The Williamsburg pizzeria that expanded to the East Village in 2009 only to close its Brooklyn location last year is coming back to Williamsburg. According to The Times, Motorino will open at 139 Broadway, near Bedford Avenue, in January.

It’s not the first case of borough bouncing we’ve seen in recent days: last week DNAinfo reported that East Village taqueria Dos Toros plans to open in Williamsburg, and today an owner of Lobster Joint, a Greenpoint seafood shack, tells The Local that it will open its outpost at 201 East Houston Street in November or December.

Bobby Levitt said that on Monday, Community Board 3’s liquor licensing committee voted to support a liquor license at the location near Ludlow Street. The satellite will replicate the menu and look of the original, and Mr. Levitt expects it to attract a similar demographic: “We get hipsters and families with kids – all ages,” he said.

So why are restaurants that open in the East Village-Lower East Side increasingly eager to expand into the Williamsburg-Greenpoint-Bushwick area, and vice versa? Mathieu Palombino, the owner of Motorino, told The Local, “Williamsburg is to Brooklyn what the East Village is to Manhattan. What works there will work here. It’s a natural expansion from one direction or the other.” (Of course, it doesn’t always work out, hence yesterday’s story about Mama’s.)

In case you’ve lost track, here’s The Local’s rundown of restaurants with locations on either side of the bridge. Read more…

Introducing a new column written by those who loved the East Village and left it. Today: Rachel Trobman tells us why she crossed the bridge to Brooklyn.

Rachel Trobman in her 13th Street apartment, 2005.

Williamsburg is teeming with babies. That was my first reaction to my new neighborhood. I’d been lured from the East Village after seven years there by the increased space, a price that would allow me to buy, and the likelihood there would not be a man singing opera at 3 a.m. outside of my window.

Moving across the river, I knew I could expect a slightly longer commute, no yellow cabs, less college students, more facial hair.

What I didn’t see coming was the prevalence of young children. There were five pregnant women in my building when I moved in. Now there are five infants and several toddlers. There are babies in the restaurants, strollers in the parks and tiny humans in the subway.

I first moved to the East Village, from the West Village, when I graduated New York University. My sister, and roommate, was a sophomore there and wanted to be close to campus. I didn’t want to be too far from Chelsea and the news network where I had just gotten a job. We found a reasonably priced “two bedroom” walk-up on St. Marks Place – more like a one bedroom made out of a living room, with a second bedroom made out of a closet. Read more…

Godlis A 1977 photo of CBGB, which operated on the Bowery from 1973 to 2006. Owners of the club’s assets are now planning a festival and seeking to revive it at a new site.

For the last six years the name CBGB has been little more than a logo on T-shirts for young people in the East Village. Now a group of investors has bought the assets of that famous punk-rock club, which closed in 2006, and plans to establish an ambitious music festival this summer, with an eye toward reopening the club at a new downtown location.

The new owners of the club’s assets — some with ties to the original Bowery establishment — say they hope that the festival will revive the wide-open artistic aesthetic associated with CBGB, which in its heyday served as an incubator for influential acts like Television, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, Sonic Youth and Patti Smith. Read more…

Add Max Brennan to the long list of East Village business owners who have opened outposts in Williamsburg. Gothamist reports that Mr. Brennan, an owner of Lit Lounge, will open a new “swinging 60s-type jazz club” called The Flat on the other side of the East River later this month. Mr. Brennan, whose fellow Lit-owners celebrated the bar’s 10-year anniversary last week, will join familiar East Village eateries like Max, Crif Dogs, Mama’s and Cafe Mogador that have followed the L train east.

What says romance better than hot dogs? Crif Dogs just unveiled over Twitter a new line of condoms featuring a variety of puns on the wrapping that The Local need not reprint. (You can probably guess.) The condoms will be available for free at the Williamsburg location of Crif Dogs on V-Day. What, no love for St. Marks?

Daniel Maurer Seen on the Bowery.

Last month, Amber Tamblyn told The Local that she and her fiancée, comedian David Cross, planned to leave the East Village for Brooklyn at the end of this month. Mr. Cross has griped about changes in the neighborhood before: “A Subway Sandwich just opened up on Avenue B,” he told Bullett in August, “and a large frat/sports bar is coming to the old Café Charbon on Orchard and Stanton, so it’s truly time to go.”

Now he’s back at it, telling Gothamist:

I’ve been fed up with what’s going on for about five years. There are so many examples but let me just sum up. On Houston—I think between Second Avenue and Bowery, or maybe it’s Allen and Chrystie—there’s a big, huge 7-11 with big, beautiful 7-11 signs. [Ed: We think he’s referring to the one on Bowery.] There’s an IHOP on 14th Street, Subway sandwiches all over the place. The thing is, I left Atlanta a long time ago and I’m spending way too much money to live in Atlanta again, you know?
Read more…