Lundy's in Sheepshead Bay was the favorite restaurant of Mimi Sheraton's family. The huge California mission-style establishment on Emmons Avenue was probably the most popular restaurant in all of Brooklyn. Sheraton's fondest memories, however, were of the place as it was in her childhood in the late 1920s and early '30s, a listing dining room in a small white house, the most notable of the many seafood shacks on the piers jutting over the water. She remembers snowy white linen tablecloths, huge rolled napkins and white coats worn by courtly, courteous black waiters. Her father would table hop or go up to the clam bar to schmooze with friends who gathered there. According to a story on the restaurant and its founder that ran in Newsday in 1989, Lundy's served alcohol despite Prohibition which might account in part for its great success in that decade.
Sheepshead Bay had been a place to fish, duck hunt or buy fresh seafood since the mid-19th century. It had a racetrack back then. Big spenders and their families stayed at resort hotels or in stately Victorians on Millionaires Row. Villepigue's and Tappen's both still around in 1946, had been the premier seafood palaces in the olden days. By the 1920s, the racetrack and the millionaires had gone and Sheepshead Bay was largely an Irish, Italian and Jewish residential neighborhood.
In the early 1930s all of the businesses on the piers, including Lundy's, were forced to move when the WPA undertook a major renovation of the crumbling docks. In 1934 Irving Lundy reopened on the site of the old Bayside Hotel in a building that he intended to be the largest single structure restaurant in the world. By then Lundy's had become the place to go in Sheepshead Bay for a family Sunday dinner or to celebrate a special occasion. The new restaurant, inspired by the buildings Lundy had seen in California, occupied a city block, was two-stories high and sat 2,700 diners at a time. The roof was red tile, the walls sand-colored stucco. Lundy put his initials. F.W.I. L for Frederick William Irving Lundy, and the family coat of arms over the doorway. Lundy had the builders embed crushed clam shells into the cement for luck. The interior had arched ceilings, stained glass windows and wrought-iron grillwork. There were two kitchens, multiple dining areas, a patio, a clam bar, and a liquor bar. Men in pinstripe suits and ladies with hats and furs would jam the place at peak hours.. Lundy's drew an ethnic cross-section of Brooklynites: Irish, Germans and Italians as well as the upwardly mobile Jews of Midwood, Flatbush and Borough Park.
There wasn't much courtly or courteous about Lundy's at its height of popularity. Elliot Willensky wrote of the roar of a thousand conversations and the sometimes interminable wait for service. Nick Viorst wrote that it was "an exercise in patience and intimidation." The restaurant had no maitre d's and took no reservations. People, who usually arrived in groups, elbowed their way through the crowded restaurant to find a table where the diners were eating dessert. They would hover and glare until the table was relinquished. Sometimes when a table was vacated, it would set off a mad scramble. At times fistfights broke out.
Getting a table was only half the battle. While Lundy instructed his waiters to develop a personal relationship with regulars like the Solomons, making them feel like big shots, it could be a different story for the occasional visitor, at least in later decades. After finally finding a table, the party might have a long wait before a waiter showed up with menus. When the waiter eventually got around to handing the diners the elaborate and somewhat unusual menu, he often would return before anyone had had a chance to study it. If the patrons weren't ready to shout their order over the din, it might be a long time before they saw him again. Then it might be another long wait before the food came. But most felt it was worth it. The food was fresh and arrived steaming hot and by all accounts it was excellent. The portions were generous, the prices reasonable. For all the complaints, the place had the festive atmosphere of a communal event with a certain ritual aspect such as the lobster bib, said to be a Lundy's invention, fingerbowls at the end of the meal and the visit to the oyster bar to swallow raw littlenecks.
Lundy hired only African-American waiters and busboys well into the poswar era. At peak time he had 200 employees working the floor. Many of them formerly had worked as grooms at the racetrack or as Pullman porters. In the summer he brought in college students from Black colleges down south. Viorst noted that working at Lundy's was a tough job for the waiters who had to keep track of many tables while transporting steaming hot trays of food through the massive, non air-conditioned dining rooms. They sweated so much they changed their crisp white jackets several times during the course of a workday. Irving Lundy was a perfectionist and eccentric with a short fuse, Occasionally physical altercations took place in the kitchen between Lundy family members and their employees. He kept the unions out of his restaurant but he paid his employees well.
Like most patrons, Sheraton's family, the Solomons, usually ordered the shore dinner, which was copied from Villepigues where it was said to have been first assembled for Diamond Jim Brady in the Gilded Age. It started with a choice of soup (usually the clam chowder), shrimp, clam, oyster or crab cocktail, followed by steamers that had been dunked in their own briny broth and then into melted butter, half a lobster with the meat picked from the shells, half a chicken, corn on the cob with more butter, and baskets of miniature, Southern-style flaky biscuits. Sheraton remembers the table holding bowls of slim French fries, relish dishes of cole slaw, and pitchers of iced tea. She insists that the well-remembered "blueberry pie" actually was huckleberry.
Sometimes the Solomons ordered watermelon instead of pie for dessert. If they were in the mood for “something different” the main course might be crab meat, lobster or shrimp au gratin under a golden brown cheese and cream sauce or a gold-pink sherry, egg and cream Newburg sauce. The Solomons loved Lundy's so much that Joseph Solomon sometimes stopped in on his way home from work to pick up a basket of soft-shelled clams to bring home as a surprise for the family.
Irving Lundy was a colorful character in his own right, born into an old Brooklyn family, a man about town in his youth and then a recluse who lived with is male lover next to the the restaurant. He was reputed to be the richest man in Brooklyn.
Here is the landmarked building in a relatively recent photograph. The original restaurant closed in 1979, two years after Lundy's death. The '70s were a bad decade for the Lundy family and the restaurant with several violent robberies, physical assaults on Irving and his family members, the murder of his sister and brother-in-law, and the embezzlement of $12-million of his fortune. A recent smaller reincarnation of Lundy's in the same building closed in 2007 after ten years of operation.. The building is currently vacant as developers and preservationists battle over its fate.