The Vaux Social Brooklyn on Vanderbilt Avenue, a British-rooted public house that unfolds in stages—a confident bar, a sharp menu, and a room designed to hold you longer than you planned.

The room does not give itself up all at once. That is the first thing to understand about The Vaux Social, which opened in February 2026 on the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue and Bergen Street in Prospect Heights. You walk in, and the light catches you. Warm amber pendants hanging low over wood floors, a bar that holds the center of the room. It reads immediately as a place where someone has thought carefully about what it should feel like. And then you start to move through it.

The space opens itself in sections, a two-top set against a wine-colored wall, anchored by a sculptural hide mounted above it. Velvet stools in deep green, brass legs catching the light. The kind of seating that tells you a conversation here will not be rushed. Near the windows, marble tables and heavy red curtains frame the street outside.

Daylight filters in just enough to soften the room without breaking its mood. Further in, the open kitchen runs along a deep navy counter, plates stacked in clean lines. You hear the kitchen at work. Nothing loud. Nothing rushed.

There is also a fireplace, another pocket within the space. This is not one continuous dining room. It is a series of settings.

The Concept

The Vaux Social is the latest project from Leticia ‘Skai’ Young-Mohan and Chef Raymond Mohan, the husband-and-wife team behind LoLo’s Seafood Shack in Harlem and LoLo’s On The Water at Pier 57. With The Vaux Social, they have moved in a different direction: away from the tropical warmth of LoLo’s and toward something more architectural, more deliberate. A modern public house rooted in the social spirit of London’s free houses, adjusted for Brooklyn.

The name carries its intention with it. In French, vaux suggests worth, a place where worth is shared. It also references Calvert Vaux, the English-American landscape architect who, with Frederick Law Olmsted, designed Prospect Park, which sits just blocks away. Subtle curvilinear forms echo throughout the space, in the arches over the centerpiece bar, in the banquettes. The design is not accidental.

The wine program is curated by Lexi Graboski, formerly of Olmsted, and focuses on small producers and food-friendly bottles that move from casual daytime visits into evenings that settle into a cocktail-driven rhythm.

The Bar at The Vaux Social

At the center of the room, the bar reveals more on closer look. Amber light glows from the shelves behind it, bottles arranged in clean lines. The top shelf is finished with stacked design books [Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Tom Ford, Cartier] used as decor. Tan velvet stools line the wood bar top. The curvilinear arches that echo through the rest of the room land here, too.

The bar program focuses on classic cocktails and precise pours. Spirit-forward, technique-driven, respectful of the classics. The cocktail list is organized around the familiar rather than the elaborate, which is exactly the right call for a room designed to hold you.

During happy hour, between 4 – 6 PM, The Vaux Social offers the tiny tinis, three miniature martinis served together. The format is slightly playful without losing control. The options on the evening I visited included an espresso martini, the Vaux Classic, and the Vaux Nouveau. If you are inclined toward martinis, this is worth ordering before you decide which full pour you want to commit to for the rest of the night.

There is also a second bar deeper in the building, in the carriage house space. On weekends, it anchors brunch service. By night, it transitions into drinks. The setup supports both without needing to announce the shift.

The Menu

The menu is British-rooted, Brooklyn-adjusted, and that distinction matters. This is not a general New American spot with pub references. The Indian-inflected bar snacks that nod to London’s multicultural pub culture sit alongside brasserie-scale mains and proper pub classics.

You build the table rather than order it all at once.

How We Ate

We started with the bluefin tuna tartare pani puri. The format: delicate puri shells holding the tartare, served in the traditional pani puri style, is the clearest expression of what the menu is doing. It is a London reference [Indian bar snacks have been part of British pub culture for decades] translated through a Brooklyn kitchen. Crisp, layered, and gone quickly. It is the kind of first plate that sets the register for everything that follows.

After the tartare, the tuna poke nachos. Crispy wontons in place of chips, raw tuna with ponzu, sesame seeds, seaweed, kewpie, soy, and avocado layered across the top. The wonton crunch held against the cool tuna. The kewpie soy carried the plate. Hawaiian poke, Japanese pantry, nacho format, British pub, all stacked into one bite, all landing. Honestly, I preferred this to the tartare.

The crab and prawn toastie came next, richer, Old Bay aioli cutting through the richness, sesame and chives finishing it. Nostalgic in its DNA but sharpened. The wild boar sausage roll holds closest to its London reference: a proper pastry, properly made, with a mango mustard chutney that shifts it just enough to signal you are not in Marylebone.

A Vaux Classic

Then the creamy butternut squash risotto with shrimp, which sits squarely in the Vaux Classics section of the menu. The thing about risotto in a place like this is that it is usually a gamble. It is either a brick or a soup. But at The Vaux, the first thing I noticed when the plate hit the table was the steam. It smelled like toasted sage and brown butter, that specific scent that says “Autumn in Brooklyn” even in May.

The texture was a slow, velvet pour across the plate that held its shape just long enough to catch a bit of the shrimp. The shrimp itself had an almost glass-like snap on the outside that gave way to something tender. After the third bite, I turned to my sister and said, “This is the most focused thing we’ve eaten all week.”

The Service at The Vaux Social, Brooklyn

The service at The Vaux Social operates in the same quiet register as the kitchen. It allows you to settle into a corner without the pressure of a quick turn.

Leticia ‘Skai’ Young-Mohan was in the room during our visit, moving between tables. She introduced herself to us with an ease that shifted the space from designed to personal.

On the floor, the rhythm was anchored by the general manager. Plates were cleared with a soft hand. The timing between the bluefin tuna tartare and the risotto felt deliberate rather than rushed.

It is a professional level of service that understands when to step in and when to step back, leaving the room’s pace intact.

The Dessert Den

A few steps down from the main room, and you are in it, visible from the dining level above, but distinct enough that crossing the threshold registers as a decision. My sister stopped mid-sentence at the top of the steps.

The shift is immediate. Walls and ceilings drenched in Farrow & Ball burgundy. Black-and-white mosaic floor tiles. A glowing stone fireplace. Blue couches that feel like a sunken living room. The lighting reads amber and gold layered over those dark surfaces. The design language is serious, slightly theatrical, and genuinely transporting. My sister whispered, “Oh, we’re in the secret part now,” and she was right. The fact that you can see it from your table before you decide to go in does not diminish that. If anything, it is the design being confident enough to show you what is waiting.

The pastry program runs from a secondary kitchen here. The desserts are designed to be enjoyed alongside another drink rather than as a closing obligation. Sticky toffee pudding. Seasonal crostata. Chocolate mousse topped with airy white clouds.

We ended with the pavlova. Olive oil lemon curd, berries, and clotted cream. Light structure, meringue base, fruit layered over. One of the few moments in the meal where the food becomes genuinely delicate. Not heavy, not overly sweet. Closes the table without ending the evening. We exhaled.

The Dessert Den is the strongest proof of what The Vaux Social is doing. Not a pub with a back room. A carefully curated sequence of moods.

The BKLS Read

I did not know Raymond Mohan was Guyanese. I found out the way you often find out the most important things about a meal: after it was over.

It reframed everything, the mango mustard chutney on the wild boar sausage roll. The pani puri format holding the bluefin tuna tartare. These are not a British pub chef’s clever references to London’s multicultural food culture. They are the cooking of a Guyanese man who apprenticed under Jean-Georges Vongerichten at Vong, built LoLo’s Seafood Shack in Harlem, and is now choosing, deliberately, from a position of full range, to speak in the quieter register of a neighborhood public house on Vanderbilt Avenue.

Vong was Vongerichten’s Thai-French fusion restaurant, where a generation of chefs learned to hold intense aromatics inside classical French technique.

Not a Caribbean restaurant. Not a fine dining room. A neighborhood public house, Skai Young-Mohan has built, with Raymond Mohan’s Guyanese hand in the kitchen and the restraint of a chef who has already mastered louder rooms.

Prospect Heights has a long memory for what it has lost and a clear eye for what it is gaining. The Vaux Social feels like a gain.

The Essentials