Brooklyn’s Best: Winner

I woke up to the smell of warm spring air blowing in through my bedroom window, and I fumbled for my phone on the nightstand. The snooze button had been running for 9 minutes already.

Under normal circumstances, sleeping in until 7:29 AM on a beautiful Saturday morning is ideal, but today I have an obligation, and I am already hopelessly late.

The night prior, I suggested to my fiancé that we would have freshly baked cinnamon rolls for breakfast, from our favorite local Bakery, WINNER.

For the past year we have had a love affair with this masterpiece of a Brooklyn bakery, but unlike most of their loyal customer base, we seemed to have discovered WINNER in reverse.

I remember when they opened in March 2020 just weeks before a global pandemic turned the entire world upside down and sent the whole city into a deep freeze. I remember passing there foggy glass store front windows on a chilly morning walk and seeing the bakers hard at work inside preparing loaves of bread for people I doubted would ever show up.

I remember turning to my fiancé and expressing sad concern over the unfortunate timing of the new local venture. 

Two weeks later I was eating my words. These would be the first of many things WINNER would have me eating in the years ahead.

Confident in the purity and quality of their art, the staff and owners of WINNER stood steadfast and the people of Brooklyn walked over every morning and stood 6 feet apart, in a line spanning avenues in length, to buy what they had to sell.

I have to confess that while I was very happy for their success, I was intimidated by the lines and did my not count myself along the stoic early morning brigade that came to the bakery‘s defense in the early months of the venture. 

Actually it was not until a little over a year later when they opened up a small restaurant next door, when I made my way over there and fell in love.

It turns out WINNER had not been the only inspiration Chef Daniel Eddy had for our neighborhood. In fact the success of the bakery had paved the way for a literal RUNNER UP to claim a prized spot in a cozy shell of a finished garage adjacent to the shop.

Far from its understated facadé, and diminutive moniker, the menu at RUNNER UP is anything but second rate.

“UNI TOAST. LOOK they have UNI TOAST.” My fiancé waves an Instagram post in my face. Its a post from Wilson Tang, owner of the world-famous Nom Wah Tea Parlor in Manhattan. “I think this is the bakery down the block from us. This is the bakery that YOU said wouldn’t survive covid! Now they have a restaurant, and they are serving UNI TOAST. We have to go!”

Within a few hours we were seated on a wooden bench, in an outside seating area, on a chilly fall evening. The tables around us were all warmly lit and buzzing softly with conversation. 

The waiter offered us each a blanket, a long ballot-style menu, and a pencil for marking it up.

We checked off a few standouts and the show began.

Salt Cod Croquettes, Sardine Toast, Roasted trumpet mushrooms cooked perfectly and marinated in miso beurre blanc made our eyes light up like we were in a Pixar movie.

The Uni Toast finally arrived, And it did not disappoint but by now everything we had eaten had already blown us away. The Uni Toast was no one-hit-wonder here. It was just one of many perfected small plates available to the lucky patrons of RUNNER UP. This place and the people behind it truly have something special at work in their kitchens.

The place was warm, wholesome, organic, like it always belonged to the neighborhood, but the food elevated far beyond even our snobby millennial expectations. In a neighborhood full of wonderful restaurants winter felt from the very first time like it was a cut above the rest.

And this is what I mean when I say we discovered WINNER in reverse. It was Danny Eddy’s exciting and vibrant menu at RUNNER UP that turned us into loyal bakery customers.

It’s just about the only reason I will hop out of bed at 7 o’clock on Saturday morning. The place is absolutely worth the line and wait. In fact, demand in the neighborhood is so high, they just opened up a pop-up shop in Prospect Park for the summer.

You can find them operating out of the prospect park picnic house, and who knows, maybe the new spot will shorten the line that currently runs down 11th St.

But for now here I am standing in line with my fellow Brooklynites on an unseasonably warm early spring morning, hoping I can make good on my word for freshly baked cinnamon rolls.