El Cortez

Stephen Tanner, a former owner of Pies ’n’ Thighs and a one-time chef at Egg, is a founding father of the Brooklyn fried-chicken scene. In 2010, he and Chris Young opened the Commodore, a well-loved Williamsburg watering hole that serves cheap, very good Southern-inflected food in what resembles a basement rec room. Now they have brought their playful aesthetic to Bushwick. From the outside, El Cortez has the look of a Southwestern lodge, complete with a porthole door and an inexplicable totem pole. The interior is split level, with a vaguely Aztec mural and iconic banana-leaf wallpaper. The result is bad seventies kitsch, down to the food and drinks—Tex-Mex and tiki cocktails—and you half expect your server to arrive on roller skates. These references are largely lost on the audience; one Friday evening, a man observed that most of the patrons looked as though they had just barely been born in the eighties.