Anyone who ate there during its heyday in the mid-1900s as a landmark seafood emporium along Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay would tell you dining at Lundy’s was a unique and mostly tasty experience. Inside the massive, hulking, Spanish Colonial Revival structure with a red-tile roof and plenty of decorative ironwork throughout its multi-tiered dining hall, patrons would consume buckets of clam chowder, mounds of steamers, bushels of corn on the cob, tons of half lobsters and chicken halves, and plenty upon plenty small buttered biscuits.
My mouth waters at the memory, for, while the outside of the building has remained intact as a historical landmark, Lundy’s as a restaurant has been closed for 17 years, but really, as the source of my culinary recall, for more than three decades.
I’m waxing nostalgic because of news that the restaurant will be resurrected, not at its iconic location at the end of Ocean Avenue where it meets Emmons Avenue, but rather in a nondescript corner of Red Hook, a former working class coastal section of Brooklyn that has undergone gentrification over the last decade or more (https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/exclusive-lundys-an-iconic-seafood-restaurant-returns-to-brooklyn-after-17-years).
I grew up on Avenue W between East 18th and 19th streets, directly five city blocks north of Lundy’s. My family did not eat there. My father did not eat shellfish. I didn’t taste lobster until I was 16, in a restaurant in Lake George on a day off from summer camp. Ever since Lobster has been a staple of my out-of-home cuisine.
My first hand experience inside Lundy’s was slight but memorable. I ate there less than a handful of times. The food was plentiful, affordable ($8 for a shore dinner, equal to a little more than $62 today), but not overly delectable.
The most memorable aspect of eating at Lundy’s was the simple action of actually being able to to eat there.
Going to Lundy’s was an occasion, an occasion to be shared with a multitude of people. It was said Lundy’s served an average of 2,000 guests a day, up to 10,000 on Sundays and 15,000 one holidays.
With so many patrons seeking tables, eating at Lundy’s became an exercise in strategic planning as complicated as any military maneuver. Like Horn & Hardart’s automat of days of yore, no reservations were accepted, there were no hostesses, securing a table was the responsibility of each party.
Patrons had to carefully analyze which diners were nearing completion of their meals, which were dawdling over coffee or a cigarette, oblivious to the presence of their successors hovering over them, as close as they could get without being too offensive. Khaki-jacketed waiters—all Black men—slid silently among the famished and the stuffed as the cacophony of heavy plates and loud, Jewish, Italian and Irish voices filled the air.
I find it hard to believe a transplanted Lundy’s will find its sea-legs in Red Hook. The ambience won’t be the same. The value? Doubtful. The experience? Don’t expect the same. But then, there are few still living who experienced Lundy’s at its peak. Perhaps the new Lundy’s may succeed. But it can hardly expect to be the same or as memorable as Lundy’s of Sheepshead Bay.