By Jack Maguire

I had the day off, so I wanted to string together a couple of interesting-looking places in Brooklyn that are both along the L train. The first one I went to was Bread & Spread, a relatively new sandwich shop in Williamsburg at 485 Lorimer Street. It originally started as a food truck, and the Williamsburg location opened in March 2026.

I ordered the short rib. I am typically skeptical of short rib because it is easy to mess up. When it is good, it is really good, but in a sandwich, it is typically overcooked in my experience.

The menu lists the sandwich with braised short rib, pickled shallots with ginger, watercress, Swiss, blackberry jam, and a side of chips.

In this case, the short rib was actually pretty good. The meat was not quite as fatty as I like it, but it was not overcooked. A lot of the people who had suggested this sandwich made it sound like it had a really good balance of horseradish and blackberry jam. I did not really find that. It mostly tasted like meat on bread.

The bread is really spectacular. It is a really good seeded roll, very chewy. It reminds me a lot of a Philly-style roll. The chips are just standard chips.

It was not bad, but the sandwich comes in around $22 after tax, so I felt like I could have gotten a better sandwich somewhere else.

Overall, this is a good, not great, sandwich, but it was pretty good. One side of the sandwich tasted a little different from the other, and I think that is because I got different cuts of the short rib. The second half was a little fattier, which I like.

I do want to go back and try some of the other stuff. They have some really interesting menu options, and I am excited to go back eventually.

Funny enough, they had an Andy Samberg movie playing on the television. I had never seen it before, and it made for a fun environment in the restaurant.

Then I hopped on the L. It took me about 15 minutes to get to the Jefferson Street station, near Maria Hernandez Park, where I wanted to try two different desserts from Don Fidel’s Nieve de Garrafa, a street stand near the park. Don Fidel was working under a small tarp on the corner with what looked like a couple of family members.

The first one was coconut nieve. There were a lot of flavor options, but the coconut was really good. It was a little icy, sweet, and slightly gummy. It is different from typical milk-based ice cream, and I found it more refreshing. It tasted almost a little like horchata.

The second thing I got was cantaloupe nieve. He put a little Tajín and chamoy on it, which gave it an acidic element. That was awesome. It was a fairly standard Mexican fruit ice, but it was very fresh and even had a piece of frozen mango in it. It was super refreshing.

I thought the two would mix together well, but for some reason they did not. I think the coconut nieve’s texture is gummier and does not have as much lactose, so it does not create the same cream-and-fruit combination you get from regular ice cream. It did not go together as well, but that is fine because I do not think it is meant to go together.

Both of these were awesome. I highly recommend going out there. It is pretty affordable, and it is nice to support someone making his father’s recipe out on the street. I would love to do that myself.