Lundy’s is to Brooklyn’s culinary world
as the Dodgers were to its sports world. But unlike the Dodgers
who, sadly, were spirited away from their home base to Los Angeles
in 1957, Lundy’s was resuscitated and continues to thrive here
in Brooklyn.
Forced to shut down after the death of its founder-owner, Irving
Lundy, in 1977, Lundy’s was reopened in the same Sheepshead Bay
location in 1997 and has been doing a roaring business there
ever since.
This spring, a new Lundy’s, based on the original, opened in
Manhattan’s Times Square.
The Lundy’s story is one of those heartwarming rags-to-riches
sagas so common to New York City and to Brooklyn in particular.
In the early 1900s, the tall, redheaded Irving Lundy started
his career by selling clams from a pushcart in Sheepshead Bay.
By the late 1930s, his restaurant was serving seafood to hundreds
of people on a summer evening, with hundreds more circling tables,
peering over the shoulders of other diners, eagerly waiting for
a table to become available. While some Brooklyn families flocked
to Lundy’s to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and Mother’s
and Father’s days, others made Sundays at Lundy’s and the shore
dinner their custom after a day at Coney Island or Brighton Beach.
The Brooklyn Lundy’s is now owned by the Tam Restaurant Group
and continues to be a favorite family restaurant for locals as
well as a popular stop for tourists.
Vaguely Spanish in style with stucco walls, a red-tiled roof,
and striped red and white awnings, the Lundy’s building still
sprawls over an entire block (though the restaurant only occupies
about half of that today). Inside is a large open dining room
dominated by a central, sunken table-filled expanse, a busy open
kitchen against one wall, a central bar and wine rack, and a
huge tank of live shellfish where lobsters the size of small
dogs preside.
Big stained-glass lanterns of diamond-shaped blue and white glass
hang from the ceiling. The tables, spread far enough apart for
privacy, are covered in ochre tablecloths topped with white paper
coverings. The waiters, dressed in white jackets and black ties,
as they have been since the restaurant’s inception, add to the
Old World ambiance.
Lundy Bros. Times Square (several of the original Lundy family
members were involved in the original Lundy’s debut including
a couple of Irving’s brothers, hence the "brothers"
in the title) comes off as a slick version of the original. All
the basic design elements of the space are fashioned after the
Brooklyn restaurant: high ceilings with the same stained-glass
lanterns, blue, white and ochre color scheme and black-and-white
photographs of old Brooklyn on the stairway leading up to the
enormous dining room. But the setting itself, on the bustling
corner of Broadway and 50th Street, lends itself to a more urban
clientele and ambiance.
At lunch men and women in business suits, as well as a few tourists
surrounded me.
Whether in Brooklyn or Manhattan, Lundy’s is a seafood lover’s
paradise offering clams, oysters, mussels, shrimp and more. The
shellfish were tender and tasted fresh from the ocean. Crab,
lobster and scallops were served in generous portions and cooked
to perfection under executive chef Tom Tedesco.
I went to the Sheepshead Bay Lundy’s for dinner and the Times
Square Lundy’s for lunch. Both restaurants have the same expanded
version of the lunch menu at dinnertime. The lunch menu is divided
into: raw bar, shellfish samplers, starters, pizza, sandwiches,
salads, fresh fish, lobster, entrees and family style side dishes;
the dinner menu expands on these choices with fried fish, pastas,
specialties of the house, meat and poultry dishes and surf and
turf.
We started our dinner with the double-tier seafood sampler –
six clams, six oysters, six jumbo shrimp, eight mussels and a
1-pound steamed lobster, all served on seaweed with an oniony
vinaigrette and a cocktail sauce for dipping. All were plump,
juicy and most importantly, fresh. The only preparation, other
than the dipping sauces, was the topping on the mussels. They
were lightly steamed and served cold with a tomato-based mixture
that reminded me of gazpacho – lots of finely chopped spring
onion and parsley.
Accompanied by a generous basket of warm, homemade foccacia and
tiny biscuits – for which Lundy’s is understandably famous –
the seafood sampler could easily have served as dinner for two,
especially with one of the generous side dishes. (The creamed
spinach, for instance, is dense and just creamy enough without
being over the top.)
Of the fried selections on the menu, the fish and chips got my
vote for most tasty, and my husband, who is English and thus
presumes to be an expert, agreed.
"I use scrod for fish and chips," explained Tedesco.
"It has a density that keeps it intact during the frying
process." The end result is fish that retains the delicacy
of its flavor within a luscious, golden fried crust. Served in
wax-coated newspaper with his glorious freshly prepared fries,
this is an indulgence in fried food well worth trying.
The soft-shell crabs, on the other hand, lost the subtlety of
their flavor and delicacy, after being too heavily crusted and
fried.
Select dishes on the menu are marked F.W.I.L. (for Frederick
William Irving Lundy) as house specialties. I recommend the crab
cakes (lots of crabmeat, in these colorful, spicy, crisp cakes.
Beautifully presented with yellow and red peppers, carrots and
snap peas); Mom’s blue crab and artichoke dip (I’ve tasted many
versions of this as an appetizer but this was the best – large
chunks of crab meat and artichoke, good and creamy); and the
jumbo shrimp cocktail. (Where DO they get those tender, huge-yet-flavorful
shrimp?)
In general I found the dishes that required more complex preparation
tended to be less successful – the seafood penne a la vodka,
for example, lost the individual flavors of each type of seafood
and the calamari were tough. The jumbo stuffed shrimp missed
the mark, too. But why mess with a good thing anyway when you
have such heavenly basic ingredients as those shrimp?
Desserts were ample, rich and all-American – cheesecake, apple
pie, Boston cream pie, baked Alaska, and the piece de resistance,
a take-off on the s’more that’s worth ordering if for no other
reason than to examine its architecture!
In fact, the s’more dessert ended up being the most interestingly
flavored confection. A box constructed of graham crackers, containing
melted marshmallow and whipped cream, sits on a pool of caramel
sauce, and the whole is topped with melted chocolate. I don’t
even like s’mores, but this successfully followed in the current
trend of elevating ’50s favorites to a new, more interesting
flavor level.
The other dessert worth mentioning was the Boston cream pie,
a dessert I’ve always found too bland and dry to bother with.
(It’s traditionally made with two layers of white cake separated
by custard, the whole covered in chocolate icing.) This version
was moist and subtle and focused on the too often overlooked
simple goodness of vanilla and chocolate.
While it’s nice that New Yorkers and tourists can get a taste
of Lundy’s in Manhattan now, you still have to go to Brooklyn
for the real experience. There, looking out on the fishing boats
in Sheepshead Bay in the hustle and bustle of the huge dining
room, listening to the myriad accents and languages that make
up Brooklyn’s diverse population, you get a taste of what Brooklyn
is really all about – as well as a sampling of the marvelous
seafood from the waters that surround it.
Lundy Bros. Times Square [50th Street
at Broadway, (212) 586-0022] and Lundy Bros. Sheepshead Bay [1901
Emmons Ave. at Ocean Avenue, (718) 743-0022] accept all major
credit cards. Price range for lunch entrees: $13-$24; dinner
entrees: $13-$37. Web site, currently under construction, is
www.LundyBros.com.
