The New Yorker:

Confidant is hoping to draw diners to the sprawling Brooklyn mall known as Industry City.

By Helen Rosner

Industry City, an enormous waterfront complex in Sunset Park, has in recent years reinvented itself as a hub for small businesses and tech startups, and it’s a terrific place to find yourself in need of lunch. The lower floors of its half-dozen-ish central buildings are dotted with kiosks and food courts. You can find gorgeous noodle soups at Ramen Setagaya, fresh tofu and exquisite sushi at Sunrise Mart, coal-kissed pizza at Table 87, and some of the best burgers and sandwiches in the city at Ends Meat, a whole-animal butcher. For dinner, Industry City has had less to offer. As the offices and furniture outlets go dark at the end of the day, so, too, do the restaurants that feed their inhabitants. In March, though, a restaurant called Confidant opened in a prime storefront of Building 5, right alongside Innovation Alley, the grandiosely named pedestrian pathway that connects a handful of the central buildings. Confidant is one of the first full-service restaurants in Industry City, and it opened with an assertive statement: dinner service only.

It was a bold, almost hubristic promise. The Industry City developer Jamestown was also the force behind the early-two-thousands renovation of Chelsea Market, in Manhattan—a single building, rather than a sprawling mini-city, but a compelling proof of concept for the rejuvenation of underutilized industrial architecture with office space and a zingy constellation of street-level food offerings. But what’s around such a development matters just as much as what’s inside. Chelsea Market is fed by a seemingly endless flow of tourists and visitors drawn by the High Line and the meatpacking district, while Industry City, out on an odd edge of Brooklyn, is effectively an island, cut off from Sunset Park by the dark fortress of the B.Q.E. overpass and the many lanes of Third Avenue running beneath. The giant campus floats almost placelessly between the highway and the harbor; along with the scrappy businesses that surround Innovation Alley, and enough art studios to give rental agents a decent story to tell, it also contains the Brooklyn Nets training facility, a Costco with a suburb-size parking lot, and the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal prison currently home to Sam Bankman-Fried, Luigi Mangione, and Diddy. To succeed as a full-service, sit-down dinner spot in this strange, self-contained universe, the restaurant needs to have the irresistible pull of a neutron star.

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