Red Hook Van Brunt Street’s New Restaurants for Fall 2026

"I keep saying this is the restaurant that Red Hook built," chef Allie Gassaway told the Red Hook Star-Revue in June. She was describing Val's, the diner and bar she was preparing to open with Victoria Viscusi and Laine Pelka. In her account, neighbors were helping with the buildout, the neon sign, the photography and the graphics.

Val's is now open at 347 Van Brunt Street. It is one of four food and drink businesses that have opened or are getting ready to open on the same stretch since July. Taken together they share a design brief. Each is built for repeat neighborhood use, either as a "living room" or as somewhere that feels like "coming over to our house." Two are run by people who already worked on the street. This fall, Van Brunt Street is building for regulars rather than visitors.

Same Address, Third Chapter

Val's is in the space that held Fort Defiance and then Pitt's. Pitt's closed permanently on March 4. The team that took over knows the room well. Gassaway was the chef at Fort Defiance and lives above the old restaurant, and Pelka worked alongside her there in 2022. Gassaway heard a rumor that the space might be coming up, and within weeks a bar concept from Pelka and Viscusi, two bartenders who have known each other for more than 11 years, became a bar and diner.

That change was intentional. The owners told the Star-Revue the diner format was meant to fill a gap in daytime food in the neighborhood, and they framed it around price. "Someplace you can actually afford to go to three times a week," Viscusi said. Even the name is local. It is built from the owners' first initials, and it also nods to Valentino Pier.

The details of the plan back that up:

• Hours: Val's runs as an all-day hangout. The kitchen is open until 10 p.m. and the bar until midnight.
• Menu: Opening-day coverage from Cititour listed eggs with hash browns and bacon, waffles, blueberry pancakes, wings, a tuna melt, a steak dinner, a smash burger, a martini and a cherry-vanilla vodka Coke. Eater's preview added fermented blue-corn pancakes, Denver omelets, rotating blue-plate specials, funnel cakes, malt icebox cake and milkshakes.
• Families: The plan included a kids menu, a weekly pizza night, and frozen drinks for both kids and adults.
• Back room: Remote workers and diners can use it during the day. At night it's meant for watching games, birthday parties, community meetings and fundraisers.
• Mural: The team planned to bring back artist Beau Stanton, who painted the old Fort Defiance mural, for a new piece on the side of the building.

The opening date depends on which report you read. Cititour wrote about walking into Val's on opening day on September 26, and Edible Brooklyn listed the opening as September 30. Either way, it opened in the last two weeks of September, more than two months after the July 15 target the owners had floated, which depended on a liquor license.

Red Hook Tavern's Alumni Are Opening Down the Block

A few doors away, at 358 Van Brunt near Sullivan Street, Hōp is under construction. It's a Cambodian restaurant and cocktail bar, and the name is the Khmer word for "eat." The co-owners came out of Red Hook Tavern. Bun Cheam was its executive chef, and Cait Callahan was its general manager and wine director. They are partnering with their former boss, Billy Durney. Eater's September fall preview names Durney's group as Four Clover. It describes a menu of beef skewers, prahok ktiss, which is a Khmer pork dip, whole branzino roasted in banana leaves, and wok-fired noodles and charred vegetables.

The timing is still soft. Eater's September 8 preview listed a November opening. Hōp's own site says construction is underway and the team is "hoping for a fall opening," with no date set.

So on one short stretch of Van Brunt, the newest restaurant and the one still coming are both run by people who cooked and managed on this street before. The menus are very different. The background is the same.

The Newcomers Are Building Living Rooms Too

Pony's, at 424 Van Brunt, opened August 22. The owners have no long Red Hook history, but they made the same choice about how the room should feel. Couple Elana Shvalbe and Michael Furac run it as a cocktail bar and café, and it's their first brick-and-mortar space. "We really wanted to make it feel like people were coming over to our house," Shvalbe told the Star-Revue.

The room was built by hand. Shvalbe used her background in production design to draw nearly every piece. A friend built the couches, friends in Montreal made the tables and the counter, and another friend made the red sconces. The plaid stools came from the Brimfield Antique Flea Market in Massachusetts and were reupholstered. The couple had run a bar once before, a tiny after-hours spot inside a barbershop in Guelph, Canada. It lasted six months, and they moved to the United States in 2022.

Across the street, Red Hook Focacceria began weekend sales on July 11 at 421 Van Brunt, at Beard Street. The bakery's site credits a Greek master baker named only as Aristos and describes long-fermented dough made with 100% Italian semolina. Frank Falcinelli of F&F has posted a testimonial on the site saying F&F carries Aristos's bread. The current hours are Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. until sold out. A weekend-only bakery that closes when the bread runs out depends on people who live close enough to come back next Saturday.

The Address Missing From This List

Follow Van Brunt toward the water past Beard Street and you reach 481 Van Brunt, the Civil War-era Beard and Robinson Stores warehouse. For 35 years it was home to the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. On September 17, 2025, a five-alarm fire burned through the night and destroyed dozens of small businesses and artists' studios inside. A few months later, BWAC learned it would never be able to return.

BWAC's site says it has had no permanent location since the fire and is still looking for space. Its one-year exhibition, "One Year Later: New Work, New Perspectives," opened September 17 at The Whale in Sunset Park alongside a national juried show titled "Exclaim!" Both run on weekend afternoons through October 18. The sources give different addresses. BWAC's own listing says 14 53rd Street, and the Brooklyn Paper report republished by Brownstoner says 15 43rd Street. Check before you go.

The coalition's artists have come back to Red Hook in smaller ways. A Brooklyn Pop-Up market with BWAC at Hook Studios, 161 Dikeman Street, brought more than 60 artists together on September 19 and 20. Founder Aimee Kellner gave BWAC vendors an 80% discount on fees "to help facilitate their comeback."

That puts the gathering spaces opening this year at the north end of Van Brunt, and the block's longest-running arts tenant exhibiting a neighborhood away.

October Weekends Around the New Storefronts

The rest of Red Hook's October calendar sits within walking distance of all four addresses.

Pioneer Works marks the Ragas schedule as subject to change. The ferry dates follow the cruise ships at Atlantic Basin. NYC Ferry added the point-to-point shuttle to handle extra demand on those days, so most October Saturdays are cruise days at the terminal. The fall schedule runs through November 1. On weekends the South Brooklyn route stops at Red Hook/Atlantic Basin between Governors Island and Atlantic Avenue/BBP Pier 6.

On the waterfront, Red Hook Barrel Yard at 185 Van Dyke Street on Pier 41 has been pouring wine and cider since a soft opening in April, with a food menu from Lundy's and a distillery planned. Red Hook Boaters' free Sunday kayaking at Louis Valentino Jr. Pier Park ended its season on September 20.

Hōp is the last piece. When it opens, sometime this fall if the team's own site is right, the stretch from Wolcott to Beard will have four new rooms. Two are run by people who worked on Van Brunt before, and all four were planned for the neighbor who comes back.

When a block gains new reasons to stay close to home, that shows up in how its addresses are presented. If you're thinking about how a Red Hook property should tell that story, Luxury Alliance Team will put senior attention and a block-by-block read behind it. Schedule a consultation.