• Moonshine

  317 Columbia St., Red Hook, 718-422-0563

  This bar by the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel works a cutesy countrified theme—chocolate stout is served in glass jars, and there’s a barrel of peanuts by the door. Yet the mix of patrons is delightfully haphazard. Scraggly hipsters with patched clothes commandeer bedraggled couches beside the Deer Hunter arcade game. Beefy tattooed bikers whiz darts dangerously close to passersby. And the back-room pool table hosts an assortment of cops and local kids in track pants. All three groups coexist uneasily in the concrete “garden” out back.

From the 2006 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine