East Williamsburg has always been a testing ground for something. Someone named boto (credit where credit’s due) observed the similarity in names between Australian “restaurant” Good Thanks (374 Graham Ave.), bar Please Tell Me1 (749 Metropolitan Ave.), and the coffee shop As You Like (428 Humboldt St.). All are located within a 3 block stretch of the Graham and Humboldt commercial corridors in East Williamsburg. Also included was the more distant Kinda Nice2 (168 Borinquen Pl.). All appeared some time between late 2022 (As You Like) and last month (Kinda Nice).3
These placenames are designed to be mentioned with mystery, charged with what editor-in-chief and alleged Sliwa meme voter Andrew Karpan would call “Vague Meaning” in such a way that you imagine those words are capitalized in His Head.
Greta Rainbow writes, “A name is a point in a constellation with the possibility for infinite expansion,” when writing about what she calls the “reference novel,” a style that can be traced from Infinite Jest to more recent writers like Honor Levy.
Though Rainbow writes about increasingly large “pileup[s] of proper nouns” in fiction, she observes that this style shows how “highly attuned to the existence of these proper nouns” we are. They are powerful signs that seduce “with exclusivity.” The above places promise what is increasingly scarce: connection.
All of these names come from conversation. They are all polite or casual phrases (that’s “kinda nice”) deployed as pleasantries or filler in common conversation. We have bars named after how we talk to each other because we talk to each other less than ever. We see their names only floating in air. We’ve never been and probably never will. But we’ll think about saying hello.
//—/-/
Also on Graham, one block apart, are Mother’s (347 Graham Ave.) and Mommy’s (323 Graham Ave.). The former was opened in 2008 by Greg Anderson, who was the father of the deceased Daddy’s (437 Graham Ave.) and Daddy’s again (4-64 Onderdonk Ave.). Mommy’s came later in 2025. People around here grew up suburban and proper, saying, “Yes, mother,” but arrived more infantile than ever (“Mommy! Mommy!”).
On a recent Friday night, I went out on a Ma-Ma Bar Crawl, of sorts, to compare maternities on Graham.
The experience at Mother’s was something that, while growing up, I perceived to be wholly innovative: a burger that tasted good. Under neon signs, they played 2010s indie tracks and their present descendants who live somewhere adjacent to Brooklyn. Brick walls, tall barstools, polished wood table: Williamsburg invented this spatial language, and has since moved beyond it. Mother’s is yesterday, remade into a relic.
Mommy’s is the kid coming up from behind. They play 2010s Top 40 hits: nostalgia for its patrons’ too-remembered teenage years. Their highballs are fluted and green, and they garnished long-stemmed glasses with dehydrated slices of blood orange that make you feel really special. Their chic patina is best summed up by the extraneous disco ball4, or the bartop: clean faux-marble up top, cheap wood beneath with a bad black paintjob, probably a remnant of past operations. No mammary bottles in sight.
Though Mother’s came first, it also abandoned the old culture, and provided a staging ground for the perceived refinement of cocktail bars like Mommy’s.
They both point toward family and home in a time where we spend less time with family and eat out more than ever. We still crave all the things we do not do or no longer have.
One local psychology degree holder, when asked about the implications in names, described Mother’s as Freudian: first established culture, authority figure representative of the state. When I told her about Mother’s millennial visual code, she nodded. Freud “proposed that we all want to fuck our mothers and murder our fathers,” she said, “and considered it to be perfectly normal.”
At Mother’s, I asked the bartender if people ever mistake Mother’s for Mommy’s. He said it was the opposite, that people enter having mistaken Mommy’s for Mother’s. And no one ends up at Mothers Seafood & More (59 Graham Ave.), it seems. Mother’s bartender then described the owners of Mommy’s as “vultures,” and alleged that, at a community board meeting, his boss asked Mommy’s, there to ask the board to recommend that the state grant them a liquor license, to not name themselves Mommy’s. He alleged that Team Mommy told Team Mother to take it up with their lawyers.
(I reviewed every single published minutes between December of 2023 and February of 2025 and could not find any mention of this, though the minutes from July and August of 2024 are absent on CB1’s minutes page. It might’ve occurred then, given that Mommy’s filed for their liquor license the following September.)
If Mother’s was Freudian, Mommy’s is the newer attachment theory. “British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, decades after Freud, did not think it was developmentally normal to fuck your mom,” the psychology degree holder said. Bowlby suggested “that our earliest relationships with caregivers serve as templates for our romantic relationships later in life. While overbearing parents can produce clingy partners who aren’t afraid to quadruple text, emotionally absent parents can produce partners bound to leave you on-read.” “Mommy” said anxiously; “Mommy,” in a desperate whine.
Mother’s hosted families, while Guys Who Still Enjoy Talking About Their Jobs filled Mommy’s. Either way, the patios of both were packed. The psychology graduate told me she had been to neither bar. Everyone loves their moms.
And the bars shared a common pricing: everything’s so $19 now! Mother’s burger (with fries) comes in at $17. Four sliders at Mommy’s cost $18 (to fund the “small kitchen” serving “big plates,” per the menu), or over $60 if you add on a $45 cocktail jug (which one bartender said constituted four drink servings).
Later, at Mommy’s, the bartender told me no one had ever come to Mommy’s when they meant to go to Mother’s. Because he disagreed with my preconceptions, I contacted his management. The automatic reply said I had “come to the right place,” but no one was there, and no one’s arrived for comment since.
The situation along Metropolitan and Graham is no more than an ambient grievance linking parallel markets. With no possessive nouns around (no “my,” no “your”), Mother’s and Mommy’s imply themselves to be a collective parental figure in the drinking lives of people who keep saying “35 is the new 24” to everyone who’s heard it before but deep down has never believed it.
These placenames signal absences—disconnection, unfamily—in the lives of patrons. But knowing there’s a smoldering hatred between petit business owners gave me a sense of hope in the world. So I called my mom in Georgia to rejoice. She said she’d prefer Mother’s over Mommy’s, and wondered when a bar named Mama’s (TBD) would appear. And she’s as good as she can be, she said. My mother, my mommy, she’s good. It’s good to know.
- Also the former site of Not Today, Maybe Tomorrow (RIP) ↩︎
- Even more tangentially, Bushwick’s They Say That (615 Wilson Ave.) ↩︎
- Bushwidgewood mirrors the trend Italian-ly, as every other bar east of Flushing is named after everyone’s great aunt Nancy. And across north Brooklyn, as Dylan Teggart points out, there are multiple Tonys: Tony’s Brooklyn Pizza (355 Graham Ave.), Tony’s By Joe & John’s Pizza (336 Knickerbocker Ave.), and Tony’s Pizza (443 Knickerbocker Ave.). I don’t have a preference on Tonies (my thoughts on pizza are elsewhere), but I do imagine all of them are part of a fraternity of Tony’s Pizza owners, pooling purchasing power for discounts on bulk pepperoni. Not everything has to be a competition. ↩︎
- I get it’s providing light, but is it really the light you need? ↩︎
Leave a Reply