58 new york | march 2–15, 2020
seeing a space that on an earlier visit had
shown promise but revealed itself to be a
leaky-roofed disaster zone, fate intervened.
Almost on a lark, or just to get out of the
rain, their real-estate broker led them to the
revolving door of 372-374 Fulton Street.
Just like that, any notions of a modest little
cocktail lounge vanished as they stepped
inside the hallowed space and saw its
unvarnished potential. Although they both
represented the bearded, bootstrapping
new breed of Brooklyn restaurateur, it
became their mission to resuscitate the bor-
ough’s most venerable eating-and-drinking
establishment. Schneider, a former cabinet-
maker who had built his own restaurants,
would orchestrate the renovations; cocktail
maestro Frizell would handle the front of
the house and open a second bar, the
Sunken Harbor Club, upstairs; and Kim
(with chef de cuisine Adam Shepard and
pastry chef Caroline Schiff )
would create a menu that paid
homage to Gage & Tollner relics
like clam-belly broil and she-
crab soup, and build a larder of
housemade condiments, pickles,
and ferments. It was New Brook-
lyn Cuisine meets Ye Olde
Brooklyn Cuisine, with the type
of pre-Prohibition cocktails asso-
ciated with both.
There was only one hitch:
They needed a lot more cash. “We
were looking for one or two big
investors who could foot the
whole bill,” says Frizell. It didn’t
work out that way. Brooklyn’s
old-money Establishment wasn’t
interested in investing, and
younger venture capitalists
weren’t willing to invest enough
(plus they wanted special perks).
So the partners decided to try
Wefunder, a newish crowd-
funding platform that allows
start-ups to solicit online invest-
ments as small as $100. (The Gage & Tollner
team set its minimum at $1,000; early-
round lenders of that amount will get back
$1,500, with returns coming from a 4 per-
cent share of revenues.) “We determinedIn its day, Gage & Tollner was a place of
power lunches and celebratory dinners; of
beefsteaks and mutton chops and countless
crustaceans creamed, steamed, and fricas-
seed; of seasoned staff whose jackets bore
service insignia marking their typically
lengthy tenure. Today, it’s remembered
chiefly for its anachronistic gaslights, which
were ritually lit even into the current cen-
tury, and for the author and cook Edna
Lewis’s stint as head chef in the late ’80s and
early ’90s. At that point, it looked much as
it did 100 years prior, on account of meticu-
lous stewardship and its 1975 landmark
designation: symmetrical rows of mahog-
any tables running the length of the Gilded
Age dining room, its walls embellished with
ornate Lincrusta coverings, cut velvet, and
cherry-trimmed arched mirrors that
reflected the cut-glass chandeliers’ glow.
Or as the late New Yorkcontributing editor
Seymour Britchky summed it up,
“turn-of-the- century splendor,
dark and handsome and a little
bit grand.”
When it closed for good, a vic-
tim of changing tastes as well as
the traffic-restricting construc-
tion of the pedestrian Fulton
Mall, this grandeur quickly
faded. The space was leased to
TGI Fridays, Arby’s, and cut-rate
jewelry and clothing shops until
the landlord decided in 2016 that
booming Downtown Brooklyn
was ready for fine dining again.
It was right around that time
that St. John Frizell, owner of
Red Hook’s Fort Defiance, was
leaving Kings County Supreme
Court during divorce proceed-
ings and in need of a drink.
Noticing the lack of a decent
cocktail bar in the vicinity, he
decided it would be a good idea
to open one himself, and he
enlisted his friend and fellow res-
taurateur Ben Schneider—co-owner with
his chef wife, Sohui Kim, of Insa and the
Good Fork—to help him fill the void.
They began scouting locations, but it
wasn’t going well. One stormy day, after
food / openingsBy the timethe oyster- and chophouse Gage & Tollner closed
in 2004 after a 125-year run, it had had eight different owners.
When it reopens on March 15 at the same Downtown Brooklyn
address, it will have 378. Well, actually, it will have three owners
and 375 investors, the majority of whom were enticed to kick in as much
by the ease and accessibility of modern internet crowdfunding as by the
antiquated, nostalgic charm of the gone but not forgotten restaurant.1950s–1960sA Timeline of
Matchbook CoversToday1970sthat we didn’t know ten people who could
give us $100,000 each, but we might know
1,000 people who could give us $1,000
each,” says Frizell. Plus, “They’d be advocat-
ing on our behalf to everybody they know
and probably coming here a lot.”
The partners advertised the project on
Facebook and Instagram and at a series of
Saturday-morning open houses on location,
fomenting excitement among old customers
and history buffs and turning the money-
raising mechanism into its own form of
marketing campaign. And the $477,000
they raised through Wefunder helped
attract 40 equity investors who paid
$32,500 per share. While they were scram-
bling to raise money, though, the landlord
was agressively marketing the space to other
prospective tenants, Brooklyn restaurateurs
Andrew Tarlow and Noah Bernamoff
among them. The biggest scare for Frizell
and Schneider came when they bumped
into someone surveying the space one day
with actual blueprints for a medical-
marijuana dispensary in hand. “We were
like, Oh God, the clock is ticking here,” says
Frizell. “We have to put this together.”
Finally, funding target met and lease
signed, the partners got to work on restora-
tion (new, Landmarks Preservation
Commission-sanctioned additions: marble
high-tops at the bar, Venetian-plaster ceil-
ing, William Morris wallcoverings). And
they continued the historical research, com-
piling oral histories of descendants of past
owners, former employees, and new inves-
tors. Frizell describes the restaurant’s back-
ers as “a real mixed bag, and it’s great.” They
include Elizabeth Warren’s digital-media
director, Joe Rospars, and his wife, Georgia,
who live in Fort Greene. “They were the first
to contact us,” says Frizell. Then came a
painter friend of his named Beau Stanton,
whose work will hang in the Sunken Harbor
Club; children’s-book author Tad Hills,
whose seriesDuck & Gooseis all the rage
among the preschool set; cocktail-world
royalty like writer David Wondrich and
entrepreneur Greg Boehm; and, of course,
assorted relatives, high-school classmates,
and regulars from the trio’s others spots,
including actor Michael Shannon, who
thought it would be cool to keep the 21-foot
Arby’s sign hanging outside as a memento
(request denied). Young and old, famous
and not, family and stranger, they all share
the dream of helping launch Brooklyn’s old-
est new restaurant—and thanks to the phe-
nomenon of crowdfunding, the feeling that
it belongs to all of them.
372 Fulton St., Downtown Brooklyn. PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF RICHARD TOLLNER (VINTAGE); MELISSA HOM/NEW YORK MAGAZINE (MATCHBOOKS)