The plastic sign, about 10 feet long with A-R-B-Y-’S spelled vertically, lay on its side by a ladder and some construction tools.
“Do you want it?” Sohui Kim, the chef and an owner of the Brooklyn restaurants the Good Fork and Insa, asked a visitor. “You can have it.”
That made it official: Gage & Tollner, one of the most storied restaurants in New York food history, is finally reopening on March 15. Workers hoisted a new Gage & Tollner sign into place, marking the end of a string of businesses, including an Arby’s franchise, that opened in this Brooklyn space on Fulton Street after the dining institution closed in 2004.
In the restaurant’s newly modernized kitchen, Ms. Kim and the chef de cuisine, Adam Shepard, considered whether some newly arrived cuts of meat were Gage-worthy. Upstairs, in private halls recently christened the Edna Lewis Room and the Dewey Room, after a former Gage chef and a former owner, applicants waited in hopes of landing a position.
Finding the right staff and writing the right menu have been consuming concerns for Ms. Kim and her partners Ben Schneider — Ms. Kim’s husband and co-owner of the Good Fork and Insa — and St. John Frizell, the owner of the Red Hook, Brooklyn, bar Fort Defiance.
“Right now, we’re getting a lot of feedback from the Gage & Tollner superfans,” Mr. Frizell said. “But really that’s going to be less than 5 percent of our audience, so we’re going to have to play to a bigger crowd.”
They want to honor the resurrected restaurant’s past as a destination for seafood and meat, while simultaneously appealing to contemporary tastes and expectations. “When people talk about the culinary memories,” Ms. Kim said, “they talk about the space, how they felt, the lights, the majesty of being in the room. Then you ask them what they had for dinner, and they don’t remember.”
Gage & Tollner, named for the restaurateurs Charles Gage and Eugene Tollner, opened in 1879, and moved to its present location in 1892. As Brooklyn’s answer to Delmonico’s, the restaurant was an elegantly appointed dining temple that served seafood, chops and steaks, and it attracted celebrities like Mae West, Lillian Russell, Jimmy Durante and members of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The handful of owners who succeeded the originals were careful to preserve its Victorian atmosphere, though that became less of a choice than an obligation when the interior was declared a landmark in 1975.
Despite some cosmetic changes, the new interior won’t look too different. As stewards of dining history, the current owners had to approve every change and fix with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, including repair work on the original wooden revolving door; the laying of new floors (stained red oak downstairs, white oak upstairs); the replacement of the upholstered wall panels; the repair of the crumbling portico; and the polishing of the many brass chandeliers (a three-week process), which once dispensed both gas and electrical light. All told, restoration, infrastructure and equipment costs have totaled roughly $2 million.
The food, too, will be a mix of the familiar and the innovative. There will be no second act for crab meat Virginia, a staple that wasn’t much more than crab and butter. But diners will get a soft-shell clam belly broil made with Ipswich clams, a popular menu item in its day.
Ms. Kim also wanted to serve a true mutton chop — the meat comes from Thistle Creek Farms in Pennsylvania. “I want it to be mutton,” she said. “I think there are some restaurants who are serving lamb — wink, wink. We won’t serve lamb and call it mutton.”
There will also be crab cakes, a shrimp cocktail, housemade Parker House rolls, shrimp scampi with gnudi, four different cuts of steak and a raw bar. Ms. Kim plans to keep it simple: “It’s all about getting amazing ingredients,” she said.
Other dishes will be completely new. Instead of a chicken potpie, Mr. Shepard has fashioned a pork potpie with a light pâte brisée dough and a lighter gravy. Mr. Shepard is not your average chef de cuisine. His long résumé includes Lunetta, Union Pacific and Tavern on the Green. When he read about the Gage project, he reached out to Ms. Kim.
The upstairs bar, called the Sunken Harbor Club, will serve nine cocktails that Mr. Frizell called “pre-tiki classics,” like the Singapore Sling and the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. The bar was designed by Mr. Frizell and Mr. Schneider, and built by Mr. Schneider; its angled wooden ceiling and walls look like the galley of a ship.
All of the 25 cocktails on the downstairs opening menu are drawn from the original Gage cocktail list, with the exception of a Negroni, an agave drink (tequila and mezcal not being popular drinks during Gage’s heyday) and a dirty martini.
That martini will be served not in the currently fashionable coupe, but in a traditional martini glass. “I like the straight-sided glass,” Mr. Frizell said. “Bring ’em back!”
Gage & Tollner 372 Fulton Street, 347-689-3677, gageandtollner.com
