Penny – a seafood counter named for a grandfather, above Claud

Penny occupies the bright upstairs room above Claud, the East Village wine bar that chef Joshua Pinsky and owner Chase Sinzer opened in 2022, and since March 2024 it has turned that floor into one of downtown Manhattan's most closely watched seafood counters. It is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, recognition for a kitchen built almost entirely around what the tide and the day boat bring in — oysters, lobster, crudo, whole fish — served without ceremony at a long marble bar. The restaurant is named, fittingly, after Pinsky's grandfather Benny Pinsky, whose family nickname was Penny. It arrived already trailing attention: the restaurant was included on the New York Times's 2024 list of its staff's 50 favourite American restaurants, and Esquire placed it twenty-third on its Leading New Restaurants list that same year. For a kitchen barely two years old, that is a fast, assured start.

01The room and the setting

Before Penny existed, the second floor at 90 East 10th Street sat empty for nearly two years, a leftover outpost of a salt cave that waited above Claud until Sinzer and Pinsky finally accepted their landlord's offer of the space. They brought back Ian Chapin of the Philadelphia studio Edsel Co., who had designed Claud, to draw a room that reads as the opposite of the cellar-dark bistro beneath it: floor-to-ceiling windows, a continuous run of pale marble, and navy-blue stools built for long nights at the counter.

Nearly every seat in the house sits at that counter. The long marble bar puts diners front row to watch chefs pluck oysters from ice and wrangle live lobsters, with a smaller kitchen counter running in the same stone and a standing rail by the window for anyone who only wants a glass of something cold and a dozen oysters on their way past 10th Street.

02The chef

Pinsky's cooking has its roots in one of the city's most exacting kitchens: he first made his name as sous chef under Sean Gray at the original, closet-sized Momofuku Ko on First Avenue, before following the restaurant to its later incarnation on Extra Place. Penny is his and Sinzer's sophomore project, built on the reputation the pair earned with Claud.

Insider tip

Walk-ins preferred; open every night 5–10:30pm; dinner only.

The name is personal rather than clever. Claud took its name from a nickname for Sinzer's mother, and Penny was named, just as directly, after Pinsky's grandfather, Benny Pinsky, whose own nickname was Penny — a detail that sits behind the sesame brioche, itself an echo of the challah on his family's holiday table.

03The cooking

Almost every savoury dish on Penny's menu involves seafood in some form, including the ones that sound otherwise — the sesame brioche, and a seasonal white asparagus salad finished with bagna cauda and a dusting of Parmesan. Pinsky works from little more than a binchotan grill and a refrigerator, and that restraint shows in everything that leaves the kitchen.

Elsewhere on the counter: baked razor clams and stuffed squid sit among the hot dishes, while an octopus and potato salad brings a Portuguese inflection to the raw-bar format. The approach throughout favours a handful of good ingredients handled plainly rather than composed plates.

04What to order

Start with the sesame brioche — a warm, seeded loaf with whipped butter, worth the small supplement for a scattering of Cantabrian anchovies on the side. The stuffed squid arrives in a chili-inflected sauce that all but demands a second round of bread to mop up what's left in the bowl.

For the full spread, order an Ice Box, Penny's answer to the seafood tower: a custom powder-coated box built around oysters, clams, shrimp cocktail and crudo, with cocktail sauce, a celery-flecked mignonette and garlic aioli on the side.

05Wine and drinks

Sinzer turned Claud into one of the East Village's more serious wine addresses, and at Penny he worked with a wine director to build a cellar that runs deep in Burgundy and Champagne across a list of some 6,000 bottles — unusually large for what is, in format, a casual counter.

06When to go and booking

Penny runs mostly on walk-ins. Reservations are limited, and arriving close to opening remains the surest way to a seat at the counter, particularly for parties of four looking for the corner of the bar.

As of October 2026, the restaurant's own site listed service every night from 5pm to 10:30pm, dinner only. Outside the Midtown belt of formal fine-dining seafood rooms, Penny's price point sits at the upper end of casual without tipping into ceremony — closer to a neighbourhood counter than a special-occasion dining room, even as the bill can climb with wine.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.