Eurotrip Opens Next Week (the Restaurant not the Crappy Movie)

Gentrification has definitely come to the stretch of 5th Avenue between 17th Street and 24th Street in south Park Slope. Where there was once pretty much just a discount store, a great Polish restaurant and deli, a good, old-school pizza place and a decent Ecuadorian restaurant, we now have a mediocre sushi place, a wine bar, a wine shop, a classic cocktails bar and soon a "southwestern American tapas" place.

Gentrification is going to happen one way or another, but I always cross my fingers that it will bring more good food than bad, and that it won't leave the neighborhood looking like a bistro-tapas theme park.

When I saw the signage and plywood go up for Eurotrip I worried it might turn out to be a yuppified bistro serving overpriced paninis.

But cheer up! In fact, Eurotrip will offer casual Central European fare, conceived by Maria Zizak, a chef from the Czech Republic. There's a nice selection of Czech and German beers on tap, as well as Hungarian and German wines. The menu runs from Viennese duck to Czech bread dumplings and pork to "Euro Tripe"—homemade tripe soup.

And although the place is clearly "nicer" than many of the restaurants surrounding it, it's in sync with the flavor of the neighborhood, which used to be (and to some extent still is) central and eastern European.

Eurotrip opens next week.

667 5th Avenue, Brooklyn
718.285.9425