In the four years since Liza Queen closed her idiosyncratic Greenpoint restaurant, the Queen’s Hideaway, nobody has quite managed to fill her quirky locavore shoes. She brings a similarly rootsy regional sensibility to Potlikker, now in soft-open mode for diner-style lunch, with a more ambitious preview dinner menu launching May 25 (both are being offered at a 25 percent discount), and the official opening slated for June 1. Named for the brothy remains of cooking collards or other sturdy greens, Potlikker is devoted to decidedly American fare, often with what the chef calls “rural and working class roots”: New England boiled dinner, say, a meatloaf sandwich on a Parker House roll, or St. Louis pork ribs with cornbread upside-down cake.

Although the menu doesn’t outwardly display any trace of the two years Queen recently spent living and cooking in Vietnam, the experience taught her that “the expectation of graciousness and quality can exist equally in the lowliest street stalls as well as the swankier restaurants.” Not that there’ll be any mistaking Potlikker’s dining room for a Saigon back alley. The colorful, feminine design breaks tradition with Brooklyn-salvage chic, and comes courtesy of her sister, Samantha Crasco, who outfitted the guest rooms at Tribeca’s Greenwich Hotel.

Potlikker, 338 Bedford Ave., nr. S. 3rd St., Williamsburg; 718-388-9808

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Blue Ribbon fried chicken wings.

Few chefs take such a culinarily inclusive approach as Eric and Bruce Bromberg, the Jersey-bred, Paris-trained, Japanophile brothers behind the Blue Ribbon empire. At Blue Ribbon Sushi Izakaya, which opens next week at the Thompson LES hotel, that ecumenical slant characterizes dishes like chicken-liver mousse with miso, negi, and challah toast. The “LEO” — one of eight fried-rice options — pays homage to that Jewish-appetizing classic, lox, eggs, and onions. Whole fish and shellfish, like aji and lobster, are served sashimi-style. And Asian-accented chicken wings and pork ribs come in four-piece increments, presumably with Wetnaps. Here’s a look at the menu and some of the dishes you’ll find on it.

Menu [PDF]

Blue Ribbon Sushi Izakaya, 187 Orchard St., nr. Stanton St.; 212-466-0404

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Can there ever be such a thing as too much pizza? Not in this town. No sooner, in fact, does one pie joint throw in the towel than another one takes its place. That, at least, is the story over on East 12th Street, where the former Piola space has given way to an ambitious, first U.S. branch of an Italian outfit called Ribalta. How ambitious, you ask? Well, there are 90 seats, 25 different pizzas, three ovens (for three various styles), two highly decorated master pizzaioli (one of whom won a lifetime-achievement award for his stick work at the oven), and one on-premises pizza school, plus antipasti, pasta, and Stumptown-enhanced tiramisu for dessert.

Menu [PDF]

Ribalta, 48 E. 12th St., nr. Broadway; 212-777-7781

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Tortita de huauzontle.

The Colonie team’s new Mexican restaurant, Gran Electrica, not only fills the void left by Hecho en Dumbo’s relocation to Noho; it helps restore culinary balance to a neighborhood increasingly monopolized by pizzerias and bakeries. The multiregional, locally sourced menu — the work of chefs Bradford McDonald and Sam Richman, who’ve passed through such top-notch kitchens as Per Se, the Fat Duck, and Noma — emphasizes housemade items like tortillas and chorizo, and aspires to authenticity in dishes like tortita de huauzontle. Here’s a look at the opening menu and a few dishes.

Menu [PDF]

Gran Electrica, 5 Front St., nr. Old Fulton St., Dumbo; 718-852-2789

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Mallorcan flat bread with sweet onion and blue goat cheese.

A while back, we shared the news that husband-and-wife chefs Eder Montero and Alex Raij, the couple behind Chelsea’s Txikito and El Quinto Pino, would be expanding to Brooklyn, and now the time has come. Their third restaurant, La Vara, is slated to open by the last week of March, bringing sharable small and large plates to Cobble Hill. Raij is as much Spanish-food scholar as she is chef, and La Vara is a thesis of sorts on the cuisine’s Moorish and Jewish legacies.

The menu evokes the Persian tradition in the form of rabbit escabèche with prunes, olives, and saffron, and explores the kinship between couscous and the Murcian pasta gurullos, which may be ordered with ground goat. Of the fried artichokes and flash-fried fish, Raij reminds us that Jews are no strangers to frying (just look at the iconic latke and jelly doughnut). Once you start scrutinizing, you see the influences that Raij celebrates: how fideua, or Valencian noodle paella, resembles Lebanese noodles; the way that chickpea-and-spinach stew sprung from Sabbath rituals; and that in another context, the torta Santiago could be your basic Passover almond cake.

But then again, La Vara isn’t exactly kosher. There’s suckling pig on the menu, and even bacon. This is still Spain we’re talking about. Here’s a look at a few of the dishes.

268 Clinton St., nr. Verandah Pl., Cobble Hill; 718-422-0065

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It’s not trout, and not from a lake, but still!

He’s done barbecue, patty melts, Newark-style hot dogs, and White Manna-style sliders. He’s even tackled scrapple. Now, Williamsburg’s intrepid regional American food guru Joe Carroll (of Fette Sau and St. Anselm) is taking on another client. This time it’s the Baltimore deep-fried seafood specialty known in that city as lake trout. “The thing about Baltimore lake trout” says Carroll, “is that it’s not trout and it’s not from a lake; it’s whiting.” Aha! Makes you wonder what’s in the crab cakes down there. Anyway, the proper way to eat a mess of lake trout is with plenty of white bread and to douse it in hot sauce the way they do up in Harlem at Famous Fish Market. Also on the menu: fried shrimp, crab cakes, turkey wings, onion rings, French fries, and this delectable-looking concoction you see before your eyes called a cheese fish sandwich. Who knows? It might just be the best thing to happen to aficionados of the form since McDonald’s two-for-$3 Filet-o-Fish special.

160 Havemeyer St., nr. S. 2nd St., Williamsburg; no phone yet.

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Marinated radish, dried mushrooms, bone marrow

Nebraska-born Matthew Lightner’s route to Atera has been long and circuitous: from a decade cooking up and down the West Coast, to a revelatory year and a half at Mugaritz, the obligatory stage at Noma, and two years transforming Portland, Oregon’s Castagna into what some consider the city’s most exciting avant-garde kitchen. Atera (“to go out” in the Basque dialect) replaces the short-lived Compose, but retains its prix fixe, tasting-menu format (now $150 for ten courses, plus $90 optional beverage pairing).

While waiting for the seventeen-seat space to be renovated and a development kitchen built downstairs, Lightner, 31, enlisted Maine forager Evan Strusinski to help source some of the region’s wild foods, a hallmark of the chef’s style. “In Portland,” says Lightner, “all these burly guys with their pants cut off, wearing tie-dyed T-shirts, would be knocking on your door every five minutes.” Lower Manhattan is another story. But that hasn’t hampered his efforts to apply modern and traditional techniques to ingredients like wild ginger, birch sap, and the parsley root he candies and folds into freeze-dried banana ice cream, a banana split for the modernist palate. Here, a preview of some of his elegant, nature-inspired compositions.

Atera, 77 Worth St., nr. Broadway; 212-226-1444

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Mesclun greens with smoked salmon roulade.

After establishing a restaurant empire in Moscow, impresario Andrey Dellos has infiltrated the Russian Tea Room’s midtown turf to open Brasserie Pushkin, a grandiose three-story paean to pre-Revolutionary food and ambiance. The 8,000-square-foot premises are equipped with two dining areas (and a third, private one), a vodka-centric bar, and a retail pastry counter, and the kitchen will be headed by Moscow import Andrey Makhov. His menu ranges from a $135 Osetra-and-blini splurge to a $16 mesclun salad with smoked-salmon roulade. And Pushkin is just the beginning: Dellos is planning another restaurant for the meatpacking district and a commissary kitchen in Jersey.

Brasserie Pushkin, 41 W. 57th St., nr. Sixth Ave.; 212-203-8636

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Just when you thought the market for Neapolitan pizza had reached saturation, along comes Kesté’s Roberto Caporuscio and his old mentor Antonio Starita, who’ve teamed up to open Don Antonio in Hell’s Kitchen next Tuesday, February 7. In certain pizza-world circles, this is huge — like Gennaro Lombardi rising from the grave to sling slices with Dom DeMarco. For the uninitiated, Starita is third-generation pizza royalty. Along with Sophia Loren, his family’s Naples pizzeria starred in the Vittorio De Sica film L’Oro di Napoli. The man has served pizza to popes. He has tomato sauce coursing through his veins. In short, there is nothing about dough he doesn’t know. His student, Caporuscio, the U.S. president of the Association of Neapolitan Pizza Makers, is no slouch either.

Together, they’ve compiled a menu that reads like a last-meal request from a Neapolitan-pizza addict on death row. There are red pizzas, white pizzas, fried pizzas, fried-and-then-baked pizzas, stuffed pizzas, calzones, and many other doughy delights. The wood-fired oven, it goes without saying, is custom-built from volcanic soil and stone. There’s room for 70 devout pizza worshiopers, and an Italian-accented cocktail list that employs both Campari and black squid-ink. Here’s a look at the menu and the space.

Menu [PDF]

Don Antonio, 309 W. 50th St., nr. Eighth Ave.; 646-719-1043

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Filed Under: openings, antonio starita, don antonio by starita, hell’s kitchen, pie tidings, pizza, roberto caporuscio, slideshow

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A big game requires a big sandwich.

When you’re a pair of sports junkies and you own an excellent sandwich shop and your hometown team is going to the Super Bowl, it’s practically your civic duty: You make said sandwiches available in supersize form come game day. That’s how Num Pang’s Ben Daitz and Ratha Chaupoly see it, and the result comes on customized three-foot Parisi hero rolls, feeds ten to twelve, and includes grilled corn on the cob with chile-mayo and coconut flakes.

$85; order by February 3 for $10 delivery or pickup at 21 E. 12th St., nr. University Pl.; 212-255-3271; or 140 E. 41st St., nr. Third Ave.; 212-867-8889

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The Smile’s Matt Kliegman, Carlos Quirarte, and chef Melia Marden — a.k.a. the coolest kids in the food biz — have discovered another atmospheric location from which to ply their healthy, tasty brand of “Manhattan-Mediterranean” cooking. This one’s on Howard Street in the former (and apparently misnamed) Chinese snack shop known as Lucky Bakery. Unlike the Smile proper, the emphasis is on takeout. “I’ve always felt that takeaway food in L.A. and London was way ahead of New York,” says Kliegman, and now he aims to put a stop to it. How will he do it? With delicata-squash salads, seared fennel with orange and parsley, rosemary-rubbed rotisserie chicken, and much more from Marden’s daily changing menu. Plus, Smile to Go has something London and L.A. do not: former M. Wells pastry chef Brenna White, who’s in charge of kale tarts, cinnamon buns, Cheddar-apple biscuits, and honey pies. Check out the grub in our slideshow, then go get some when the shop opens later this week.

Smile, 22 Howard St., nr. Crosby St.; no phone

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The big news out of Brooklyn last week, as reported on Eater via Mouthfuls, is that Franny’s, which opened on Flatbush Avenue eight years ago, is moving to a bigger space nearby. Now owner Francine Stephens divulges more details: The move is planned for November and the space, in a former Blockbuster video store at 348 Flatbush, is double the size of the current Franny’s — where the no-reservations waits are legendary, and as you’ve might have heard, worth it. The expansion is intended, says Stephens, “to make the experience better, and to accommodate large parties which we never could before.”

The new Franny’s will take reservations for six or more, and a private dining room will be available for groups larger than ten. Double the amount of space means double the number of people who want featherlight pizzas, so Stephens and her husband and partner, chef Andrew Feinberg, are building two brick ovens in the new location as opposed to the one currently in heavy use at the original Franny’s. Franny’s 2.0 will also serve lunch and do takeout. “We have the lease, we’re designing the space, construction starts in May,” Stephens says. The move, she adds, is scheduled for November 1.

And what about the original Franny’s, you ask? After a thorough renovation, it will become a new restaurant called Marco’s, named after the couple’s son and slated to open in spring of 2013, which also happens to be the publication date of their first cookbook. “Marco’s will be an Italian restaurant, all regions, more authentic Italian and more classic than Franny’s,” says Stephens. It will focus on fresh pasta, versus Franny’s emphasis on dried, and the original brick oven will be replaced with a wood-burning grill and spit rotisserie. As for speculation that the new incarnation of the old Franny’s space will delve into fine dining, Stephens denies it like someone who’s been accused of a crime they didn’t commit. “‘Fine dining’ doesn’t resonate with me,” she says. “We’re Flatbush Avenue, we’re Brooklyn.” Marco’s will serve, as she puts it, “what Andrew wants to be cooking.”

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