Anna's Café
Sandwiches/Deli
Brooklyn : Flatbush : Nostrand & Ave. I
At the end of 2012, the company I worked for in Midtown was sued by Mayor Bloomberg and eventually shut down by the city of New York. That's true! So I suddenly found myself having to get a new gig, and the one I came up with was located in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
This bummed me out for a number of reasons. I sincerely loved working in Midtown: It felt like "New York" to me. I liked the park, the beautiful architecture (my favorite building in the City, the Standard Radiator building, overlooked Bryant Park, where I would eat lunch everyday) and, more than anything else, I loved how much great food was within only a couple blocks of my office.
Working in Flatbush was something else entirely. Where walking out of the subway at 42nd Street immediately greeted you with the park and skyscrapers, walking out of the subway at Flatbush Ave. only greets you with pawn shops and fast food restaurants. I worked there for the entirety of 2013, and finding food to eat was always a struggle.
However! There was some decent food to be found in Flatbush if you knew where to find it, and having spent a year there, I think I have. For example: I don't miss much about Flatbush (I have a hard time imagining I'll ever want to go there again), but I do miss having a place like Anna's Café around.
Anna's is one of those old New York diners that are just about extinct in 2014. They serve passable American fare for super cheap, the guy manning the cash register had an accent that couldn't be mistaken for anywhere but Brooklyn and the diner's patrons have the kinds of conversations that are familiar to any working class area. I heard the same people say the same things in blue collar Michigan, and there's something comforting about finding them alive and well in Brooklyn. Williamsburg seems like a world away from Flatbush.
Anna's was particularly helpful in satisfying two cravings I have constantly: pancakes and BLTs. You could get three pancakes for about as many singles, whipped butter included! What a way to start the day! A BLT was about the same price. It's nothing fancy, but if you occasionally crave bacon as I do, it will absolutely hit the spot.
That's mostly what I ate at Anna's, although I would be ecstatic if a similar place opened up near my house so I could continue to satisfy those two cravings as cheaply and easily now that I've left Flatbush for good. I would also occasionally get a hamburger at Anna's, which was decent but never really got the job done like the BLTs and pancakes (although adding cheese and bacon helps).
If you happen to be in Flatbush, you could do a lot worse than Anna's. In the future, I'll try to hip you to a few other food discoveries I've made in this godless land of Applebee's and shitty Chinese food.
