There's a particular kind of Brooklyn bar that has become almost impossible to find: one where you can walk in on a Monday night, shoot pool, and drink well without feeling like you've entered someone's carefully curated Instagram moment. Frog, which opened in 2023 on Marcus Garvey Boulevard in Bed-Stuy, is exactly that bar. Founded by Alexandra McCown and Charles Gerbier—the couple behind Fort Greene's beloved Cafe Paulette—Frog was built on a simple premise: make natural wine accessible to the neighborhood that actually lives there, not the wine tourists passing through.
The bar's design philosophy feels almost radical in its restraint. There's a pool table. There's a sprawling backyard anchored by a large tree. There are no small plates. Bottles are priced a notch below what you'd expect from a Brooklyn wine bar in 2025, which means they're actually priced like you might return tomorrow. The orange wine of the day rotates. The chilled reds do too. You can order olives. You can order capocollo. You can sit with a snack board and not feel obligated to make it a whole evening's event, though you might anyway.
McCown and Gerbier understood something essential: most neighborhoods don't need another wine destination. They need a bar. One that happens to have natural wine, yes, but fundamentally operates as a place where regulars can genuinely afford to be regular. That this philosophy resonated so strongly that Frog won BKMAG's 2025 Readers' Choice Award for Best Bar in Brooklyn suggests that plenty of people were waiting for exactly this kind of place.
The genius is in the casualness. When McCown talks about the concept, she describes it as wanting "to just be able to walk over and have a glass of wine somewhere and then walk home." That's not positioning. That's not a brand strategy. That's just what happens when people who actually live somewhere open a bar for people who actually live there. The result feels less like a wine bar and more like a summer house party you didn't have to drive three hours to attend, which is to say it feels like the kind of place worth going out for on a random Tuesday.
If you're going, go on a weeknight when the pool table isn't claimed and you can actually claim a seat in the backyard.