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A High Stakes loss near Yards

By Sarah Portlock
The Brooklyn Paper
The Brooklyn Paper / Sebastian Kahnert
Bruce Ratner’s inability to build Atlantic Yards may have claimed this victim.

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Has Bruce Ratner’s failure to build Atlantic Yards claimed its first victim?

High Stakes Cheese Steaks, a perfect-for-pre-game fast-food joint on Flatbush Avenue at Dean Street, closed last week, 18 months after it opened in anticipation of the controversial construction project that was supposed to create 1,500 construction jobs annually over 10 years. Yet construction of the arena, which was once slated to be done by 2007, has not even begun.

Instead, the bright orange lunch spot — with its one menu item, Philly cheese steaks — quietly closed. Experts said the joint would likely still be open if the Nets were playing home games across the street, but the still-unbuilt arena is only partly to blame.

“They had a single food concept, and people in the neighborhood were looking for more choice,” said landlord Michael Pintchik. “Most of the people who went in there…were totally limited by the menu. You can take Item A or Item A or Item A.”

The restaurant did offer several variations of the steak that made Philadelphia famous — there was chicken, different kinds of cheese, and peppers, pickles and onions. But another common complaint was the long wait time. Workers on a half-hour lunch break barely had enough time to get there, order, eat and get back to the job site.

The owners could not be reached for comment.

When the restaurant opened, a spokesman for the anti–Atlantic Yards group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn said the store would be waiting a while to get that business.

“It’s always a shame when a local business goes under,” the spokesman, Daniel Goldstein, said this week. “If they been expecting Atlantic Yards to open sometime soon after they opened, they were, unfortunately, misguided.”

Before High Stakes, a popular Greek diner, the Silver Spoon, operated in the spot for nearly two decades. Its owners retired early, Pintchik said.

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©2008 The Brooklyn Paper

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