Honey Badger

Crown Heights After Dark

The residential blocks around Fenimore Street in Crown Heights are not where most visitors think to look for a restaurant earning national recognition. The neighbourhood lacks the density of dining anchors that pulls crowds to Carroll Gardens or the foot traffic of a Bedford Avenue corridor. That relative quietness is part of the context for understanding Honey Badger: it operates at 67 Fenimore St as a dinner-only destination that earns its audience through reputation rather than location. You arrive because you went looking, not because you stumbled past on the way somewhere else. The dining room is open Wednesday through Saturday from 12 to 7 pm, with the space closed on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Sundays.

The New American Bracket in Brooklyn

New American cuisine in New York has long occupied a broad and contested middle ground, running from farm-to-table formulas at one end to technically precise tasting-menu formats at the other. Brooklyn has become one of the more interesting places to track how that category evolves. The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg repositioned the bracket around natural wine and restrained small plates; other producers have pushed toward nose-to-tail or hyper-seasonal menus that pull from the same regional sourcing tradition as venues like ABC Kitchen in Manhattan. Honey Badger sits in a different tier from the larger Manhattan operations, dinner-only, neighbourhood-scaled, and is more usefully compared to the category of outer-borough restaurants that have developed serious followings without the structural advantages of a Flatiron or Tribeca address.

Nationally, New American at the highest registers includes long-established rooms like Craft in New York, The Inn at Little Washington in Virginia, and Bayona in New Orleans. Honey Badger is not operating at that scale or price point, but its trajectory on Opinionated About Dining's rankings places it in a conversation about which Brooklyn kitchens are building something durable rather than merely timely.

The Trajectory Worth Noting

Opinionated About Dining runs one of the more data-intensive restaurant ranking systems in North America, aggregating scores from a community of serious diners rather than relying on a single critic or anonymous inspection process. The methodology tends to surface restaurants that perform consistently across multiple visits by multiple experienced eaters, which makes trajectory on those lists a meaningful signal. Honey Badger ranked #423 on the OAD Leading Restaurants in North America list in 2024, then appeared at #566 on the OAD Casual list in 2025. Reading those two data points together: the restaurant has entered a tier of national recognition while being specifically classified as casual, a designation that carries editorial weight in how the kitchen and format position themselves.

That classification separates Honey Badger from the tasting-menu operations that dominate the upper registers of American fine dining, the kind of rooms represented by Alinea in Chicago, Lazy Bear in San Francisco, or Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg. The casual designation points toward a kitchen that has chosen accessibility of format over ceremony, a choice that aligns with how a significant cohort of serious Brooklyn restaurants have been operating since roughly 2015, prioritising ingredient quality and cooking precision over white-tablecloth presentation codes.

Chefs Sheholli and Juman in the Brooklyn Kitchen Generation

Fjölla Sheholli and Junayd Juman represent a pattern that has become recognisable in how Brooklyn's more ambitious kitchens are now structured: co-chef arrangements where the kitchen program is a shared authorship rather than a single-named-chef model. That structure distributes creative risk and tends to produce menus with broader range, though it also places significant demands on collaborative discipline in the kitchen. The restaurant's Google rating of 4.5 across 177 reviews suggests the execution has remained coherent under that model.

The broader context of New American kitchens in New York, from the studied French-influence rooms of Manhattan like Clocktower to the more theatrical formats of Beauty & Essex, shows how wide that category runs. Honey Badger's OAD positioning suggests the kitchen is competing on cooking quality rather than on experience design, which narrows the comparable set considerably.

What the Evolution Looks Like

Restaurants that move through OAD rankings over multiple years are doing something that single-year notices don't capture: they are holding attention from a community of eaters who return, compare, and score across time. The shift from the Leading Restaurants list in 2024 to a Casual-specific ranking in 2025 is not a step down, the two lists measure different things, and appearing on both in consecutive years indicates that the restaurant's identity has become clear enough to be classified, which is itself a form of maturation. Early-stage restaurants tend to be ambiguous; restaurants that have found their format and their audience settle into legible categories.

For a kitchen operating on Fenimore Street and a limited weekly schedule, that clarity of identity is the main signal. The program is not trying to occupy multiple market positions simultaneously, which is a discipline that many restaurants at this stage abandon under commercial pressure. Comparable trajectories in other cities, Emeril's in New Orleans building from neighbourhood credibility, Providence in Los Angeles earning recognition through sustained consistency rather than a single landmark moment, The French Laundry in Napa cementing its position through repetition rather than reinvention, all suggest that the restaurants that hold ranking-level attention over multiple years do so by not chasing the next thing.

Planning Your Visit

Hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 12 to 7 pm; closed Monday, Tuesday, and Sunday. Address: 67 Fenimore St, Brooklyn, NY 11225. Reservations: Essential. Dress: Smart casual. Budget: About $300 per person.