Bar Louise is a co*cktail bar and date night restaurant for grown-ups  - Brooklyn Magazine (2024)

By Scott Lynch

Park Slope’s Pasta Louise, which Allison Arevelo opened in July 2020 after selling noodles from her stoop during those earliest pandemic times, has been a big hit in this famously family-friendly part of Brooklyn. The menu is filled with crowd-pleasers: There’s booze if you want (need) a drink, and it’s a reliable go-to for just about any occasion involving multiple generations. “On a Saturday afternoon, it’s like a stroller parking lot here,” she says.

And Arevelo totally gets it! She lives right nearby and has two school-age kids herself. But one night late last year she and a friend wanted to grab a drink on Seventh Avenue and realized that, ever since Parish closed, there wasn’t really anywhere to go. And so Bar Louise, the adults-only sequel to Pasta Louise, was born.

“This is a place you don’t want to bring your kids,” Arevelo tells Brooklyn Magazine. “You come here with your partner, or friends, and just have more of a grown-up experience. Park Slope has a lot of kid-friendly restaurants, we need a place where people can go out on date nights and get away from that for a little while.” Right from the start, the neighborhood has been loving it.

The party kicks off every day at 3:30, an early happy hour which Arevelo did specifically for all the nearby school teachers, and goes deep into the night (well, until 1 a.m. on weekends… this is still Park Slope), with $18 co*cktails, a full wine list, a few beers, a few mocktails (which were delicious, by the way), and an appealing food menu of fun snacks and satisfying full-sized plates.

The chefs here are Jon Bohm and Hector Vasquez, who also run the kitchens at both Pasta Louise locations and, as Arevelo put it, are stoked “to show off a little bit” here at Bar Louise. There are charcuterie boards available and a “snack tray” of olives and nuts and such, but there’s also an excellent octopus dish — a single plump tentacle pan-seared with miso sauce, placed atop of mound of sweet squash puree and covered in wilted watercress.

The deviled eggs are delicious, heavily seasoned and luxxed-up just enough to make you feel special with a few pearls of salmon roe.

The zucchini salad, too, is plated in semi-fancy fashion, a tri-color haystack of summer squash “strings” studded with ricotta salata, capers and pistachio bits.

Under large plates you’ll find a pair of confit duck legs, a crisp-fried branzino filet and a juicy brisket sandwich made extra gloppy by chunks of fresh mozzarella. A pile of pickled carrots adds a distinctly bahn mi feel to the proceedings here; a slather of spicy mustard ensures your instant attention.

Finally, there’s the lasagna flowers, which the chef had been making for years before Don Angie made the dish Instagram famous with their $68 version. At Bar Louise the four (meatless) pasta roses will only set you back about a third of that, and it still looks as pretty as can be.

Speaking of pretty, the back dining room is a stunner, festooned with flowers (plastic, printed on wallpaper) and an almost startling number of floral-esque lamps hanging from the ceiling. The designer is another Park Slope local, Caroline Ward, and it all feels like a place where, once you settle in with a glass of something, you can easily be convinced to stay awhile. Plan your night accordingly.

One final note: At both Pasta and Bar Louise, Arevalo has set up a scholarship program —the Pasta Rose scholarship —which gives at least $15,000 a year to “Brooklyn students who have lost a parent to cancer.” The program is in honor of Arevalo’s sister Lenore, who passed away from the disease in 2018, leaving behind two daughters, Jasmine and Scarlet, both of whom have the middle name Rose. “All year long we do special co*cktails and special dishes to raise money,” Arevelo says. Check your menu for further details.

Bar Louise is located at 221 Seventh Avenue, between Third and Fourth Streets, and is currently open on Tuesday through Thursday, and Sunday, from 3:30 p.m. to midnight, and on Friday and Saturday from 3:30 to 1 a.m.