Additionally, it is not overrun by hipsters, but is frequented twenty-somethings of all different lifestyles as well as long-time residents and families. The eatery, which also offers a wide selection of desserts and serves breakfast all day, offers a multicultural menu of food that is strongly influenced by the owner’s Brazilian heritage and French culinary training.

This combination inspires a uniquely delicious selection of standard and new world dishes and desserts. For example, if you are interested in a classic French breakfast, you may enjoy a baguette served with fresh jam and butter on the side. Or, you may enjoy ornate French toast with fresh strawberries and freshly made whipped cream.

You may have to wait a minutes to snag a table inside, but it is well worth the wait. Through big bay windows, you may observe passersby on the street as you enjoy your meal. And, in the warm weather, Fabiane’s offers outdoor seating, so you may simultaneously enjoy your meal in the fresh air.

So any fans of labor unions would be proud of some local Brooklyn news coming in this week. This week Brooklyn Cablevision workers have voted to unionize. 282 workers mostly  technicians and dispatchers voted on Thursday to join the union the Communications Workers of America. The union is the largest telecommunications union in the world and includes 700,000 other workers. Cablevision of course released a statement that they were “disappointed” about the results of the vote.

The effort to unionize apparently began on December 2nd 2011 when more than 70% of the company’s workers submitted union registration cards. The results of this vote could reverberate throughout the cable industry and have an affect on customers prices. For the workers the results will be a leg up in contract negotiations.

This bar, called Shady’s Tap Room, is opening its doors this Spring in an old condemned building. Yup, you read that correctly. A decrepit old building was renovated to house a new cozy little bar. The building had once been left in disrepair with water damage and unsafe conditions. Then two people changed that story around. Pat and Brenda Collins became owners of 110 N. Main St. They got a liquor license by the village council and began to change the place.

Whatever concerns there were no longer exist and the owners look forward to opening a comfortable and charming social hub in the downtown. It will have Michigan-brewed beers and traditional Irish pub eats, along with snacking favorites like pizza and sandwiches.

Looks like yet again something in Brooklyn has been reinterpreted and made fresh. You can look forward to going there this spring once the doors open. Keep your eyes peeled for this and other opening establishments in downtown Brooklyn.

More significantly though is the new New Yorker’s disrespect of bagel culture. It is not that they do not appreciate the greatest carbohydrate New York and Brooklyn have to offer, it’s that they do so all wrong. Some of these people do something that would have any self respecting Brooklynite feeling defeated and angry. They have the nerve to toast perfectly good bagels ruining their doughy softness and making them into just some regular old toasted bread.

A Brooklyn bagel is not the same as those dumb things you get in a frozen bag at your local supermarket and to toast one is a crime against culinary justice. A nefarious and vile act that should be grounds for sending people to some Brooklyn salt mine deep in East New York.

This might not be Brooklyn news but apparently it is to some.

Here's Leighton Meister sitting in a hallway.

Just before 9/11 many writers had contemplated what they called “The End of History.” We lived in relative peace and prosperity and progress be it technological or sociological had sped up so much that keeping track of it was no longer tenable. Of course now we know that those who predict the death of history are doomed to be rocked to the core by it.

Then there are slow news days. Lately, post #OccupyWallStreet, I’m feeling a bit of a lack of history locally. Of course am I asking for trouble simply by mentioning this dearth of eventfulness? Probably.

Brooklyn news these days can be tragic on a hyper local scale(a man was shot by the police in his own home last night) or almost about the fact that nothing is happening(have your heard the Nets are a thing that will eventually happen here). What it is not in the last few weeks is world changing important cultural, political and economic shifts. Where are those stories?

The last decade Brooklyn has played a big role in the collective consciousness. Perhaps we have now entered into a period of cultural insignificance. More likely though the sky will cave in in some way or maybe something huge and good will happen.

Good! I know it can get a little bland to keep getting the same beer at spots with upwards of 7 beers on tap and yet there I was. I think the reason I kept returning to it is the flavor felt full without ever feeling overwhelming and the beer was just heavy enough to allow for long sustained drinking. It may not seem like Brooklyn news at this point since the line started showing up in well stocked delis around October but I think they’ve hit a stride with this particular brew and I thought it seemed worth letting everyone know that now is the time to dive in.

Of course if you aren’t a fan of winter ales or Brooklyn Brewery in general I don’t know that we should even be talking to each other at this point.

You can  check out their E-book catalog and browse for some novels to read, from new releases to old classics. The list is pretty comparable to the kind of selection you’d find on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You may be missing a book or two from your must-read list, but you’ll be surprised how many you’ll actually find. And the beauty of it, you don’t have to do anything to return them. The e-book just disappears after your 14 days are up. That means no overdue fines! Just keep track of when your time is up so you can finish reading it before you lose it.

If you still love the feel of a real book in your hands, then by all means, take the trip to the library. But it’s nice to have the convenience of downloading books in the winter, when it’s just far too cold to make that trek.

Yeah, I co-built that cube.

Tomorrow my dear friends Chris D’Acunto and Anthony Browne are having an art show called Do What You Want at 248 McKibbin St. in Bushwick. Chris has recently undergone a transformation in his paintings, making them less caricature-based, and more complex and abstract. Anthony, playing off of Sol LeWitt’s perfect cube idea, has created a series of badly built cubes, five of which I have helped him to create. The show starts at 7 tomorrow night, and for those interested, there will be a procession from Anthony’s studio on Johnson Avenue (call or tweet @anieldadler for details) where we will each take a cube and walk to the space at the McKibbin Lofts, where once inside  we will create a giant pyramid of badly built cubes. This is not a rinky-dink little art show, it is featured on ArtCat, and here’s the Facebook invite.

248 McKibbin is the good one, not the crazy one where my co-worker Jess visited last January and found a roach on her coat as soon as she set it down on the bed belonging to the hippies whose party she was at. So come one, come all, it’s going to be as distinguished an art show as you can expect in Bushwick.

With this in mind the Republican party took a Brooklyn congressional seat in a special election last night. Brooklyn businessman Bob Turner beat Democratic Assemblyman David I. Weprin in a margin large enough to turn the heads of polsters who had been predicting an incredibly tight race, 54% to 46%.

National Republican leaders, trying to get a leg up on the upcoming Presidential race, suggested that the Democratic loss was a referendum on President Barack Obama himself. It is as if they forgot completely that the entire special election was necessitated by the public shaming of former Congressman and amateur pornographer Anthony Weiner.

Mr. Turner is the first Republican since 1920 elected to the ninth congressional district, which includes several working class Brooklyn neighborhoods and Forest Hills in Queens. In the end it seems that the Democrats greatest miscalculation was nominating a career politician, easily painted as a party insider intent on keeping things going as is.

The view of Manhattan from Brooklyn, always an iconic reminder that we live in one of the most exciting and vital places on the planet, was changed forever. So too was the view from our collective psyche. The last ten years have been a series of culture shocks and cultural breakthroughs. The technology we once feared would drive a wedge between humanity has instead become a hyper connective network. In a way that reaction could have something to do with the events of 9/11. The fear of being suddenly torn from someone you love or something familiar now has us forever connecting to one another. It is safe to say that on that day Brooklyn and the world got a whole lot smaller.