Named after the famed Progressive-era journalist and photographer who documented the rank indignities of tenement life in New York, Riis is typically described as the “people’s beach,” a place developed for poor immigrants as a counterpoint to Jones Beach, intended to draw the middle class. In his biography of Moses, “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro counters this impression, writing that at the time it was built Riis held the largest parking lot in the world; it now has space for more than 9,000 cars. (The parking lot is so enormous that it served as a dump for debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.)

As you walk the shoreline today from the western tip at the Fort Tilden border, it is hard to distinguish the demographic at Jacob Riis from whatever you might find on the eastern end of Long Island. In the way that no definition of 21st-century urbanism is sufficient without an incorporation of the epicurean, the concessionaire at Riis Park this year and for the next several is the Brooklyn Night Bazaar. The bazaar is an amalgamator of small-batch indulgences, which, like so much cooking now, exist as rarefied interpretations of average-Joe mainstays.

There is something about going to a public beach in Queens and having moules-frites (or tacos for $7, each made with locally caught monkfish) and washing all of that down with a $10 Ginni Hendricks cocktail (made with Hendricks gin) before you top it off with a paleo chocolate mousse made from cacao, dates and cashews — every one of these things completely delicious — that feels a little like flying privately to the mullet toss at the state fair. As one beachgoer in front of me on the seafood line so aptly put it, “I think it is all great. But then again I’m a gentrifier.”