For All Things Good

Franklin Avenue and the Affordable End of Brooklyn's Mexican Dining Scene

Brooklyn's Franklin Avenue corridor has spent the better part of a decade sorting itself into a recognisable dining strip, with Crown Heights properties occupying a different register than the higher-ticket addresses further north in Prospect Heights or across the bridge in lower Manhattan. The Mexican restaurants that have earned staying power in this part of the borough tend to work in the dollar-sign tier, building loyalty through consistency and portion logic rather than tasting-menu ambition. For All Things Good, at 343 Franklin Ave, sits firmly in that category: a Google rating of 4.6 across 371 reviews suggesting a neighbourhood following with genuine depth.

The Michelin Plate designation is not a star, but it is a meaningful signal in the context of affordable Mexican cooking in New York. It indicates that Michelin's inspectors found the cooking worth recommending on quality alone, independent of price tier or format. In a borough where Mexican food ranges from taqueria counter service to the more composed ambitions of Oxomoco or Alta Calidad, recognition at the accessible price point is the harder credential to earn. Inspectors in this tier are weighing value against quality in ways that $$$$ rooms never have to consider.

The Sweet Side of the Mexican Table

Mexican cuisine's dessert and pastry traditions are among the most coherent in the Americas, and they tend to travel poorly in cities where the cuisine is reduced to its savory street-food anchors. The pan dulce canon, conchas, cuernos, polvorones, puerquitos, represents a baking tradition with colonial-era roots, shaped by Spanish, French, and indigenous influences across several centuries. Tres leches operates in a different register: a soaked-sponge format that separates Mexico's sweet table from anything in European pastry tradition, its texture defined by the ratio of evaporated, condensed, and heavy cream, and by how long the cake rests before service. Churros, the most exported of the three, are often the most abused in diaspora settings, arriving undercooked or oversweetened at venues that treat them as an afterthought.

The editorial case for paying attention to the sweet program at any Mexican address is simple: it reveals whether the kitchen is working from the full tradition or editing it down to the familiar. In New York's broader Mexican dining scene, the conversation is dominated by the savory, the birria surge represented by destinations like Birria Landia, the composed contemporary plates at Atla, the market-driven approach at ABC Cocina. The sweet table is where fewer places compete and where the gap between serious and perfunctory kitchens tends to show most clearly.

Crown Heights as a Dining Neighbourhood

Crown Heights is not a neighbourhood that has positioned itself around destination dining in the way that Williamsburg or the West Village have. The Franklin Avenue strip functions more as a community corridor than a dining draw for out-of-borough visitors, which has historically kept rents lower and given independent operators more room to build something durable. The trade-off is lower footfall from destination diners. The advantage is a review pool, 353 Google reviews at 4.6, that skews toward people who actually live nearby and return with some regularity, rather than tourists checking a list.

That demographic context matters when reading the score. A 4.6 at 353 reviews in a residential Brooklyn neighbourhood represents a different kind of validation than the same number in a tourist-dense area. The repeat-visit signal is stronger; novelty dining inflation is less present.

New York's Mexican Dining Tier Structure

New York City's Mexican restaurant tier structure has become meaningfully more layered over the past decade. At the leading, composed tasting-menu formats and ambitious modern-Mexican rooms compete on technique and wine programs. In the middle tier, neighbourhood addresses with Michelin attention, like For All Things Good, work at price points where value is part of the proposition. At the base, counter-service and cart formats serve the city's largest Mexican communities in Queens and the Bronx.

The comparison set for a single-dollar-sign Michelin Plate recipient in Brooklyn is not the $$$$ rooms that define New York's most-written-about dining. The relevant peers are addresses where the cooking earns recognition on its own terms at a price most diners can afford without occasion-planning. For a sense of where Mexican cooking sits at higher investment levels nationally, Pujol in Mexico City defines the modern-Mexican benchmark, while Alma Fonda Fina in Denver illustrates how the regional tradition translates in a mid-sized American city. New York's comparable addresses operate in a more compressed competitive field, where Michelin's attention at the affordable tier is rarer and therefore more weighted.

For reference, the Manhattan addresses that anchor New York's fine-dining conversation, rooms like Alinea, The French Laundry, Lazy Bear, Single Thread Farm, Providence, and Emeril's, operate in entirely different price tiers and formats. Their Michelin credentials are not the relevant benchmark here. The meaningful signal is that For All Things Good sits with Brooklyn Mexican addresses worth seeking out, at a price point where the decision carries almost no financial risk.

Planning Your Visit

Address: 343 Franklin Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238. Neighbourhood: Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Price tier: $ (single dollar sign). Google rating: 4.6 from 371 reviews. Reservations: Walk-in friendly. Dress: casual. Getting there: Franklin Avenue is served by the Franklin Ave subway station (C, S lines), placing the address within a short walk of transit.

What Regulars Order