You almost expect to see a beet salad on every menu these days, but this one's unlike any other you've met. Forget the predictable goat cheese and walnuts. These roasted beet wedges are carefully layered with paper thin, shattery shreds of cocoa tuile. Chocolate and beets together? And you get to call it a salad? The sweet, earthy beets actually work really with the delicate, slightly bitter cocoa sheets. More

At cozy Cafe Catania in Brooklyn Heights, the sandwich list is impressive. But I'd recommend you skip the menu and go for a manager's suggestion: their sarde a beccafico on semolina with a bed of arugula and a healthy squeeze of lemon ($11.75). Pricey, but more than worth it. More

Boerum Hill's standby for Mexican standards, Fast and Fresh Burrito Deli is not quite in the same league as the taquerias of Sunset Park, but it's nothing to scoff at if you need a serviceable torta or a pair of tacos in a pinch. The deli's breakfast tortas ($3.50 each, $4 after 11:00 a.m.) make for an particularly good meal on the go, offering a few options for mixing and matching. More

Bedouin Tent's leg of lamb sandwich ($8) rolls just-baked pita around green letttuce, tomato, onion, and (of course) slices of roasted leg of lamb. The well-done lamb meat is powerfully seasoned, particularly heavy on black pepper and roasted garlic and nudged to a higher level of flavor by the house's tasty lemon-mint mayonaise. More

Walk into Tazza just north of Atlantic Avenue (that barely Brooklyn Heights zone), and you'll find a chalkboard wall menu covered in sandwich options. This one with roasted eggplant and tomatoes is on a soft square of focaccia, which thankfully doesn't suffer from that depressingly dry, dense chew that so many focaccias do. More

[Photographs: Andrew Strenio] Colonie opened on Atlantic Avenue back in February, and the neighbors have been loving it up ever since. It's across from the Shell station in a beautiful space that has a live fern wall in the... More

The Heights Cafe is a pleasant brunch spot, worth visiting as much for its proximity to the Brooklyn waterfront as for its simple, satisfying fare. Their menu aims to go beyond the standard bacon-and-eggs dishes as well, with creative touches meant to liven up classic dishes. More

The sandwich itself is not much besides pastrami: a few shmears of mustard keep things together on Jewish rye. If you're still unconvinced this is the real deal, try their black and white cookies, homemade daily and with icing so freshly slicked you can still see the knife strokes in the fondant. More

The roasted turkey is freshly sliced off a very large turkey breast (the kind you'd find at a Pilgrim's Thanksgiving), and bacon is there only as a sidekick—if you gave it any more stage time it'd steal the show. More

Iris Cafe doesn't have an official brunch menu. The sandwiches and salads are available all day, but it's especially hopping inside the Brooklyn Heights nabe cafe during prime weekend brunching hours. Look on the framed chalkboard for the Smoked Bluefish Salad ($9.50). The glistening little pieces of fish from Acme Smokehouse in Greenpoint (it's their only local fish) are salty, smoky, and buttery atop a bed of lettuce leaves, hard-boiled egg slices, and roasted asparagus. More

[Photo: Kathy YL Chan] The Brooklyn Flea Market, currently putting in a full week at the Williamsburg Savings Bank in anticipation of Christmas, was madness this last Sunday; the food section, in the back of one of the three... More

A cheddar-ham biscuit with a soft-boiled egg: how could this be bad? No big surprises, it's pretty perfect and available all day at Iris Cafe in Brooklyn Heights, which opened a couple months ago on a sleepy brownstone block.... More

While we've had plenty of lively office debates about the merits of different chocolate chip cookies, this was the first week we had a true consensus. The winner was unanimous. The second-place cookie was also a unanimous vote—and every taster decreed it a very, very close runner-up. Third and fourth place? Also unanimous. It made for a very interesting blind test. More

This city is flooded with blueberry muffins. Plain ones, sugar-dusted numbers, big ones, itty bitty ones, and others still, paired with everything from bran to corn. We loved some, hated others, and passed on a few. Our conclusion? There's one we can honestly call "the best" and many others which are simply great and worth a detour. In the end, blueberry muffins, like most sweets, are totally subjective. Taste is personalized, so we've made sure to included seriously delicious muffins on all ends of the spectrum. More

When I first started writing about New York food markets for Serious Eats, I asked friends to recommend stores for me to explore. Three-quarters of them answered: Sahadi's. Well, I thought, no need to go there if everyone knows... More