New York City has a seaside village: eating and drinking in Red Hook, Brooklyn

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New York

Red Hook is a seaside village in Brooklyn, New York, where the city stores its guts. Just a 10-minute drive from the tip of Lower Manhattan, this is where the trash trucks, halal carts and school buses sleep, where prehistoric-looking cranes still work the docks, where vintage cars are stored for film sets and actual carpenters drag handheld saws.

The ‘Wild West’ of Red Hook, Brooklyn

My now-husband, Larry, lived in Red Hook first. I began biking down to visit him and fell in love with them both. Before then, I, like most New Yorkers, assumed the neighbourhood was hard to reach.

Honestly, some days it is. Red Hook sits on a peninsula that juts into the East River, cleaved from the rest of Brooklyn by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Getting there can be a slightly laborious journey: from the closest subway station in Carroll Gardens, it’s a 13 to 25-minute walk under the elevated highway and past various dusty warehouses, Brooklyn’s largest public-housing complex and plastic bags floating in the wind. But this journey also protects it: its far corners hold town houses built for dockworkers on crooked cobblestone streets, quaint but world-class restaurants and gargantuan sunsets over the Statue of Liberty (her closest and clearest front-facing view).