Every Saturday since July 9, sawhorses go up along seven blocks of Smith Street, from Wyckoff to Union, and the corridor turns into a ten-hour, open-air stretch of restaurants and shops running noon to 10 p.m. It is the version of the neighborhood that shows up in every roundup: strollers, sidewalk tables, a street built for people who came specifically to be there that day.
One block east, on Bond Street, none of that happens. No sawhorses, no city permit, no promenade season with a start and end date. And yet that quieter block is where Sean Rembold and Caron Callahan, the husband-and-wife team behind Ingas Bar in Brooklyn Heights, chose to plant not one restaurant this year but two. If you only follow the action on Smith Street, you're watching the wrong block.
The Sawhorses on Smith Street
The Smith Street Saturdays promenade runs on a defined schedule, seven blocks between Wyckoff and Union reserved for restaurants, shops, and activities every Saturday from noon to 10 p.m. through a season that closes out August 27. As of this week, that leaves two more Saturdays, August 15 and August 22, before the barricades come down for the year.
Smith Street didn't need much help filling those blocks. Bar Rêve, a cocktail bar built around the salons and soirées of Belle Époque Paris, opened at 222 Smith St, adding to a strip that has spent three decades building a reputation as Brooklyn's original restaurant row. The promenade gives that reputation a stage. It does not, on its own, explain where the neighborhood's dining scene is actually placing its bigger bets.
One Block Over, Two Bets Instead of One
That's Bond Street. In May, Lonnies opened at 112 Bond Street, right at the Pacific Street corner, as the second restaurant from the Ingas Bar team. The space leans Art Deco, cozy and a little nostalgic, and the kitchen runs entirely on induction, no gas at all. The menu is built around a short list done carefully: chicken under a brick, a daily prime rib special, and a Basque cheesecake for dessert. The name comes from Lonnie Lanham, a Vietnam veteran and hairdresser who shaped Rembold's early years in Kentucky, a detail that tells you this project was personal before it was strategic.
Months earlier, in January, a permit filing with Brooklyn Community Board 2 surfaced a second Bond Street address tied to the same duo: a 2,900-square-foot space at 100 Bond, the former home of Café Kitsuné, which closed at the end of summer 2025. At the time, Rembold described the still-unnamed project as "Ingas's older sister", with a future bar concept planned to follow, and told a reporter the plans were far from settled:
"Everything is still being developed and hammered out."
Whether that 100 Bond project became Lonnies at a corrected address or is still taking shape as a separate, third venture from the same team isn't something the public record resolves cleanly. What the record does show is unambiguous: this year, one restaurant group put two storefronts on one block of Bond Street. That's not a business expanding into a neighborhood. That's a business betting on a specific block within it.
Why a Quieter Block Gets the Bigger Bet
Smith Street rewards restaurants built for people passing through on a Saturday afternoon, the promenade crowd, the visitors, the once-a-month reservation. Bond Street offers none of that built-in traffic. No closed corridor, no city-sponsored season, no guaranteed foot count on a summer weekend. A restaurant there survives on people who live behind the brownstone facades and come back on a random Tuesday in February because the chicken under a brick was good the first time.
That's the wager Rembold and Callahan made twice in one year, and it says something the promenade schedule can't: Bond Street has enough resident demand now to support two projects from operators who already have a proven concept and could have expanded almost anywhere in Brooklyn. They picked one block, twice.
The Whole Foods Line Nobody's Rushing to Finish
Not every signal on Smith Street moves at restaurant speed. Whole Foods has signed a lease for 182 Smith Street, on the corner of Warren Street at the edge of Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill, in a 35,000-square-foot space that most recently held a Rite Aid and, before that, a J. Michaels furniture store. There's no announced opening date. Big-format leases like this typically take a year or more to become a working store, so anyone circling the block expecting produce aisles by fall is planning around a timeline that doesn't exist yet. It's worth knowing about, not worth waiting on.
What's Left Before the Promenade Wraps
- August 15 and August 22: the final two Smith Street Saturdays, noon to 10 p.m., Wyckoff Street to Union Street, before the season closes August 27.
- September 27: Atlantic Antic returns, stretching more than ten blocks of Atlantic Avenue from Brooklyn Heights through Boerum Hill, one of the borough's oldest street fairs.
- Anytime: Bond Street, which doesn't need a permit or a season to be worth the walk.
The promenade is the version of Boerum Hill that photographs well and fills a roundup. The more interesting story this year is happening a block away, where two restaurants from one proven team are betting that the neighborhood's regulars, not its Saturday crowd, are the ones worth building for. If you've been sticking to the closed-off blocks of Smith Street on weekends, you've been walking past the better story the whole time.
If you're the kind of person who notices which block a chef bets on twice, you probably think about the neighborhood the same way we do. Bill and Guy track Boerum Hill closely enough to know it, block by block, and we're always glad to talk through what a home here is actually worth right now. Request a complimentary home valuation whenever you're curious.
