Lundy’s and the Risks of Restaurant Revivals

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 Web site of the new Lundy’s promises “Old Brooklyn Revived.”

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. ♦