Will the real Brooklyn Kitchen please stand up?

Not much to report from my little Brooklyn kitchen this week, since I’ve been living off dinner party leftovers. But I noticed a familiar phrase while biking down Smith St. in Boerum Hill the other day: a corner storefront under renovation (I think around Baltic St.) amongst a busy restaurant row, which had tall glass windows that showed signs of a soon-to-be-restaurant, or maybe market, and a new awning with the words written in stylistically childish font: “Jessie’s Brooklyn Kitchen.” I bet I can almost guess what kind of food they’ll serve: fresh, rustic, down-to-earth New American cuisine. Or perhaps not.

What’s really interesting though, is the small-scale scramble over the two-word term “Brooklyn Kitchen,” a name which seems to me to convey the everyday, the homely, and most intriguingly, the subtley anti-establishment feel of “not eating out”–set amid the urban landscape of Brooklyn.

Forgive me if I’m imposing ideals upon Jessie’s Brooklyn Kitchen, which hasn’t even opened yet. The other Brooklyn Kitchen I’m thinking of is of course the kitchenware store in Williamsburg. Owners Harry and Taylor had expressed a slight frustration with having their name, since the first match that pops up when you google it is the blog www.brooklynkitchen.net. So Harry and Taylor’s store took www.thebrooklynkitchen.com. And someone else has taken www.brooklynkitchen.com, though we have yet to see what they’re going to do with it.

Maybe it’s the familiarity factor that adds to the popularity of this term–it’s like, cool, I have a Brooklyn kitchen, too. Maybe I should go to their Brooklyn kitchen and it would be like going to a neighbor’s. And we can take from the relative success of Brooklyn Industries and other such brands that Brooklyn is a hot marketing term these days. But it seems to me like there’s a prevalent home-cooking pulse running through the borough, even as parts of Brooklyn get swankier and more chic. I hope it sticks around.