Inly Alvarez

Williamsburg is not short on places to eat. What it is short on is rooms where the food holds up after 10 PM, and that is a narrower list than the neighborhood's restaurant count suggests. Viva Toro has been working that gap at 987 Grand St since the early 2000s, running a full kitchen on the same nights the DJ is going. If you are deciding on a Mexican restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn this week, the useful question is not which one has the best tacos. It is which one is still cooking...

October Baseball Is Better With a Crowd There is a specific kind of quiet in watching a nine-inning elimination game alone. You get through the fourth, the tension has nowhere to go, and by the seventh you are pacing your own apartment talking to a television that cannot hear you. Baseball is the sport that most needs other people in the room. One big at-bat with forty strangers reacting at once does something no home setup can reproduce. Viva Toro is a Mexican restaurant and sports bar in...

Viva Toro is the best Mexican restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the second half of that night. Dinner, drinks, a DJ, bottle service, and the only mechanical bull in the neighborhood, all in one room at 987 Grand St. Nobody has to coordinate a second location at 10pm while half the group quietly heads home