THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 11
PHOTOGRAPH BY HEAMI LEE FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Gage & Tollner
372 Fulton St., Brooklyn
The last time Gage & Tollner was fea-
tured in this magazine, it had been open
for fifty-two years. That was in 1931.
The management at the time estimated
that John Anderson, an oyster-fry cook
who had recently died, shucked sixty-six
million oysters in his forty-nine-year
career—he was on staff when the place
opened, in 1879. “Old customers are
always coming in again after absences
of years, and getting emotional at sight
of the same ancient mahogany tables,
deep with wax, the red Turkey carpet,
the dim, mirrored walls,” the story said.
This nostalgia continued for another
seven decades, until 2004, when Gage &
Tollner, named for its original owners,
finally went out of business. For a few
years, the downtown-Brooklyn address
was occupied by a TGI Fridays, followed
by an Arby’s and a series of discount re-
tailers. But a 1975 landmark designation
meant that, though some of those tenants
covered up the dim, mirrored walls, they
remained intact. In 2019, Sohui Kim and
Ben Schneider, the married couple behind
the Good Fork, in Red Hook, and Insa, in
Gowanus, along with St. John Frizell, of
Red Hook’s Fort Defiance, restored them
to their former glory, with a fresh plas-
tering of William Morris wallpaper. In
2021, after some COVID-related setbacks,
Gage & Tollner 2.0 débuted, and the nos-
talgia picked up where it left off. What’s a
twenty-odd-year wait to go home again?
In William Styron’s 1979 novel,
“Sophie’s Choice,” set in the forties, the
narrator, Stingo, dines at Gage & Tollner
“beneath gaslight on littleneck clams and
crabmeat imperial.” A few weeks ago, I
dined at Gage & Tollner on clams and
crabmeat, under light that was as ro-
mantic as gas, if decidedly electric. Now
as then, the restaurant is a chophouse,
specializing in oysters and other shellfish
on ice, wedge and Caesar salads, and
various cuts of beef, with sides includ-
ing creamed spinach and butter-roasted
hash browns, which come in the form
of an incredibly precise Hasselbacked
rectangle of golden-edged potato. My
crab was molded into a crisp, salty disk,
airy without skimping on sweet meat,
served with a tangle of frisée, a smear of
lemon aioli, and a soft-boiled egg.
The original place also offered items
like fried chicken and cornmeal frit-
ters, which is part of why, in 1988, the
celebrated Black Southern chef Edna
Lewis, then seventy-two, was brought in
to polish things up. Now Kim, the chef,
along with Adam Shepherd, has lovingly
re-created those dishes while ushering in
a new era by subtly incorporating flavors
from her own Korean American heritage:
my clams were “Kimsino,” with pats of
bacon-kimchi butter bubbling beneath
crispy bread crumbs.
That this is food begging for a Mar-
tini is borne out by the seven varieties
on the comprehensive list of classic
mixed drinks. (Frizzell is a historian
of cocktails.) A server recommended
the Perfect—gin with equal parts sweet
and dry vermouth, up with a twist—and
indeed it was, whetting my appetite for
butter-glossed Parker House rolls, for
luscious, Edna Lewis-inspired she-crab
soup, finished tableside with a splash of
sherry, and for broiled meat. The T-bone
sirloin and the bone-in rib eye are priced
by the ounce; $4.55 looks like a bargain
until you multiply it by twenty-four. A
juicy sixty-three-dollar veal chop, topped
with roasted-shallot-porcini verjus, is a
steal by comparison.
It’s genuinely difficult to save room
for dessert. One idea is to order nothing
but; the pastry chef Caroline Schiff ’s
menu could sustain its own establish-
ment. Start with a beguilingly creamy (yet
dairy-free) scoop of roasted-pineapple
sorbet, followed by a slice of coconut layer
cake whose daintiness belies the zing of
its lime curd and its cashew-pink-pep-
percorn brittle. Who needs steak when
there’s a confection as metaphorically
meaty as the Baked Alaska for Two?
Torched whorls of Swiss meringue give
way to fresh-mint, dark-chocolate, and
Amarena-cherry ice creams, layered like
archeological strata atop a bedrock of
crumbled chocolate cookie, a record of
the reimagined past. (Entrées $28-$64.)
—Hannah Goldfield
