Bagels toast while Applewood roasts in Park Slope

Tucked next to Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s Park Slope feels calm and restful after dark, yet the neighborhood hides a buzzing restaurant scene with culinary hotspots for every meal.

Opening almost before sunrise, Brownstone Bagel & Bread Co., at the corner of Union Street and Fourth Avenue, can help to start an all-day tour of Brooklyn. Brownstone’s generously irregular, handcrafted bagels taste best when directly from the oven at 6 a.m. Crusty and eggy, the dough puts up a fight at first chew, but eventually yields into pillowy morsels. Slathered with cream cheese, these bagels make the perfect morning meal.

Nestled closer to Prospect Park at 11th Street and Seventh Avenue, Applewood is a departure from Brownstone’s more traditional breakfast fare. Serving food from local farms and featuring a constantly changing menu, this self-proclaimed “neighborhood” restaurant tries hard to stay right in the center of current culinary trends. Unfortunately, many dishes fail to even come close to hitting the gastronomic bull’s eye.

House-made charcuterie seems to be a fixture of every halfway expensive restaurant today, and Applewood is no different. Lamb torchon and a rabbit and veal forcemeat come with garlic crostini and stone ground mustard—no surprise. Although the rabbit and veal combination has a savory taste, the lamb feels tough and greasy, a homely sausage that crumbles more than melts in the mouth.

Another appetizer, or “small plate” in Applewood’s self-consciously hip restaurant language, is the crispy braised Vermont pork belly, which looks more like wanly flaccid Vermont pork fat. The tasteless, flabby cut lacks virtually any signs of meat, and a funky sunchoke puree fails to help this plate get back on track. Instead, carrot slaw dressed with abrasively hot roasted black pepper vinaigrette is left to disguise this dish’s utter paucity of flavor.

Luckily, grilled Maine lobster—another protein from a decidedly nonlocal source—delivers a sweet and smoky taste bundled within unusually tender claw and tail meat. Charred romaine lettuce enriches an otherwise merely good menu item, heightening the crustacean’s natural flavor with a well developed bitterness.

One of Applewood’s mainstay desserts, chocolate-filled doughnuts with coffee crème anglaise and a black and white milk shake, looks too decadent to miss. The pastries themselves appear rather unremarkable—diminutive spheres dusted with confectioner’s sugar—but concealed inside is a lusciously thick dark chocolate ganache that rescues this cliche offering from mediocrity.

For better quality and more original sweets, head to Warren Street and Fifth Avenue, where the Chocolate Room entices cocoa lovers with an extensive dessert menu. Chocolate sorbet typically feels grainy and cloying, but here the astoundingly refreshing ice seems impossibly smooth. Other reliable treats like chocolate layer cake, applauded in O magazine, possess an earthshakingly intense quantity of dark chocolate, helping to shake up a quiet neighborhood with bold flavors.