Crif Dogs Goes Legit in Williamsburg, Adds Breakfast Menu

Once it decided to establish a second branch in Williamsburg, nobody expected Crif Dogs to completely retain its sense of louche culinary transgressionalism, which had been expressed not only through its habit of wrapping hot dogs in bacon, deep-frying them, and then slapping on a piece of cheese, but in its dank basement premises and lewd logo of a scantily clad woman riding a hot dog as if it were ... OK, a dick.

Indeed, the new place looks like a rec room in an Ivy League fraternity house, with an antique Ms. Pac-Man table, a neatly mounted series of showy skateboards, stamped tin ceiling that might have come from Restoration Hardware, and a set of matched tables and chairs that suggest no one had salvaged them from a used restaurant supply store on the Bowery, which is exactly what the original place looked like.

In line with its newly exalted premises, and consequent necessity of meeting the rent, a breakfast has been added, served from 7 a.m. (ouch!) to noon every weekday, and dubbed "brunch" from 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. on weekends. ("Brunch" was a word that was previously inconsistent with Crif Dogs.) According to our spy in Williamsburg, Amy T., the place has been mobbed early every morning, with working stiffs about to jump on the L train into Manhattan garnering their cups of Intelligentsia coffee.