The Charcoal Grill on the Hoxton Roof
Michael Solomonov's Israeli skewer house sits on a Williamsburg rooftop with the Manhattan skyline in the middle distance. The Resy is brutal; the twelve bar seats are not.
The dorade comes to the table butterflied, skin blistered brown from the coals, red chermoula pooled underneath. It is the dish that argues hardest for the room. You came for the skyline, probably, and for the skewers the Philadelphia original made famous — and then a fish shows up that reorganises the meal around itself.
This is Michael Solomonov's New York outpost of Laser Wolf, the Israeli shipudiya he opened in Philly first and turned into one of the more recognisable Israeli restaurants in the country. The Brooklyn version landed on top of The Hoxton in Williamsburg in 2022, and has been one of the harder Resys in the city ever since. A shipudiya is a skewer house built around a live-coal grill. The prix fixe format opens with the salatim — a spread of salads and dips including hummus — moves through a skewer of your choosing, and lands on soft-serve. That is the shape of the meal. The rest is the room and the coals.
The rooftop earns the reservation, and the twelve bar seats held for walk-ins are a real chance after ten without one.
Editorial Deep
The grill is the point. Everything intended for heat goes over live coals, and the kitchen is disciplined about what comes off when — the dorade arrives with skin that shatters and flesh still holding moisture, chermoula rubbed into the flesh before it hit the grate rather than spooned over after. That order-of-operations detail is why the fish tastes of the coals instead of tasting of the sauce. Order it. If dorade is off, the salmon skewer runs the same playbook — smoke first, seasoning integrated, not overworked.
At seven the room is a rooftop restaurant with a view — light still in the sky, Manhattan across the water lit sideways, tables civilised, service unhurried. By ten it is a different place. The skyline is fully on, the bar has filled, the volume climbs, and the walk-in crowd starts cycling through the twelve stools along the counter. Two rooms, one address, and the sitting you book decides which one you get.
The host at the door on a Tuesday, watching a two-top finish their soft-serve, walks over before they've asked for the check and offers to put the next date on the books while they're still at the table. That is house policy, not improvisation — the GM tells guests to ask on the way out and staff will try to make it happen. It is the single most useful piece of information about eating here, and nobody publishes it.
The obvious comparison in Williamsburg is Lilia, where a pasta-forward dinner with wine lands in similar money and the room is the point in a different way — a converted auto-body shop rather than a rooftop with a skyline. Lilia is the harder food; Laser Wolf is the harder room. For an out-of-town guest who has never eaten Israeli grill cooking and has never seen Manhattan from across the East River at dusk, the money goes further here. For a fourth visit in a year, the prix fixe format starts to feel like the ceiling it is.
Don't come back if what you wanted was a tasting menu. The prix fixe is a fixed arc and it does not rotate the way a menu-driven kitchen does; the diner who reads menus for a living and wants a different meal every quarter will find the same meal every quarter. The rooftop is the reason to return, not the food changing under you.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The dorade with red chermoula, or the salmon skewer if dorade is off
“The rooftop and the fish justify the reservation; the twelve walk-in bar seats are reason enough when the Resy fails.”
Book the terrace for sunset in shoulder season, order the dorade, and ask for your next reservation on the way out. If the Resy is a wall, walk in after ten for a bar seat. For a Williamsburg rival at similar money in a very different room, Lilia is the pasta-forward alternative — harder food, no skyline.
The Verdict
