Signature Dish: The Baroness

Welcome to the Q’Stoner food feature, Signature Dish! Once a week we check in with Queens restaurants and ask the owners about the all-time favorite dishes they serve. If you know of a dish you’d like to see featured here, please email emily@brownstoner.com.

The Spot: The Baroness, 41-26 Crescent Street, Long Island City.

The Deal: The Baroness Bar exploded – almost literally – in a vastly underserved area of Queens dining landscape. The craft beer and wine bar has drawn the attention of the city’s bloggers by teaching customers “the art of Sabrage a Champagne,” or how to open a bottle of champagne with a saber. In a cordoned-off area of a bar, patrons who purchase a bottle of champagne are handed a saber and told to slide it down the bottle hard and fast to make the cork pop off. The bar also offers some perfect bar nibbles of cheeses, meats, and flatbreads.

The Dish: The flatbreads have quickly become a popular accompaniment to the specialty wines and beers. Out of the regular selection of seven pizzas – including a rotating special – one has stood out above the rest: the Som’bitch. The house-made crust is dusted with fennel and topped with chorizo, hot dry milanos, spicy tasso ham, and the homemade spicy sauce and blistering mozerella.

“It is definitely set apart from your traditional ‘pizzas,’ considering the level of quality of the ingredients. It is not reinventing the wheel ‑- more like making it work better than others,” says owner Kyle Radzyminski.

Try with caution. The name was chosen for a reason.