the original place and don't remember it being this good.  It was totally a bad idea to have ordered 3 dishes.  Even if you're hungry, if you're just 2 people, 1 small dish and 1 big dish is more than enough.  I feel like I need to have be fat drained out of my body now.  Total bill with tip: $63 total.