Lundy's

For more than five decades, F.W.I.L. Lundy's Restaurant of Sheepshead Bay was an institution of Brooklyn life, as essential to defining the borough as the Bridge and the Dodgers. When the restaurant reopened in late 1995 after a hiatus of 16 years, residents greeted it as if a long-lost family member had come home. For thousands of people, Lundy's was their own personal restaurant, a place where they knew the waiters -- and the waiters knew them -- by name and where dining was always...
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For more than five decades, F.W.I.L. Lundy's Restaurant of Sheepshead Bay was an institution of Brooklyn life, as essential to defining the borough as the Bridge and the Dodgers. When the restaurant reopened in late 1995 after a hiatus of 16 years, residents greeted it as if a long-lost family member had come home. For thousands of people, Lundy's was their own personal restaurant, a place where they knew the waiters -- and the waiters knew them -- by name and where dining was always an event, an experience to be treasured. In its heyday it seated 2,800 and today, with room for a mere 800 patrons, it's still no little restaurant. Then and now, Lundy's served a distinguished American cuisine, with generous portions of fresh seafood -- lobsters, clams, oysters -- perfectly cooked; fluffy biscuits; and well-filled fruit pies. It reminded Brooklyn's immigrant community of the plenty that was possible in America, and allowed industrial tycoons and working-class families to dine together. Through his provocative essays, illustrated by distinctive historical photographs, Robert Cornfield celebrates the vibrantly revitalized Lundy's while breathing life into the old one. He conjures up images of rooms full of women in hats and fur pieces and men in pinstriped suits, all sipping cocktails while requesting more of those incomparably flaky biscuits. Lundy's diners past and present share their memories of the grand occasion of eating there, and Kathy Gunst's recipes allow cooks to reproduce the nostaligc seafood chowders and bisques, entrees from land and sea, sides such as creamed spinach and buttermilk onion rings, and those fabulous Lundy's desserts: Blueberry pie, cheesecake and rice pudding. When Lundy's closed, says one patron, it "became the the Brooklyn Dodgers of restaurants, but unlike Ebbets Field and the Dodgers, it did come back."