Gage & Tollner – Brooklyn's Gilded Age dining room, reborn

On Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, Gage & Tollner occupies the same dining room it moved into in 1892, eleven years after Charles M. Gage opened a modest eating house nearby and took on a cigar salesman named Eugene Tollner as his partner. The move placed the restaurant in the thick of Brooklyn's civic and entertainment district, and for generations it fed the judges, politicians and Brooklyn Academy of Music audiences who filled Borough Hall's orbit. After 125 years in business, Gage & Tollner served its last meal on Valentine's Day 2004; the landmarked room then spent over a decade as a TGI Fridays and later an Arby's before standing empty. In 2018, chef Sohui Kim, her husband Ben Schneider and St. John Frizell began raising money to bring it back, and the oyster and chop house reopened on 15 April 2021 beneath the same brass chandeliers that have burned gas and electricity since 1888. It is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, its raw bar, dry-aged steaks and she-crab soup carrying the Gilded Age name into a third century.

01The room and the setting

The main dining room runs ninety by twenty-five feet, lit by thirty-six brass fixtures built for dual gas-and-electric use when they were installed in 1888, with mahogany tables, cherry-wood-framed mirrors running the length of the walls and panels of burgundy Lincrusta-Walton covering - the whole room said to have been modelled on a Pullman railroad dining car. When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the interior in 1975, it became only the third interior landmark in the city, after the New York Public Library and Grant's Tomb.

Upstairs, past the main room, the Sunken Harbor Club occupies the second floor - an intimate hideaway serving tropical cocktails and small plates, a deliberate counterpoint to the Victorian grandeur below.

02The chef

Executive chef and partner Sohui Kim trained under Dan Barber at Blue Hill and Peter Hoffman at Savoy before opening The Good Fork with her husband, Ben Schneider, in Red Hook in 2006, followed by the Korean barbecue and karaoke restaurant Insa in Gowanus in 2015. Both concepts earned Kim James Beard Foundation nominations for Best Chef: New York, as a semifinalist in 2019 for Insa and again in 2023 for Gage & Tollner.

Insider tip

Dinner nightly; weekend brunch; book ahead for groups of 8–10.

At Gage & Tollner, Kim and her partners rebuilt the kitchen around the restaurant's own archives rather than inventing a new identity from scratch, and by 2022 the comeback was named one of Bon Appétit's 50 Best New Restaurants.

03The cooking

The kitchen still serves the dish that made the dining room famous twice over: she-crab soup, the blue-crab bisque most associated with chef Edna Lewis, who cooked here in the late 1980s and early '90s, today thickened without roux and finished with cream, crab roe and sherry.

Clam belly broil - soft clam bellies baked under compound butter and showered with fried sourdough crumbs - has been a fixture of the menu since 1944, while Clams Kimsino, bathed in bacon and kimchi butter, is chef Kim's own nod to her Korean heritage, worked into the house's classic steamed-clam formula.

04What to order

Start at the raw bar with East Coast oysters, clams on the half shell or caviar with buckwheat blini, then move to hen-of-the-woods mushrooms with black garlic aioli, or roasted bone marrow. Among the mains, split lobster broiled in the shell with beurre fondue and cornmeal fritters and a surf-and-turf of half lobster and bavette steak are kitchen signatures, alongside straightforward fried chicken with kale slaw.

Steaks and chops come à la carte - T-bone sirloin, bone-in ribeye, NY strip or veal chop - and the pork shoulder rib roast for two is served with winter fruit mostarda. Finish with the coconut layer cake, its lime curd and cashew-pink-peppercorn brittle, or a baked Alaska.

05Wine and drinks

The cocktail list below stays close to the classics, while upstairs the Sunken Harbor Club turns to rum and tiki styles instead. Corkage is charged at $45 a bottle for up to three standard 750ml bottles, with no outside spirits permitted, and a daily happy hour - Monday to Friday from 5 to 6pm, weekends from 3 to 5pm - brings the raw bar and classic martinis within easier reach.

06The neighbourhood and booking

Gage & Tollner sits close to both Jay Street–MetroTech and Borough Hall stations, putting several subway lines within a short walk of Fulton Street. Dinner runs Monday to Friday from 5 to 10pm and weekends from 11am to 10pm, with Saturday and Sunday brunch served from 11am to 2.45pm and an interim menu bridging the gap until 5pm, as published on the restaurant's own site in October 2026; parties of eight to ten must book the prix-fixe family-style menu in advance by email.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.