The Guest List For Myrtle Avenue's Negroni Week Tells You More Than The Drink Does

Ten bars along Myrtle Avenue spent the last week of September pouring their own version of one cocktail. Negroni Week, the annual fundraiser that pairs bartenders with Slow Food's grant program, returned to the corridor September 21 through 27, stretching from Fort Greene into Clinton Hill. Ten venues, seven days, one brief: take gin, Campari and sweet vermouth and make it yours. What actually came back said more about this stretch of Brooklyn than any single glass did.

The lineup itself is the story. Not because ten bars agreeing to make Negronis is unusual for a Brooklyn commercial strip. It's that none of them are the same kind of place, and none of them are chains, and the list reads like a cross-section of what Myrtle Avenue has actually become over the last few years rather than what it used to be known for.

What Ten Glasses Actually Show

Doppelgänger built a smoky, ruby-red riff with mezcal, Cocchi Americano and rhubarb bitters. The Emerson went cherry-forward, using Luxardo's Sangue Morlacco alongside Citadelle Jardin d'Été gin. LaRina Pastificio & Vino kept a bright, bittersweet edge with lemon and orgeat. Little Falcon pushed its house version toward French elegance instead of Italian bite. Osteria Brooklyn used a California-sourced gin for a smoked take. Putnam's Pub built its entry around Glendalough Wild Rose Gin, made with rose petals grown in the late mother of owner Gerry Rooney's garden. Rosticceria Evelina went furthest, running five versions at once, including a savory Negroni Pie with olive oil-washed gin and tomato-infused Campari.

Each participating bar made a donation to Slow Food as part of the event, which means the week wasn't really about the drink. It was an excuse to walk Myrtle Avenue and count who's still standing, who's new, and who decided a shared civic cocktail week was worth their bar's time.

That list is a map of a corridor that has changed shape without anyone declaring it had.

The Places That Didn't Make The List

What's missing from a lineup can carry as much information as what's on it. Moo Burger, a Clinton Hill burger spot, closed after 15 years in business. Mekelburg's, the specialty grocery known for babka and its beer selection, had already closed its original Clinton Hill location roughly a year before it shuttered its Williamsburg outpost too. Neither closure had anything to do with Negroni Week directly. But both point at the same pattern the Negroni Week roster confirms: longevity alone hasn't been enough to keep a storefront open on this strip. What's kept a business on the list, at least for now, is a narrower and more specific identity than "burgers" or "grocery."

Every bar that poured a Negroni this September had already staked out a single, legible reason to exist. Entre Nous does coffee and La Bicyclette pastries by morning and natural wine by night. Tailfeather built its whole menu around obscure natural wine, with glasses from Greece, Georgia and the Czech Republic starting at nine dollars. Aita Clinton Hill is Italian food built on ingredients from upstate farms and local green markets, nothing broader. Place des Fêtes, opened by the team behind Oxalis and Laurel Bakery, runs an industrial-chic room built around a chalkboard that changes constantly, technically a restaurant that behaves like a wine bar.

None of these are trying to be everything to everyone on the block. That specificity looks like the difference between showing up on this year's Negroni Week list and becoming a footnote in a closures roundup.

The Corridor Now Exports What It Used To Only Import

For most of the last decade, the story of Myrtle Avenue and the blocks around it has been about what arrived: a wine bar here, a rotisserie chicken spot there, a Nigerian restaurant from the Dept. of Culture team setting up on Greene Avenue as Radio Kwara. Arrivals are still happening. Mariscos El Submarino, a Mexican seafood restaurant based out of Jackson Heights, expanded into Clinton Hill and added a backyard, filling a gap in a neighborhood that had limited options for Mexican food or seafood on their own, let alone together.

But the more interesting shift runs the other direction. Choice Brooklyn, the family-run cafe that has anchored Lafayette Avenue since the mid-2000s, opened a second location this spring not somewhere else in Brooklyn but on the Upper West Side, at 2040 Broadway and West 70th Street. The new shop carries the full Clinton Hill menu across the river: house-baked pastries rooted in recipes the family traces to a farm in Lot-et-Garonne, espresso, and made-to-order sandwiches, with breakfast starting at $4.95 and sandwiches priced in the mid-teens. It's a two-decade-old Clinton Hill business deciding it was strong enough to bring its own name to Manhattan rather than the other way around.

That's a different kind of proof point than a new opening. A neighborhood that only receives businesses is a destination. A neighborhood whose homegrown businesses are confident enough to open outposts somewhere else is something closer to an origin point.

The Old Guard That Never Needed A Cocktail Week

None of this displaces what was already working. Speedy Romeo, one of the earliest places in New York doing Neapolitan-style pizza back when that wasn't a common phrase, is still a Clinton Hill mainstay running a rotating wood-fired menu of ribs and wings alongside the pizza. The Good Batch has been making ice cream sandwiches and honey-butter biscuits in Clinton Hill for more than fifteen years. Su'juk, the vintage and homewares shop, opened its original Clinton Hill location over a decade ago and still anchors the block near Speedy Romeo.

None of these three needed a week-long cocktail fundraiser to prove they belong on Myrtle or the streets around it. They're the fixed points the rest of the corridor's turnover gets measured against. A new wine bar opening two doors down from Speedy Romeo isn't competition in any meaningful sense. It's confirmation that the block is dense enough to support both a fifteen-year-old pizza spot and whatever just opened next to it.

What This Actually Means If You Walk These Blocks

Negroni Week ends, but the pattern it exposed doesn't. Myrtle Avenue and the Lafayette, Greene and Gates blocks around it aren't just absorbing new bars and restaurants at a steady clip. They're producing businesses with enough identity to survive long enough to close a location and still have somewhere else to go, or strong enough to open somewhere else entirely. That's a different kind of neighborhood health than a rotating cast of openings and closings would suggest on its own.

If you're picking where to go this week, the ten names on the Negroni Week list are a reasonable place to start, especially if you missed the actual event window. If you're just trying to understand what's happening to the strip you walk every day, the closures matter as much as the openings, and the Choice Brooklyn story matters more than either.

If you've got questions about this stretch of Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, from what's changing on Myrtle to what a place near this corridor is actually worth, John Chubet and the JTC Team know these blocks storefront by storefront. Reach out anytime.