The Drift

The Drift is the kind of place you’d hope to come across on a country road—decked out in wood paneling, tufted booths and taxidermied animals. You’ll find it instead in Greenpoint, under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. That’s part of its coolness. So is the team behind it (whose other restaurants, the Commodore and El Cortez, are also in Brooklyn). There’s a specialty cocktail menu, but the laid-back crowd mostly favors cheap bottles of beer as well as the spicy smoked mushroom sandwich, smoked chicken sandwich with zesty Alabama white sauce and luscious banana pudding.