The Lundy Brothers Restaurant, better known as Lundy’s, was founded in 1926 in Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, as the self-proclaimed largest eatery in the country. It occupied a Spanish Mission-inspired building that filled an entire city block. At the peak of its popularity, its twenty-eight-hundred-seat dining room could serve an estimated fifteen thousand customers a day, and something like a million diners passed through its doors each year. The menu was an aquatic cornucopia—oysters, crab, lobsters, and fresh fish sourced directly from local fishermen. But the restaurant became famous less for its food than for its sheer cultural inescapability: it was the colossus of Brooklyn, a star of guidebooks and travel dossiers. Joseph Heller wrote about Lundy’s. Its lobster almost certainly inspired an ignominious incident in “Portnoy’s Complaint.” The most popular order was the bountiful Shore Dinner, a set-price meal that included a chilled seafood cocktail; a serving of chowder and an order of steamed clams; half a chicken and half a lobster with vegetables on the side, plus a closing salvo of coffee and dessert.
In 1979, Lundy’s shut down, not long after the death of Irving Lundy, its founder, and a very long chapter of New York City culinary life seemed to come to an end. The enormous building sat unused until 1995, when the restaurant made a comeback, under new ownership, in a carved-out portion of the old dining room with space for a mere eight hundred souls. (The remainder of the building had been converted into a multi-tenant shopping center.) The new version flourished, for a decade or so—there was even, for a brief moment in the early two-thousands, a Lundy’s near Times Square—but was closed again by 2007. Now, as of January, Lundy’s has risen once again. It’s moved to another part of Brooklyn—Red Hook, this time—and is under the stewardship of Sandra Snyder, a hospitality-industry veteran whose husband, Mark Snyder, operates the Red Hook Winery, nearby. The Web site of the new new Lundy’s promises “Old Brooklyn Revived.”
If there is one thing that ties all of New York together, the people and the institutions, the native-born and the recently transplanted, it is a common obsession with the city that once was—recent or long gone, gilt or graffitied, all of it aglow in the perfecting haze of memory. The only thing we love more than a restaurant that’s managed to hang on through the years—your Nom Wah Tea Parlors, your McSorley’s Old Ale Houses, your Keenses and Katz’ses—is a restaurant, defunct and much missed, that flings its doors open again for another go. A few years back, in downtown Brooklyn, there was the reincarnation of Gage & Tollner, the stately establishment that anchored its stretch of Fulton Street from the late nineteenth century all the way into the early twenty-first, before closing in 2004. On the Upper East Side, late last year, the French bistro Le Veau d’Or, open since 1937, made a triumphant comeback, after a five-year closure, under the aegis of the chef-owners Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr. Both spots underwent extensive renovations before reopening; both are now themed, extravagantly, around their own pasts. At Gage & Tollner, the restoration unearthed the historical building’s original architectural flourishes from behind wall insets and drop ceilings, like the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb. At Le Veau d’Or, an exuberantly backward-looking menu features outdated French classics from its heyday—oeuf en gelée, chilled lobster macédoine, calf’s brains in lemon-butter sauce—and one of the original handwritten menus is framed on the wall. But both places became buzzy, must-visit dining rooms because they managed to make their old concepts feel vividly, refreshingly modern, alive with music and good food and light, rescued from the stuffiness of history by the sexiness and the precision of their renewed ambition.
I’m not sure if the same can be said of the new Lundy’s, whose home is an odd little corner building, inset in a gated lot where the city’s yellow school buses sleep at night, across the street from the flat expanse of the IKEA parking lot. The restaurant, once so famously metropolis-sized, is now more of a village, holding fewer than a hundred people. The brick-walled dining room is strangely charmless, with gray industrial carpeting, optic-white tablecloths, banquet-hall chairs slipcovered in cream velour, and a large picture window framing a floodlit, behemothic loading-dock crane. Even when thrumming with patrons, the awkward space feels temporary and sleepily under-filled. Though the new owners evince clear reverence for Lundy’s legacy—Sandra Snyder has spoken about the importance of the place to her romantic history with her husband—little effort seems to have gone into making the room feel evocative of the original’s time or place. This lack of regard, ironically, may be one of the clearest nods to Lundy’s, which was never concerned about coolness or elegance; its prodigious scale acted on the city’s restaurant culture the way the moon pulls on the tides. It didn’t need to be anything; it simply was.
The spirit of Sheepshead Bay is more explicitly invoked on the menu, which is built around Lundy’s classics. The quantity of food, more than the quality, was the original draw—Gael Greene, the late New York restaurant critic, once described Lundy’s as “a fortress of gourmandise and sensory insult”—and, likewise, portions at the new place are generous, if not gargantuan, and the food is decent but unremarkable. Start a meal with a basket of Lundy’s famous biscuits—small and pale, good without quite tipping into excellent—and end it with Lundy’s pie, a bubbling ramekin of huckleberries under a flaky crust, sweet and just a little gummy, with the requisite snowball of ice cream on top, melting into chilly rivulets of cream. In between, there is chilled seafood, available à la carte or as a tiered plateau, with sweet oysters, plump shrimp, a portion of saucy Crab Louis, and a halved lobster tail. For the main course there is a broiled lobster (among his many other accomplishments, Irving Lundy was rumored to be the inventor of the lobster bib!), and a crisp-skinned half chicken served with a sauceboat of bronze, rosemary-scented jus. Among the sides, go for the Lundy’s potatoes, sliced lyonnaise-style and served in a skillet, with caramelized onions and a dollop of sour cream—delicious, but how could it not be? The Shore Dinner is back, though it’s now a more modest three-course menu, with just a soup and salad to begin. Dessert, at least, still comes with coffee. Many of the cocktails, as a server hesitatingly noted one evening, are named for old fishing boats from Sheepshead Bay.
There’s a bandstand in the corner of the bar, and an emerging calendar of live music. There’s an enormous, juicy, somewhat incongruous burger that does a very solid job of being an enormous, juicy burger. An appetizer of fried calamari, Rhode Island style, with vinegary peppers, was pretty great. I never had the pleasure of dining at the earlier iterations of Lundy’s (blame my mother, I suppose, for giving birth to me too late, and halfway across the country), but it’s hard to be a serious restaurantgoer in New York without becoming acquainted with its ghost. It’s a good thing, I believe, for the New York that is to keep the lines open to the New York that was—in fifty years, we’ll still be complaining about change and mourning the dear departeds, whether a slice at Scarr’s in Space or a lab-grown-leather booth at Balthazar 3.0, and we’ll be the better for it. But what Lundy’s is now is arguably a different restaurant entirely, not so much a revival as an homage, a small-town cover band playing someone else’s hits. A catch of the day on one visit was branzino, a fish that’s not even a little bit local, a thousand miles away from a fishing boat pulling into Brooklyn waters. I suspect that Irving Lundy, were he to rise from the grave, might see such seafood sacrilege—in such a normal-sized room!—and immediately jump back into the ground. ♦
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