A KidSuper Canvas Above the Long Bar in Williamsburg
Ray Rondo's post-Carbone Italian-American cocktail bar treats the food menu as seriously as the martinis. Book a table on Resy or come early for the bar.
A KidSuper painting runs the length of the wall above the long bar counter, chalk-white plaster around it, globe lights hanging low over the room. Underneath, someone is stirring a martini that contains both gin and vodka, and someone else is eating a smashburger with pistachio pesto sugo. That is Bar Madonna in one frame.
The bar opened in 2024 in a 1,000-square-foot Metropolitan Avenue room from Eric Madonna and Ray Rondo, who managed Carbone before this. Rob Crowe runs the drinks and Rob Zwirz runs the kitchen, which matters more than it usually does at a cocktail bar. In its first eligible year the room landed at No. 36 on North America's 50 Best Bars 2026 as a New Entry. It is trying to be an Italian-American cocktail bar that takes both halves of that phrase equally seriously, and it is succeeding.
The rare Williamsburg cocktail bar where the meatball parm is the reason to stay past a second round.
Editorial Deep
The drinks are built as pairs of ideas that shouldn't work and then do. Nonna's Half & Half puts gin and vodka in the same martini and treats the argument as settled — order this first, sit at the bar, watch it made. The Brooklyn Special stacks coffee, Michter's rye, Fernet Branca and a cherry into something that reads like an amaro nightcap dressed up as a highball. The Bialetti pushes the espresso-martini template into Oloroso sherry and hazelnut. The Puttanesca Martini goes further — gin, olive, tomato, capers, anchovy — and lands as savoury as it sounds, and lands there deliberately.
At 6pm on a weeknight the room reads as a wine bar — early tables filling, the KidSuper canvas doing quiet work above the bar counter, globe lights on low, plenty of room to talk. By 10pm on a Friday it is a different bar: the counter three deep, the tables turned once, the volume up but never shouting, and the walk-in queue for bar seats already thin on options.
Williamsburg thirties who know what a good martini costs, a steady rotation of industry after 11pm who clocked the Carbone lineage before the 2026 North America's 50 Best listing arrived, and enough date-night couples that the room reliably tilts warm rather than loud. The crowd is the product here in the way a good neighbourhood bar's crowd is the product — nobody is performing, everyone is drinking well. It gets denser after the 50 Best nod hit in 2026, and Fridays now go earlier than they did last year.
The smashed meatball parm, octopus alla griglia and grilled-romaine Caesar with wild boar bacon anchor the food menu. The food is where the value shows: a smashburger-style meatball with pistachio pesto sugo and parm crisps is priced like a bar snack and eats like a plate from a proper kitchen.
This is the best version of what a small, ambitious neighbourhood cocktail bar in Brooklyn can be right now — the drinks justify the room, the food carries the second hour, and the KidSuper painting is worth the photograph. Come back on a Sunday at 4pm with one other person for martinis and the meatball parm before the crowd arrives. Do not come back on a Friday at 10pm hoping to talk business at the bar; the counter will be full and the volume will not cooperate.
Order this
Drink this.
Nonna's Half & Half martini and the smashed meatball parm
“Go for the martini and the meatball. Book Resy 30 days out or take a bar seat early.”
Bar Madonna is a small Williamsburg cocktail bar with a serious kitchen bolted on, and the two halves work in the same direction. Rob Crowe's Italian-American cocktail programme is coherent and confident, Rob Zwirz's food menu is priced like bar snacks and cooked like a restaurant, and the KidSuper canvas gives the room a specific identity that most new bars in the neighbourhood do not have. Book on Resy 30 days out for a table, or arrive before 7pm for bar and counter seats, which are walk-in only. Parties of 7-14 have to email reservations@barmadonna.com. Skip Friday after 10pm unless the point of the evening is the volume.
The Verdict
