A source tells me that John Wright and Tim Murray, owners of Greenpoint spots Diamond Lil (179 Nassau Ave.) and Broken Land (105 Franklin St.) will soon find themselves in Ridgewood: they have plans, I’m being told, to take over the spot where Ask Alita (8-17 Onderdonk Ave.) used to be: that wine bar that popped up across the street from Rolo’s (8-53 Onderdonk Ave.) in late 2024.
Ask Alita shuttered one month ago. “This is one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. This year has been a really tough one, and owning a small business has taught me that it truly isn’t for the weak,” owner Alexandra “Alita” Stafford wrote on Instagram. They have yet to say anything about the Diamond Lil people, or anyone else who might be taking over the space.
Big, if true. A write-up in Time Out calls Diamond Lil “comfy and unpretentious despite being very cool,” and a report by Jennifer Rosini-Gentile in Greenpointers claims Lil started running an “elevated dining menu” earlier this year. And the frozen Aperol spritzes at Broken Land once landed on a list from JPMorgan Chase’s Infatuation called “16 Frozen Cocktails That Are Worth The Brain Freeze.”
One could write something about Greenpoint as a slightly different post-Williamsburg cultural nexus, a parallel development lingering across the barren, expensive wilderness of East Williamsburg, but perhaps that’s best left unsaid and un-Googled. Maybe upscale menus come for us all, no matter where we are and it doesn’t mean anything. Remember when those guys at the Pencil Factory (RIP) opened that burger place on Onderdonk Avenue (RIP), like a decade ago? That was cool. Now, there’s no Pencil Factory, and no Onderdonk & Sons.
Nevertheless, Ask Alita will be missed too; its ambitions as a Rolo’s-adjacent watering hole were dashed from the start by the arrival, simultaneously, of the profoundly evil Hellbender (68-22 Forest Ave.), a synergy on restaurant lists that continues to haunt the neighborhood like a persistent illness. Maybe Ask Alita never had anything on the menu, but what they did have was heart, and they poured that by the glass.
Reps from Diamond Lil have yet to confirm the move. When asked on Instagram, someone there asked me where I heard that before deleting their response.
Watch this space, Ridgewood. Frozen coolers could be in your future.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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