Zoli’s Superb Seafood Turns an Industrial East Williamsburg Block Into a Destination

Zoli is located at 312 Maujer St., between Waterbury Street and Morgan Avenue, and is currently open on Wednesday through Sunday from 5:00 p.m. “until we close.” Bar Zoli also opens at 5:00, from Friday to Sunday, weather permitting.  

It’s a trip, stepping into Zoli for the first time, leaving the unlovely world of industrial East Williamsburg (adding to the rather grim vibes of the block, I went on one of our recent “wildfire smoke” evenings) and entering a sleek, soaring space anchored by three massive aquariums with puzzling contents.

The restaurant is part of the Amant contemporary art campus, founded in 2021 by collector and philanthropist Lonti Ebers. It’s designed by the Brooklyn-based firm GRT Architects, which transformed the former warehouse into a striking room of reclaimed fir and polished cherry, a heavy pewter bar, and walls of concrete blocks in a variety of finishes sourced from artist Sol LeWitt’s supplier. 

And those huge aquariums, whose only inhabitants are a school of weirdly glowing goldfish that, as I learned from my server, are genetically modified and cloned from each other? It’s actually a commissioned piece by artist Pierre Huyghe. It’s all very cool, as is the lush outdoor roof deck, and delivers one of those pleasantly jarring New York City experiences of entering a space from the street and feeling like you’ve been transported to somewhere else entirely. “A spatial, cultural disorientation” is how Zoli’s executive chef, Ned Baldwin, puts it.

So! Great room—nice job, everybody—but Baldwin and his ace kitchen crew are the real reasons you’re coming here. If you’ve ever eaten at chef’s other restaurant, the excellent Houseman in Manhattan, then you know the guy can cook. Ebers sure knows it: She and her husband have been Houseman regulars since it opened in 2015, and invited Baldwin to run the kitchen here in Brooklyn.  

“It seemed like a good opportunity to do what I call a ‘non-dogmatic seafood restaurant,’” Baldwin, an avid and accomplished local fisherman (he keeps a boat in Mill Basin), tells BKMAG. “At Zoli, we often cook fish in unusual ways. We often cook unusual fish. And now that the suppliers know who we are, we’re the ones who get the phone call when they have something weird.”

The menu changes daily, so while we weren’t offered anything too offbeat, the monkfish we had was magnificent, a fat slab butchered like a bone-in steak, the meat springy and slightly sweet, rubbed with peppy morito and sitting in a bright and lively tomatillo sauce.

Shellfish were the stars of our other two seafood dishes, a plate of briny, thinly sliced surf clams accessorized with fiery serrano slices and crunchy peanuts, and smoked oysters beignets, which aren’t beignets the way I normally think of beignets, showing up instead as a pair of bivalves breaded in cornmeal, fried to a crisp, and paired with a tangy tartar dipping sauce. Either way, they were amazing. Probably the best bite of the night.

There are a bunch of non-fish options as well, including duck hearts in a kombucha glaze, a wonderfully funky goat sausage covered in a sort of chunky salsa verde, and, if you’re in the mood for something less adventurous, a bison strip steak or a roasted chicken. The French fries are also very good, as is the leafy, judiciously dressed Olney salad, named after the late food writer and famous salad freak Richard Olney.

Cocktails run about $19, there are a number of bottles of wine in the $80 range, and a beer costs around $13. And if you want to just pop by for a drink and a few bites of something that’s probably delicious, Zoli’s rooftop bar is the move. Though closed due to smoke and rain on the night we went, the appealing menu up there is loaded with things like shrimp chips, fried dogfish, a deviled crab roll, and an ice cream sandwich.

Zoli is fancy—worthy of a special-occasion dinner for sure, and definitely a destination restaurant—but neither the food nor the atmosphere are at all fussy. Baldwin is quick and eager to hype his kitchen team, led by chef de cuisine Danny Roberts and sous chef Aimee Li, for helping to promote the relaxed vibe. “A lot of collaboration happens here, and it’s really working,” he says. “We’re all pretty creative, and we’re having fun. There’s a genuineness to the Zoli culture, and it’s pretty special.”

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