Back in June Brooklyn Warehouse and North Brewing Company piqued interests with a little tease—the beloved restaurant and craft brewery were teaming up and taking the show on the road to Dartmouth. Together, they’d open something new, a bar, in the former Nectar Restaurant and Wine Bar (62 Ochterloney Street) space. But the rest was a mystery.
Yesterday, the beans were finally spilled. Battery Park Beer Bar and Eatery is the name, craft beers (North and otherwise) and chef Mark-Gray-imagined small plates, designed for sharing are the game. And they’re hoping to have the 65-seat space ready for October.
“I think it is going to be pretty different, we don’t really like to duplicate one spot after another,” says Brooklyn Warehouse/Ace Burger’s George Christakos. “We’re always getting inspired and learning new things about our trade. This will be a combination of lots of things we’ve learned from Brooklyn. But it’s more of a bar.”
Part of the building will be designated as a North Brewing Company retail shop, for growler filling and one-off brews courtesy of Peter Burbridge and Josh Herbin. North will also use this opportunity expand upon its current Agricola Street brew house, zeroing in on its goals of being a zero emissions operation.
“This was very much a collaborative idea, with Peter being extremely involved, and Mark is now a lot more involved in the creative aspect of it,” says Christakos. “The name actually came from Mark, who got really inspired doing some research. He went down the rabbit hole.” Battery Park makes reference to the southern Manhattan park of the same name, which was originally an artillery battery that protected the city but eventually housed a massive beer garden. "It's akin to so much we know in Nova Scotia, with the Citadel and York Redoubt."
Like Brooklyn Warehouse has before, Battery Park will launch crowdfunding campaign—complete with some pretty sweet returns—to help in getting the project off the ground, a move Christakos sees it as another great way of involving the community in the process.
“What we learned in the first one, 85 percent of the people who crowdfunded with Brooklyn shared the same postal code as the restaurant," says Christakos. "People in a neighbourhood want to be proud of their neighbourhood. And we want to be part of the fabric of Ochterloney Street.“