Turkey’s Nest doesn’t take cards or reservations, and for most of its 45 years it didn’t take much seriously beyond a frozen margarita in a styrofoam cup. So it’s a little funny to see it on a New York City government agenda, lined up with other restaurants asking the Department of Transportation for permission to put a table on the sidewalk. The last of the old-school Williamsburg dives is now a permit applicant.
The bar at 94 Bedford Avenue, on the corner across from McCarren Park, came up at Brooklyn Community Board 1’s combined public hearing and board meeting on June 9, where the board was scheduled to review its application for a DOT Dining Out NYC permit. The application (No. 20260418030001) was added as a late revision, according to a revised notice CB1 sent to community members on June 6, and it landed ninth under Agenda Item 7, the Dining Out NYC section, alongside ten other Williamsburg and Greenpoint establishments asking for the same thing. The meeting ran at 6:00 PM at the Swinging Sixties Senior Center, 211 Ainslie Street.
Turkey’s Nest opened in the early 1980s and bills itself as “the last of the old school dive bars,” a “local dive/sports bar” now run by its third generation of management, per the bar’s own about page. Owner Steve Ehresman took it over from his father and grandfather, Greenpointers reported. It’s cash only, known for cheap drinks and frozen margaritas strong enough to relocate your weekend. Some of its employees and regulars have been around for more than 20 years, and it’s shown up in a long list of TV shows. You don’t picture a bar like this filling out a revocable-consent application.
This is also a bar that just threw itself a party. Over Memorial Day weekend 2026 it celebrated 45 years with karaoke, a potluck, and barbecue out front despite the rain, Greenpointers reported. “The main goal was really just to get everyone together who’s ever supported the bar,” Ehresman told the outlet. The weekend doubled as the 88th birthday of Frances, the bar’s longest-tenured employee at 30 years, who shared pie and lemon bars with the crowd, and it raised money through a GoFundMe for security guard Jimmy Venezia, a years-long staffer battling stage 4 colon cancer. “Our niche is that we’re a family-owned bar where everybody knows each other,” Ehresman said, with staff who have been there 20-plus years and greet regulars by name with their drink already coming.
For a place this stubborn, paperwork is not a new enemy. On Halloween 2011 the city Department of Health shut Turkey’s Nest down after an inspection turned up mice droppings and poorly installed plumbing, hitting it with a $2,000 fine, the Brooklyn Paper reported at the time. The staff worked around the clock for nine days, ripping out pipes and the coin-operated machines blamed for the rodents, and reopened the following Wednesday. The bar survived the inspectors then. The question now is whether it can survive the application.
Dining Out NYC is the city’s permanent outdoor-dining program, run by the Department of Transportation. It replaced the pandemic-era free-for-all when restaurants just built sheds in the street, and now the tables are licensed. Sidewalk cafes can operate year-round; roadway cafes are only allowed from April 1 to November 29, per the program’s official FAQ. Community boards like CB1 review applications and pass along advisory recommendations. There’s a license fee, a public-hearing fee, a security deposit, and a revocable-consent fee. Once DOT has a complete application, the FAQ says, “the review process can take six months before a license is issued.”
Six months is the optimistic number. The approval process itself has been a problem this spring. In a May 14 letter, City Comptroller Mark Levine opened an investigation into how DOT and the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services review these permits, after finding that more than half of applicants were stuck in limbo, amNewYork reported. “Restaurants are struggling to cut the red tape on a slow and cumbersome permitting process,” Levine said. Six weeks into the 2026 season, only about 2,100 restaurants had permits, down from roughly 2,500 last year and around 13,000 at the height of the COVID program. Some reported waiting more than a year.
The bottleneck is not the last step. Levine’s office said DOT had forwarded 1,225 applications to the Comptroller for final registration, a stage it clears in an average of eight calendar days, while DOT estimated back in January that 2,390 applications were somewhere in the pipeline, amNewYork reported. DOT’s own framing is that the law is the problem: a City Council statute that routes every application through DOT, the community board, a public hearing, the local Council member, and the Comptroller. “These participation numbers show exactly what we warned about: seasonality and a lengthy, bureaucratic approval process are making it harder for restaurants to participate,” the agency said in a statement to ABC7. Turkey’s Nest filed in April. By the program’s own math, it could be deep into autumn before a single legal table appears on Bedford Avenue, if one does at all.
A bar that outlasted gentrification, a health-department shutdown, and four decades of Williamsburg changing around it is now stuck in the same backlog as roughly a thousand other restaurants. The slowest part of getting a sidewalk table isn’t the bar or the neighbors. It’s the city. The CB1 advisory vote is one early checkpoint in a process the Comptroller is now investigating for taking too long.
If you want a say in whether a table ever shows up outside the Nest, the place to do it is local and early. CB1 publishes its agendas, minutes, and the schedule for its next combined meeting at nyc.gov/brooklyncb1, and the board’s Dining Out NYC reviews are where neighbors can weigh in for or against a sidewalk cafe before DOT makes the call. If your own block is waiting on a permit that should have come months ago, the Comptroller’s office is the one publicly pushing on the backlog. Levine’s investigation and his May 14 letter to City Hall were covered by amNewYork, and the office posts its own statements to its newsroom at comptroller.nyc.gov.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
