Lundy’s and the Dangers of Restaurant Revivals

I’m undecided if the identical will be stated of the brand new Lundy’s, whose house is an odd little nook constructing, inset in a gated lot the place the town’s yellow college buses sleep at night time, throughout the road from the flat expanse of the IKEA car parking zone. The restaurant, as soon as so famously metropolis-sized, is now extra of a village, holding fewer than 100 folks. The brick-walled eating room is surprisingly charmless, with grey industrial carpeting, optic-white tablecloths, banquet-hall chairs slipcovered in cream velour, and a big image window framing a floodlit, behemothic loading-dock crane. Even when thrumming with patrons, the awkward house feels short-term and sleepily under-filled. Although the brand new house owners evince clear reverence for Lundy’s legacy—Sandra Snyder has spoken in regards to the significance of the place to her romantic historical past along with her husband—little effort appears to have gone into making the room really feel evocative of the unique’s time or place. This lack of regard, satirically, could also be one of many clearest nods to Lundy’s, which was by no means involved about coolness or magnificence; its prodigious scale acted on the town’s restaurant tradition the best way the moon pulls on the tides. It didn’t have to be something; it merely was.

The Website online of the brand new Lundy’s guarantees “Outdated Brooklyn Revived.”

The spirit of Sheepshead Bay is extra explicitly invoked on the menu, which is constructed round Lundy’s classics. The amount of meals, greater than the standard, was the unique draw—Gael Greene, the late New York restaurant critic, as soon as described Lundy’s as “a fortress of gourmandise and sensory insult”—and, likewise, parts on the new place are beneficiant, if not gargantuan, and the meals is first rate however unremarkable. Begin a meal with a basket of Lundy’s well-known biscuits—small and pale, good with out fairly tipping into glorious—and finish it with Lundy’s pie, a effervescent ramekin of huckleberries beneath a flaky crust, candy and just a bit gummy, with the requisite snowball of ice cream on prime, melting into chilly rivulets of cream. In between, there’s chilled seafood, accessible à la carte or as a tiered plateau, with candy oysters, plump shrimp, a portion of saucy Crab Louis, and a halved lobster tail. For the primary course there’s a broiled lobster (amongst his many different accomplishments, Irving Lundy was rumored to be the inventor of the lobster bib!), and a crisp-skinned half hen served with a sauceboat of bronze, rosemary-scented jus. Among the many sides, go for the Lundy’s potatoes, sliced lyonnaise-style and served in a skillet, with caramelized onions and a dollop of bitter cream—scrumptious, however how may it not be? The Shore Dinner is again, although it’s now a extra modest three-course menu, with only a soup and salad to start. Dessert, not less than, nonetheless comes with espresso. Most of the cocktails, as a server hesitatingly famous one night, are named for outdated fishing boats from Sheepshead Bay.

There’s a bandstand within the nook of the bar, and an rising calendar of dwell music. There’s an infinite, juicy, considerably incongruous burger that does a really stable job of being an infinite, juicy burger. An appetizer of fried calamari, Rhode Island model, with vinegary peppers, was fairly nice. I by no means had the pleasure of eating on the earlier iterations of Lundy’s (blame my mom, I suppose, for giving start to me too late, and midway throughout the nation), however it’s onerous to be a severe restaurantgoer in New York with out changing into acquainted with its ghost. It’s an excellent factor, I consider, for the New York that’s to maintain the strains open to the New York that was—in fifty years, we’ll nonetheless be complaining about change and mourning the expensive departeds, whether or not a slice at Scarr’s in Area or a lab-grown-leather sales space at Balthazar 3.0, and we’ll be the higher for it. However what Lundy’s is now could be arguably a distinct restaurant solely, not a lot a revival as an homage, a small-town cowl band taking part in another person’s hits. A catch of the day on one go to was branzino, a fish that’s not even somewhat bit native, a thousand miles away from a fishing boat pulling into Brooklyn waters. I believe that Irving Lundy, had been he to rise from the grave, would possibly see such seafood sacrilege—in such a normal-sized room!—and instantly leap again into the bottom. ♦