24
HAPPENINGS
Ben Schneider, Sohui Kim and St. John Frizell at the restaurant. Photo by Sean Tice.
One of Brooklyn’s Oldest Restaurants
Comes Back to Life
story by CRAIG HUBERT
It was serendipitous. Ben Schneider, Sohui Kim, and
St. John Frizell, the teams behind Red Hook restaurant
The Good Fork and bar Fort Defiance respectively,
were hoping to open a small cocktail bar in Downtown
Brooklyn. A broker was showing them some spaces,
none of which fit what they wanted. At the end of their
tour, after a series of disappointments, the broker said,
“Oh, let me show you one more thing.”
The team walked across Fulton Street and into the
former home of Gage & Tollner. “When we walked in
that day it had been cleared out and you could see the
dining room for the first time in years,” said Frizell. “It
was a magical experience.”
Quickly, plans changed. What was going to be an
intimate, 30-seat cocktail bar became the revival of
Gage & Tollner, which seats 110, has two private dining
rooms, and space for a cocktail bar upstairs. It was
the beginning of a massive undertaking. The plan is to
open by the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020.
In operation from 1892 to 2004, the restaurant was
the result of a partnership between Charles M. Gage
and Eugene Tollner. After running the restaurant
for nearly 40 years, the pair sold in 1911, the first in a
series of transfers of ownership. It was designated by
the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1975, one of
only a handful of interiors of restaurants or bars designated
in the city, and the only one outside Manhattan.
“With 125 years as a restaurant, that’s a lot of history,”
says Kim. As the chef, she is thinking about how to
structure the menu so it both reflects Gage & Tollner’s
abundent past while updating it for modern times. “It’s
dealing with people’s memory of the place and it’s all
very sensitive.” She has been looking at old menus, she
says, and wants to make sure everything is accessible
and familiar. “I feel like the ghost of Edna Lewis is looking
over me,” she adds, referring to the famed chef who
ran the kitchen at Gage & Tollner during a brief period
in the 1980s. (One of the rooms upstairs will be named
after her.)
History has become an important part of the reopening
of Gage & Tollner. Regulars and former employees have
been stopping by the restaurant during construction,
regaling the new operators with stories from the past.
They even heard from an actress on Netflix’s “Orange is
the New Black,” who used to play violin in the restaurant
for customers. Hopefully, they say, all of this will be compiled
into an oral history of the restaurant, of which the
reopening is just the next chapter.