when you want, where you want.
The Long and Short of Radio Bakery’s New Location
Photo: Grub Street
It’s clear we bear some responsibility for the line that has recently begun to fascinate Prospect Heights neighbors. When Grub Street called Radio Bakery’s turkey-pesto sandwich the best sandwich of 2024, we weren’t alone — plenty of our fellow omnivores had been singing Radio’s praises, too. So of course a queue formed outside Radio’s first location, on India Street in Greenpoint, which led the bakery to specify on its menu when certain items would go on sale (croissants at 7:30 a.m., non-croissaint pastries in the “late morning,” focaccia at 10 a.m., sandwiches at 11). When each would sell out, of course, was anyone’s guess. You’d try your luck and bring a book.
Finally, after months of anticipation, Radio’s second location opened in Prospect Heights, taking up the Underhill Avenue space that once housed a Blue Marble Ice Cream. (Radio is far from the only hype bakery to contend with rabid demand and not even the only one to expand on the strength of it; Brooklyn Heights’s L’Appartement 4F recently opened its second location in the West Village.) Whether doubling its footprint has alleviated pressure on the original I can’t say, but I can tell you this: At 12:18 p.m. on a Thursday during opening week, I was the 18th person on the line, which snaked well past the entrance, down to the coin-op laundromat three doors down, from whose window a woman warily eyed the assembled waiters: a dad with two kids and a stroller, another fuzzy-jacketed man with a fuzzy-onesied baby strapped to his chest, a variety of 20- and 30-somethings in carpenter jeans and Birkenstock Bostons, a pretty young woman in a banana clip who stepped away momentarily to take a selfie against the bakery’s glass-front doors.
This was, comparatively speaking, nothing. The Brooklyn Eagle reported a line 70 strong on the bakery’s opening day at the beginning of the month. I’m glad to add that my own wait was much shorter: At 12:33 p.m., I was safely out of some drizzle and inside the space, which is larger and lighter than Greenpoint’s. In the open kitchen at back, a team of bakers piped pistachio cream into and onto hulking croissants. Up front, we formed another line around the counter and ordered cafeteria style. “Has it been like this all week?” I asked the woman who rang me up. “Pretty much,” she said.
Expansion hasn’t affected quality as far as I can tell. I enjoyed the turkey sandwich as I always do, with its fearless embrace of garlic, and a recommended spicy tofu sandwich as well, which had a nice chile spice and maybe a little too much tahini. I generally prefer Radio’s breads to its pastries: Its locally famous brown-butter corn cake is a little puddingy and underbaked for my tastes, and its chocolate-chunk cookies are good, but standard, coffee-shop fare. All of it comes, understandably if frustratingly, at new-standard prices. I spent $50 and change on two sandwiches and three pastries.
If I lived and worked in Prospect Heights, I could easily imagine being a regular visitor, strolling up from Grand Army Plaza for a sandwich treat now and again. And I’d never begrudge Radio, or any of its compatriots, its success. But at a certain point, the hype cycle eats away at its victims on both sides, the vendors and the customers. At what point, we have to wonder, is the product being offered the bread or the wait? I took my box of treasures to one of the two sidewalk tables. “Good?” I overheard from a couple walking by. “Supposed to be very good.” Another woman trundled by. “There’s still a huge line,” she said into her cell.
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