Ice cream, booze, and killer sandwiches now available in McCarren Park

The completely reconstructed McCarren Park House has finally opened, with food, drinks, and a bunch of new bathrooms

McCarren Park, located on the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, has long been a vital public gathering space for its adjoining neighborhoods, even as (or maybe especially since) the communities it serves have undergone enormous changes in the past two decades.

But what McCarren has never had, at least in our memory, is a place where you could walk up and get a drink, or a double-scoop cone, or an iced coffee, or a big, awesome sandwich.

Until now.

After some three years of community meetings, construction, and pandemic delays, McCarren Park House, a complete overhaul and expansion of the old comfort station at the northern end of the park, is finally open.

(Re-)opened for business (Scott Lynch)

Park House is operated by Aaron Broudo and Belvy Klein, who were last seen in this part of town running the subterranean Brooklyn Night Bazaar on Greenpoint Avenue. There’s lots of outdoor seating at picnic tables on the back patio, and several new bathrooms, and a terrific lineup of food and drink vendors, anchored by what is instantly one of Brooklyn’s great sandwich shops, Club Club.

The menu at Club Club is short for now, just four sandwiches and a couple of sides, but everything on it is great. The shop — really more of a kitchen with some arched ordering windows — is a collaboration between Matthew Calender and Dria Atencio, the former of which spent time at Roberta’s and helped open Rippers out in Rockaway, the latter you may know as Salty Lunch Lady, whose pastries are the stuff of pandemic side-hustle legend.

Given Calender’s Rippers pedigree, it’s no surprise that there’s a great burger at Club Club, a compact beauty messy with melted cheese and special sauce, pickles giving the thing a nice hit of acid. You can get it with bacon if you want, but it doesn’t really need any adornment.

The cheeseburger, $9 (Scott Lynch)

Atencio’s baby here is a dense and smoky chicken salad club sandwich, which uses that bacon to excellent effect. The loaded-up mortadella and mayo sandwich is an obvious Club Club standout, but the sleeper hit might be the fried cauliflower sandwich, thick and earthy with peppers, eggplant, and aioli.

From left: The Mortadella, fried cauliflower and chicken salad sandwiches; each $15 (Scott Lynch)

Some good roasted carrots and a boat of waffle fries complete your picnic options for now, though Calender told us that they plan to tack on dishes in the coming weeks.

“Sandwiches are like the fucking perfect food,” Atencio tells Brooklyn Magazine, and she’s not wrong. “They’re portable, they’re social, everyone understands what they are but they can also transform into so many different things. Plus in a sandwich you get to curate every single bite. Like each bite, if you make it right, can just be the perfect balance of things each time.”

Roasted carrots with labne from Club Club, $7 (Scott Lynch)

Next to Club Club in the Park House is a Blank Street coffee counter, pouring all of the expected varieties of hot and cold-brewed caffeinated beverages starting at 7:00 a.m. each day. And at the other end of the pavilion sits an OddFellows scoop station, featuring a rotating selection of about a dozen different flavors.

The odd fellows at OddFellows (Scott Lynch)

Opening day Oddfellows options included hits like pecan sticky bun, vegan coconut caramel chip, and a pair of “limited-edition” newbies called passionberry love, a combination of passionfruit ice cream and crumbles of raspberry cake, and the bright blue bubblegum pop. These last two are “inspired by classic book genres,” the fruits of a partnership between OddFelllows and the publishing giant Penguin Random House, which is exactly as, well, odd as it sounds. Fantastic ice cream though.

Bubblegum pop and passionberry love from OddFellows; $8.10 (Scott Lynch)

In the middle of everything is the Park Bar, serving cocktails (frozen and not), draft wine, and a bunch of different beers. The space itself, designed by KITSMAstudio, is pleasant and airy, the entire windowed wall in the back opening up onto the patio and into the park. And remarkably, in a neighborhood that’s seen so much sterile new development in recent years, Park House carries forward some of those indie-sleaze hipster vibes that were so prevalent around here in the mid-aughts.

For both Calender and Atencio, nostalgia for that era definitely contributed to the appeal of opening Club Club here. “It was 2008, the year everything crashed, we called it the summer of funemployment,” remembers Calender. “And we would come to McCarren Park almost every day, grab a couple of margaritas at Turkey’s Nest, meet up at the Vagina Tree, which looked like that because it had been struck by lightning — it’s now cut down because it got struck by lightning again — and just hang out all day.”

Atencio, who lived in Bushwick for 14 years before recently moving to Ridgewood, chimed in. “I used to come here and just strike up conversations with strangers all the time,” she says. “There are so many different kinds of people here. Weirdos like me, and artists, and people that have a bunch of money and people with babies, and dogs, and the coffee people, and the joggers, and the people who want to party … There’s something about the park that’s just kind of unifying. It feels nice to be a part of a community thing like that.”