At a Bushwick Listening Bar, Mediterranean Tacos Make a Menu

Cocktail bars are leveling up food offerings all over the city. The latest example is Moondog HiFi, located deep in the Bushwick industrial frontier at 119 Ingraham Street, near Johnson Avenue. This new bar is the collaboration of siblings Einat and Elon Admony; Einat is behind the falafel chain Taim and Israeli Balaboosta. Here, the menu fuses Eastern Mediterranean and Mexican, particularly when it comes to tacos. In an area replete with tacos and bars, Moondog offers a unique spin on both, leaning into a fusion that’s also on display at places like Fort Greene’s Theodora.

A logo on the aluminum gate shows an eye cradled in a radio telescope, which turns out to be a stylized turntable. Past a narrow concrete courtyard filled with tables, stairs lead to a subterranean restaurant, decorated with that neon symbol over the bar and racks of vinyl records at the far end of the room.

The cocktails, courtesy of beverage director Josef Griz, are great, on a menu of eight showcase mixed drinks that have evocative names. There’s a coffee martini ($17), this one made with vodka and Turkish coffee. The flavor is somehow richer than the usual coffee martini, with a hint of cardamom. The Prickly Tempo Collins is the bar’s take on the Tom Collins with mezcal instead of gin, laced with prickly pear, though the lime is assertive, too. When Birds Cry is a tall mixture of mezcal, lime, grapefruit, and mastiha, a liqueur seasoned with pine resin — I kept sipping, hoping some of that stickiness would show up in the drink.

Five tacos ($6 to $8) form the heart of the menu. The chicken shawarma was the best, gobbed with aioli blended with an amba, a mango pickle with a wonderfully sharp taste. Festooned with pickled carrots, the taco made a lovely picture in its cardboard slot, the chicken slightly gritty with a bit of curry.

The lamb taco and the brisket taco are both well worth ordering. The lamb for its distinct flavor and crunchy shallots on top; the brisket for its small cup of a bright green herbal sauce merging chimichurri and zhoug. A couple of empanadas are also available ($6), including beef, as well as and corn with feta, the latter of which was quite good. French fries arrive dusted in herbs and accompanied by the same amba aioli: They’re irresistible.

Skip the mushroom taco, described as “al pastor.” The filling was slippery and flavorless; The fish taco is another pass, as it’s overdone with breading.

The music included some very nice samba and samba rock from Brazilian Beats Brooklyn, an album from artists who had been featured at Black Betty, a nearby club that closed in 2009. The music was so good at Moondog, I’d return just to listen, relax, and eat more of those chicken shawarma tacos.