Runner Up – Park Slope's twelve-stool encore to a bakery queue

Runner Up occupies the back half of a one-time carriage house on 11th Street in Park Slope, the savoury, sit-down companion to WINNER, the bakery next door whose queues have made it one of the neighbourhood's quiet institutions. Chef Daniel Eddy opened it in the autumn of 2021, completing a plan he had first sketched out when he signed the lease in 2019. Eddy had earlier run the kitchen at Rebelle, a Michelin-starred restaurant, and at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Café, and had spent time in Paris, where he developed a taste for bread eaten warm, straight from the oven. The room holds just twelve stools along a single bar, making it one of the smallest dining rooms in South Brooklyn. Today the kitchen is led by chef Marky Bayer, who sends out a fixed, nightly-changing Dinner for Two. It holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, a distinction the restaurant has carried since the 2022 selection, recognising good cooking at a moderate spend.

01The room and the setting

Eddy signed the lease for the 11th Street space in 2019 with a clear split in mind: a bakery and coffee counter at the front, a wine bar at the back, divided by the entrance to the residential building above. The bakery, WINNER, opened in March 2020, just before the city shut down, which pushed the wine bar plan into the freezer; instead, the unfinished back room became a staging ground for to-go rotisserie-chicken dinners and weekly guest-chef pop-ups that kept the business afloat through the pandemic's worst months. Eddy returned to his original idea in the autumn of 2021, finally opening Runner Up.

What that history leaves is a room with an improvised, neighbourhood feel rather than a designed one: twelve stools along a single bar, with a terrace for warmer evenings. The kitchen shares its lineage and part of its menu with WINNER next door, and the bread that arrives at the table, baked a few steps away in WINNER's ovens, is treated as a course in its own right rather than a basket on the side.

02The chef

Daniel Eddy built his reputation before Park Slope knew his name, running the kitchen at Rebelle, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan, and earlier at Walnut Street Café in Philadelphia. A stretch working in Paris left the deeper mark: evenings spent carrying home a warm baguette convinced him that a good neighbourhood needs good bread as much as it needs a good kitchen, a conviction that became WINNER's founding logic and, two years later, Runner Up's.

Insider tip

Book ahead; only 12 seats, fixed Dinner for Two menu, Tuesday to Saturday.

WINNER has since grown into a small constellation around that same conviction: the original bakery on 11th Street, an outpost inside Prospect Park's Picnic House, a butcher shop, and Runner Up itself. Day to day, the Runner Up kitchen is now led by chef Marky Bayer, who keeps Eddy's original instinct for fast, produce-driven cooking while shaping the nightly menu himself.

03What to order

Runner Up now runs on a fixed Dinner for Two menu served Tuesday to Saturday between 5pm and 8.45pm, priced at $70 for two, or $35 a head. In October 2026 that meant a short run of courses: honeynut squash with baguette, sesame and nuts; an endive salad dressed in buttermilk herb dressing with parmigiano reggiano; a pot roast of braised beef with potato, carrot and mushroom; and a $12 sundae to finish. The kitchen updates the line-up through the season, so the exact dishes shift, but the shape of the meal - vegetable, salad, braise, something sweet - tends to hold.

It wasn't always this tight. When Runner Up first opened, the format was closer to a small-plates menu ordered dish by dish for quick, successive delivery, with dishes such as mortadella dressed in a brown butter-pistachio vinaigrette among the early favourites. The fixed Dinner for Two is really the same instinct refined: food meant to arrive fast and get eaten without ceremony.

04Wine and drinks

The restaurant publishes two lists, an Every Day Wine List and a Reserve List, both subject to change without notice. The selection leans French, with a particular pull toward the Loire Valley and Jura, rounded out with newer-wave Californian, Italian, Spanish and Austrian producers.

05The neighbourhood

Runner Up sits deep in residential Park Slope, close to the Seventh Avenue subway station, where the F and G trains stop in the heart of the neighbourhood. WINNER's own footprint has since spread around the district from the same 11th Street kitchen, taking in an outpost inside Prospect Park's Picnic House and a butcher shop, a small empire built from one bakery window during the pandemic.

06When to go and booking

With only twelve stools at the bar, Runner Up is worth booking ahead, especially for a Friday or Saturday seating; reservations run directly through the restaurant's own website for the Tuesday-to-Saturday dinner service between 5pm and 8.45pm. No gratuities or tips are added to the bill, a policy the restaurant states on its own menu.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.