New York Post, Friday, March 13, 2020
nypost.com
By HANA R. ALBERTS
A
ctress Meryl Streep.
Banker David Rockefeller.
Painter Robert Rauschen-
berg.
Waiter Mark Bermudez can rat-
tle off dozens of celebrities he
served during 26 years working
at legendary Brooklyn restaurant
Gage & Tollner.
“Jack Nicholson came in with
Mike Nichols because they were
filming ‘Heartburn’ in Prospect
Park,” re-
called Ber-
mudez, a
65-year-old
Bushwick
resident
who has
done stints
at Babbo
and Baltha-
zar.
“[Nichol-
son] asked,
‘What can
you get
here?’ and I
said, ‘You
can get
anything
we have.’ I
was a
smartass back then.”
His was the kind of good-na-
tured hubris that came from dec-
ades at a culinary and cultural in-
stitution where owners, employ-
ees and regulars acted like a
tight-knit family.
Dating to 1879, Gage & Tollner
started out as a chophouse at 372
Fulton St. in Downtown Brook-
lyn known for its seafood and
meat, luring customers from pol-
iticians and starlets to the literati
and mobsters. Powerbrokers sat
beneath glittering chandeliers in
a long room lined with elegant
cherry-wood paneling and
arched mirrors. A century later,
the historic decor — brass Victo-
rian hat hooks included — was
designated the city’s third-ever
interior landmark, after the New
York Public Library and Grant’s
Tomb. By some measures, it was
the eighth-oldest restaurant in
the city, opened eight years be-
fore Peter Luger.
But after Gage & Tollner shut-
tered in 2004, its halls were be-
smirched by inglorious tenants:
Arby’s, TGI Friday’s and a cos-
tume jewelry shop called Ladies
and Gents among them.
Now a trio of trendy restaura-
teurs — Sohui Kim, Ben Schnei-
der and St. John Frizell — in ad-
dition to hundreds of investors
who pledged money via a crowd-
funding campaign have restored
the restaurant to its former glory.
Gage & Tollner reopens on Sun-day with an old-school cocktail
list and a 21st-century menu of
throwback dishes.T
he road to resurrection has
been long, as legacies of the
restaurant’s earlier iterations
loom large. When Charles Gage
and Eugene Tollner debuted an
oyster eatery near the court-
houses and government offices
where many regulars worked, it
was four years before the Brook-
lyn Bridge was complete and al-
most a dec-
ade before
Kings
County
joined the
other bor-
oughs to
form what
we now call
New York
City.
During
the early
20th cen-
tury, own-
ers re-
mained so
devoted to
the busi-
ness that
one — Al-
exander Ingalls, who purchased
Gage & Tollner in 1911 — died in
the dining room. Tollner himself,
who stayed on staff even after the
sale, dropped dead on his way to
the restaurant in 1935, the night
before his 86th birthday.
The next family to run Gage &
Tollner was committed to carry-
ing the torch. Wine-business heir
Seth Bradford Dewey was in-
spired to purchase Gage & Toll-
ner after he took a date there
during the 1910s and left his wal-
let at home, according to a report
in Beverage Retailer Weekly.
He asked a manager if he could
return to settle his bill the fol-
lowing day and leave his gold
watch as collateral. Gage, who
was still acting as host at the
time, scoffed at the request and
told Dewey to keep it: “You will
need it to know when to go
home. Besides, it may surprise
you to know that I kissed your
sweetheart before you ever did.
Her dad used to bring her in here
when she was just a little tot.”
“From then on,” the Beverage
Retailer Weekly reported, “the
restaurant had two more steady
customers” — and, eventually, a
new owner.
Dewey operated the restaurant
until his death. Management
later passed to his son Ed and
Ed’s wife, Trudy. Ed and Trudy’s
grandson, Torin Dewey, has vivid
memories of working as a runner
on a packed New Year’s Eve,scarfing down filet mignon and
chocolate mousse in the kitchen
and kiddie high jinks in his
grandparents’ high-ceilinged
quarters above the restaurant.
“My grandfather would get up
at 5 in the morning. We would
gather all the day-old bread and
the better portions of it he would
distribute to the needy. We
would go to the Fulton Fish Mar-
ket,” said Torin, now 55 and a
Boulder, Colo.-based chemist.
“I would try the oysters Rocke-
feller and the traditional wedge
salad. That had my grand-
mother’s blue-cheese dressing. It
was the same dressing we had
upstairs in the apartment, so that
was really cool.”
Torin inherited a treasure-trove of Gage & Tollner swag —
from matchbooks (which adver-
tised the space had that rare
amenity: air-conditioning) to
T-shirts from the running club Ed
led (which new pastry chef Caro-
line Schiff, a marathoner, plans to
revive) — and many will eventu-
ally be on display in the re-
opened restaurant.
“We heard stories all the time,”
said Torin. “ ‘Muhammad Ali
came by the restaurant last
week,’ or whatever. The old
mayor, Ed Koch, was a regular.”
Other boldfaced patrons in-
cluded Paul Newman and Joanne
Woodward, Sigourney Weaver,
Mae West, Rex Harrison, Truman
Capote and Martin Scorsese.
Brooklyn Dodgers players re-united there, as did multiple gen-
erations of police commission-
ers. It teemed with Brooklyn pol-
iticians, judges and lawyers from
Al Sharpton to David Dinkins —
especially during lunch hour.
“Think of the Gilded Age. It was
like walking back in time, into the
19th century. You had 18-foot-high
mirrors on both sides which am-
plified a small space into a
greater space. It was opulent,”
Bermudez said. “This is what
Gage & Tollner was, but it was
egalitarian, everyone could go.”I
ndeed, locals from Brooklyn
Heights and other neighbor-
hoods sat cheek by jowl with
the borough’s bigwigs. Delores
Connors, 48, and husband Matt-Return of the fabled tables
steaking their claim: Restau-
rateurs (from left) Ben Schneider, Sohui
Kim and St. John Frizell have revived the
old Fulton Street eatery Gage & Tollner.Brooklyn Historical SocietyAfter ending 125-yr. run in ’04, B’klyn’s Gage & Tollner restaurant is reopening
Lizzie Munro