A Proper British Lunch in Brooklyn
"Well, another crazy day. You'll drink the night away."
When London’s St. John Restaurant Came to Cobble Hill
When London’s famed restaurant St. John announced on Instagram that they would be taking over Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar for a one-night only dinner, tickets for the event (which cost around $280 per person and included an 8-course dinner, a welcome cocktail, tax, and gratuity) instantly sold out.
Chef Fergus Henderson opened St. John in London’s Smithfield district in 1994 with his business partner Trevor Gulliver, bucking against British fine-dining trends by pioneering nose-to-tail cooking and serving often overlooked off-cuts of meat and offal with a contemporary mindset that honored the culinary past. Henderson’s signature dish of roasted bone marrow served simply with toasted sourdough bread, parsley salad, and sel gris inspired chefs around the world, and his 1999 cookbook, Nose to Tail Eating, remains a modern classic.
On paper, Long Island Bar, run by co-owners Toby Cecchini and Joel Tompkins, might seem like an unlikely destination for such an in-demand restaurant to hang its hat for the night, especially considering the number of restaurants in New York City who would kill for such an opportunity. But if you’ve ever been to L.I.B. and waited among those three-deep at the bar for a seat to open up then you know it’s a beloved classic as well.
As it turns out, a local representative of the New York outpost of Drake's, the noted British menswear haberdasher founded in 1977 by Michael Drake, was quite taken with the historic Brooklyn bar and thought it might be a perfect (and admittedly “cheeky”) location to commemorate the launch of St. John by Drake’s, a capsule collection of clothing and accessories inspired by two cult British brands born in East London.
“I think there’s a natural symbiosis and mentality between the two restaurants,” said Toby Cecchini in an interview with Drake’s Diary. “You know what it is that you do well, and you just do it. We trust our taste.”
Cecchini also wrote a fascinating origin story of Long Island Bar for Drake’s which I encourage you to bookmark or stop what you’re doing to read this very moment. I’m fortunate that I get to spend a lot of time at Long Island Bar and share late-night sips of vermouth over dinner with Toby in the Lombardi Room on a regular basis, but reading this made me miss his byline and writing even more. (And Joel and Toby, please, please, please, consider a one-night-only “Coach Peaches” revival sometime soon.)
“During the summer, I had been scraping down and resurfacing the old mahogany bartop one day, when I noticed a figure in the open window to my right who’d been watching me work. I looked up into his grizzled expression and he shouted, “Keep it old!” That became our watch-cry to one another then for the duration of the buildout. When we decided to take down the old neon signs on the exterior and have them redone, people in the neighborhood and on archivist websites bemoaned the loss of yet another old classic storefront. Conversely, there was joy in the realm when we had them remounted and they first snapped back into their dazzling illumination, the colors morphed where the craftsmen united the old tubing with new.”
—Toby Cecchini, “The Epic Tale Behind New York’s The Long Island Bar”