Food /Williamsburg /New American

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9.2 / 10

Cozy Royale

A quiet block in Williamsburg, a room built for a long dinner, and cooking from the people who run the butcher shop down the street.

MUSEENYC

Where
434 Humboldt St, Brooklyn, Williamsburg Open in Google Maps ↗
Price
$$$
Order this
Whatever the beef is that night
Website
www.cozyroyale.com

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The location does half the work before anyone brings you a menu. Humboldt Street is a quiet block, well off the parts of Williamsburg that queue, and the room inside is calm in a way that almost nothing at this price in Brooklyn manages. It is the most romantic dinner we can currently point at in the borough, and it gets there without a single candle-and-exposed-brick cliché.

The food is not coasting on that. It comes from the same people as The Meat Hook, the butcher shop a short walk away, which shows up exactly where you would hope: the beef is treated like the point rather than the centrepiece of a photograph.

What to know

Dinner from 5pm every night, later on Friday and Saturday. Lunch is weekends only, from 11:30. The bar runs to 11:30 daily and keeps its own happy hours — 5 to 7 on weekdays, and again from 10 on Sunday through Thursday, which is the quietest and probably the best time to sit at it.

Book it. The whole appeal is a table in a calm room, and that is exactly the thing you cannot get by turning up hopeful at eight on a Saturday.

434 Humboldt St, Brooklyn, Williamsburg. Directions in Google Maps ↗