St John Frizell: 00:02
Yeah, it just seemed to me just to represent this beautiful thing that was then, you know, kind of forgotten. And then later disgraced and now here and now here it was again, it was like uncovering like a temple in the jungle that had been covered in vines and stuff. And you're just kinda peeling off the layers of it and then all of a sudden there it is.
Ofer Cohen: 00:21
That temple covered in vines is Gage and Tollner. The historic restaurant on Fulton street in Downtown Brooklyn, which shut its doors back in 2004. Gage and Tollner first opened in 1879. Gage and Tollner was one of New York city's earliest landmarked interiors. Its wood details, mirrors and historic gas lamps have remain intact. Now Gage and Tollner has a team of new owners and around 200 small investors from a crowdfunding campaign. The historic restoration project is in its final stages and the restaurant is set to open in the next few months. The three restaurateurs, breathing new life into Gage and Tollner pioneer, the Brooklyn foodie scene and own successful restaurants in Brooklyn. Ben Schneider and chef. Sohui Kim are the husband and wife team behind Good Fork in Red Hook and Insa in Gowanus. They're are opening Gage and Tollner and it's upstairs cocktail lounge with their friends St John Frizell, food writer and bartender behind Red Hook's Fort Defiance. In our first episode of the season, I sat down with Ben and St John in our Hey BK studio. We are on, Gage and Tollner is coming back to Brooklyn. Hey guys, thanks for being here. They met at the burlesque show at a bar in Red Hook in 2002 way before Ikea came to Red Hook.
Ben Schnider: 01:36
We became fast friends and Sohui and I had just bought a rundown house in Red Hook and I was rebuilding it and we had an apartment in the downstairs and St John and his wife Linden became our tenants down there. And and we proceeded then to have good times for a long time and we did,plays back there that St John wrote. And that I starred in the backyard. Those dramas, these, these amazing plays that he wrote.
St John Frizell: 02:06
But with, you know,production values. We had like a full band. We had lights, we had sets, whatever the costumes,
Ben Schnider: 02:13
We sort of memorized our lines and we had a audience of up to a hundred people for each show. It's a big backyard. We just crammed everybody in and we did a pirate play called blow me down and then we did a cowboy play called saddle up and we had original songs. They were really quite phenomenal. Quite phenomenal.
Ofer Cohen: 02:33
I moved to Brooklyn in 2004, so I vividly remember when Good Fork open. Yeah. Because you know, moving to Brooklyn in the early two thousands from the city, that you definitely felt the lack of, the lack of good places to go out to eat.
Ben Schnider: 02:52
When we opened the Good Fork, you could really, it was like maybe 20 places in all of Brooklyn that were doing kind of inventive, sort of higher end food.
Ofer Cohen: 03:03
I don't think there were 20,
Ben Schnider: 03:04
Maybe not. No, you're right.
Ofer Cohen: 03:06
There was probably like six.
Ben Schnider: 03:07
Yeah. I mean, yeah, all of Brooklyn. And now there's like 20 in every neighborhood. And then St John had been talking about this idea for this sort of cafe bar and I actually helped you find that space.
St John Frizell: 03:20
Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. You actually saw the for rent sign that had been there for years. I was looking all around the neighborhood and you're like, you should call this number. This signs been up here forever.
Ofer Cohen: 03:31
Fort Defiance was modeled after the old day European style bars St John encountered during these travels in South America. Sohui was born in Korea and Ben most recently opened a restaurant and karaoke lounge inside in the Gowanus in 2015.
Ben Schnider: 03:46
We used drive to flushing all the time cause we craved, you know, Korean food and that experience. And so we're like, well there's none in South Brooklyn. Really of a scale, you know, with barbecue and all and the whole thing. And so that's how we came up with the idea for the inside and just built it.
Ofer Cohen: 04:03
From my perspective, you know, living in these neighborhoods. For the last 15 years, it was like a total game changer because, you know, just like the vibe, the family style, you can come with your kids, you can come for a date, the karaoke in the back. It was like such an institution and also one of the first establishments that kinda made Gowanus be taken a little bit more seriously on the foodie map.
Ben Schnider: 04:32
Yeah. It's great because it's really fun and we also have the karaoke rooms there and all that's fun and the bars is fun, but then the food is all homemade, so it's real tasty. But the working title for Insa before we came up with the name was Korean fun time place for celebration, which we actually still have on the menu like little spot.
Ofer Cohen: 04:56
The friends who embodied the Brooklyn spirit with great food and drinks lived through Superstorm Sandy that flooded red hook and brought the community together. But this is the first time they've truly worked together.
St John Frizell: 05:07
Well. I was, I was looking for a place to open in this neighborhood. I really fell in love. I really fell in love with the neighborhood. So my son goes to the international charter school of New York, which had, a campus on Willoughby street and one on Hanover. So I was there, you know, multiple times a week to drop them off and pick them up. It's the neighborhood I really was not that familiar with except, you know, by just passing through like everybody does. And so I really started to spend time here for the first time about five years ago. And I don't know, just fell in love with it. Like it's got just such energy and there's like, there's always something happening and it really feels like you're in a city, there's a lot of people on the sidewalk and it feels, it feels good. Um and there's not many places to eat or drink. So I started to look around for a place to open a small bar you know, tried to rope Ben into it and thought maybe we could go in together. And do some kind of a thing where I'm doing the drinks and they're doing the food. We started to look at properties and we are looking at one on Willoughby and it was a dump. And I was really discouraged. And the realtor said, well, let me show you one more thing I have around the corner. And she walked us right into Gage and Tollner, and it was the first time we had seen it when it wasn't a jewelry store or a clothing store or something. We had never been there to dine, but we both knew sort of the legend of the restaurant and had, you know, done research on its history. So when we walked in, I mean, but it was amazing. It's like, you know, as I'd say, it's like walking into a cathedral. It's like you just fall in love with the space instantly and recognized like the power that it has. It's, it's really very special.
Ofer Cohen: 06:52
Tell us a little bit about, you know, the history.
St John Frizell: 06:55
So Gage and Tollner opened a little bit down a Fulton street, what would be a Cadman Plaza now in 1879, it moved to its current location on Fulton street near the intersection of Jay street in 1889. And,it's, it's the third landmarked,interior in New York after the New York public library and Grant's tomb. So people recognize that it, that the interior has real historic significance and it's just absolutely beautiful when you walk in. So it was an operation from 1879 until 2004, so 125 years.
Ofer Cohen: 07:36
It's very interesting. Like 2004 was such a pivotal year in downtown Brooklyn. The rezoning was just passed. Downtown Brooklyn was just about to start a whole new trajectory. Any idea why closed?
Ben Schnider: 07:48
Well, you know, restaurants aren't like the real estate business. It's really a daily in and out and so, and there's, there's like the profit margin is very small and the overhead is very high. So you're not, you know,, it's not the same kind of business model. You can't wait for that now for the future, you could see the change on the horizon, but you gotta be on the horizon to make money in the restaurant business. You can't be waiting, you know, it was a great place still, but it was just a hard place to have a large scale restaurant at that time.
Ofer Cohen: 08:25
But it was a pretty big deal when they closed. Right?
St John Frizell: 08:27
I mean, yeah, it was, I mean, I think, it's just one of those things where, you know, people saw it in the paper and said, oh, I never went to Gage and Tollner, I kept meaning the go.
Ofer Cohen: 08:37
Nobody lived in Downtown Brooklyn at that point. I mean, that was before all the development came in. So there was no density.
St John Frizell: 08:42
Right. And after six o'clock, they just, they would roll up the sidewalks here and there just was nothing going on.
Ofer Cohen: 08:47
So essentially 15 years of remarkable transformation of a neighborhood you know, tens of thousands of people moving. That restaurant was waiting in a way. And that space was waiting because the space was really hard to do anything else with.
St John Frizell: 09:03
Well, so then the rest of the history after it closed in 2004, it became a TGI Friday's that was open for a couple of years and then it closed and it became an Arby's and it was an Arby's for about a year. Then it became a clothing store and then another clothing store. And then another clothing store. We just kind of went through a lot of tenants at that point. But when we found it, it was empty. It was vacant for the first time in a long time and it had been vacant for a couple of months. Yeah, you could totally, you could see the whole thing for the first time, you know, because when it was a clothing store, they put up these false walls in front of the interior, it has these beautiful arched mirrors and these chandelier's and the clothing stores had done their best to hide all of that. So they put up these, a false walls along the wall. So you couldn't see the mirrors. They put up a grid in the ceiling so that the chandelier's were kind of hid and it was like a, it was like seeing it for the first time. It was amazing.
Ofer Cohen: 10:03
You immediately fall in love with the space and the idea essentially? .
Ben Schnider: 10:07
I had been obsessed with the space had been never been there, set foot in there, but I somehow, like almost a decade before we saw it together, had learned about it. I don't remember how I learned about it, but I became really interested in it on a kind of romantic level in New York history. I was a young restaurant owner and I was like this Gage and Tollner thing. So I looked into it and I actually called Peter Ashkenazi, who was the owner before Joe and Peter was a customer of mine at the Good Fork and so in my reservation books, I found his phone number and I called him and I asked him about it and he said, you know, it's complicated. It's hard to do business there. The ownership is complicated right now and also you're not ready and he was right about all that. And so I kind of, it fell by the wayside and then 10 years later we walk in there. So I had a kind of a connection to it in that way. You knew about it too as a kind of a historian of food and drink, which St John really is. You know, you knew exactly what was going on.
St John Frizell: 11:19
Yeah, it just seemed to me just to represent you know, something in our culture, this beautiful thing that was then, you know, kind of forgotten. And then later disgraced and now here it was again, it was like uncovering like a temple in the jungle that had been covered in vines and stuff and you're just kind of peeling off the layers and then all of a sudden married his and you'd get this feeling of wonder about it. We got this idea on, when we first saw the space, we kind of fleshed it out on the back of the napkin on the ride back to Ben's house. We told Sohui, that instead of a little cocktail bar, we were opening 110 seat chophouse and she said...
Ben Schnider: 12:02
She said I sent you guys for a cup of milk and you came back with a cow.
St John Frizell: 12:09
You know what was going to be a project that was going to cost about $400,000 became you know, a multi million dollar project. We started looking around the Downtown Brooklyn partnership introduced us to a few venture capitalists. We kind of went round and round with them. In the meantime, the clock is ticking because the realtors are still aggressively showing this property. We know there are other restaurateurs interested and we had to do something. We were getting a lot of nos and so we needed to look for another way in. So we decided to take it right to the public. So we create a regulation, crowdfunding campaign, which is, you know, different from something like a Kickstarter in that, you know, instead of getting a tote bag it's a real investment and you're looking for a real return. So we started this thing in August of 2018. It was a covered in the New York times and,it was ultimately successful and we raised just shy of half a million dollars,through a revenue share loans,made by our investors and the investors come from largely from the neighborhood that the restaurants in,and the surrounding neighborhoods, which is as it should be.
Ofer Cohen: 13:28
Without even mentioning the word gentrification. It comes to mind, right? That there's an institution that was old, this Brooklyn that's completely changed in the last 15, 20 years. The neighborhood is a very different neighborhood. You come in with a new voice for food and, how did you even start thinking about what you're doing there?
Ben Schnider: 13:47
Well, I mean, speaking for, Sohui, who I'm sorry I couldn't be here today, but her food is really rooted in this kind of like great combination of simplicity and uniqueness which means sort of one foot in comfort food and one foot and fine dining is how I've always described it and using kind of global ingredients. But she has a great way of bringing love into the food and bringing out flavor in a way that's so satisfying. And if you think about the classic cuisine that a place like Gage is known for, you know, that food is begging for that kind of treatment and that's kind of what we're going to do. So, you know, we were excited by that food and to me a place like Gage and a menu like that, if done with heart, done with soul, it's fun and it's satisfying and it's a little bit of an antidote to this world we're all experiencing with our phones and, and just being glued to them all the time. It's like when you walk into a place like Gage and you're going to sit down and have dinner there, you're going to escape that for a minute. And I think that people are really craving that same dishes, applying some of the kind of seasonality and, I know talk about cliches, but the farm to table movement and just attention and care.
St John Frizell: 15:11
Farm to table, I mean in the 1890s everything was farm to table. I mean it's kind of like going back to, the you know, the roots of, of the restaurant. We're gonna try to get oysters as local as we can. We're getting our food as local as we can. This is the way that they used to do it. This is not, this is not a new idea.
Ben Schnider: 15:27
Right. And I think that for us too, you know, kind of because there's a long history to the restaurant, there's a lot to draw from and we are going to do some fun stuff like have a monthly probably historic special if you will in the in the food realm where we find that there's all these, the menu was vast back in the old days. And there's all these there's all these dishes that have bizarre names, like oysters, boys and barriers.
Ofer Cohen: 15:56
You always collected old the old menus?
St John Frizell: 16:00
Yeah, we've got menus going back to 1919 and actually we just got one yesterday that goes back to 1895. So it's amazing. I mean it's, and then you have to go back and look at what these dishes were and some of them are really hard to figure out like what is, you know potatoes Saratoga. We had to look that one up.
Ofer Cohen: 16:20
Well actually what is it?
St John Frizell: 16:21
Potato chips. So they were on the menu through, through 1919. I was happy to see them on the 1895 menu and then by the fifties they drop off the menu. Why? Probably because you could buy them on every corner. So it wasn't fancy anymore, but for awhile it was, you know, so they were on the menu.
Ben Schnider: 16:39
So you know, we'll have stuff like that. Some of it will be just be kind of guessing or making it up but it'll be a fun exercise to try and recreate some of those dishes or guessing what they might've been like. So there's going to be invention and creativity, but at the same time it's really about, you know, making an Oysters Rockefeller that is just like perfectly balanced and a lot of those simple dishes are just all about balance and ingredients and execution and technique. And that's what we're gonna do. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here and my principal as like the builder has been our basic thing is like, let's turn the lights down and serve are some good food because that's what it wants. That's what it is.
Ofer Cohen: 17:24
Right. So talking about the lights down, what do you guys envision the experience to be?
St John Frizell: 17:30
People who have been to the restaurant before will totally recognize it in its new incarnation. The idea is that the people who have been there before will feel like they're coming home. You know, they'll feel like nothing has changed. That even the things we do change that they'll remember them being there before, if you know what I mean. You know, what I'm trying to focus on is the experience when you first walk in the door, how do you feel? And we want people to feel really welcome and we want, everyone who walks in to feel that and if we can achieve that and if the food is good, we've got a great business. I mean, that's, that's sort of the goal.
Ofer Cohen: 18:13
Was it more formal back then than what you envisioned Gage and Tollner today should it be?
St John Frizell: 18:20
Yeah, it went through different periods. I feel like it kind of changed over time and it's level of formality. There are definitely at times when it was white tablecloths and very kind of a fine dining, but I think it started originally a little bit simpler than that you know, everyone who's been there in the past remembers the waiters. So the waiters were up to the 1960s or seventies, all black men in black tie with waistcoats and black blazers within insignia on the sleeves that indicate how long they had worked there with a bar meaning one year, a star meaning five and an Eagle, meaning 25 years. And there were men there who had two Eagles on their shoulders. So these were guys, these are guys, you know, we talked to the old manager, this guy John Simmons, who said that there was a guy working there, he was the manager in, in the sixties and seventies. There was a guy working there who had had two Eagles who fought in world war one. And it's like it's incredible, these guys would get a job there and just keep it forever. So, but they were very, you know, they presented this very kind of, you know, a dignified but, but also warm service. So it's like when people talk about the experience of dining there in the past, they talk about the food a little bit, but they really talk about the service and the room. So how to, you know, present a meal? So it's a special occasion. So you feel like, like you're dining at a special place without it being too fussy or too formal.
Ben Schnider: 19:53
And I've always thought of it as kind of like, you can feel like you could spend $40 or $400 and either way, either direction you go, it's good. Kind of more of a brasserie vibe, you know, a place that is like really attentive and really friendly and the service is like impeccable but alive.
St John Frizell: 20:15
And then behind them there'll be the Sunken Harbor club, which is a little 30 seat cocktail bar that will have a vibe of like a, a Victorian Explorers club that was, you know tucked away and sort of the legend is that it was a club for eccentric, you know, Victorian explorers. They would meet up there and plan their expeditions and they were very secretive. And then at some point in the 20th century, they just disappeared and left their club behind them with the cocktail recipe book of all the cocktails they collected from around the world. And we found the book and we're just reopening the club.
Ben Schnider: 20:53
Basically it's going to be a ship and old wooden ship that sank to the bottom of the ocean and then kind of listed over sideways. So it's gonna all be a little bit crooked and we're going to have great Tiki drinks in there. And then all kinds of sort of, you know treasures from various travels.
St John Frizell: 21:11
Yeah. It's the, it's like a little weird secret bar on the second floor of a old chophouse. You know, there's nothing like it in the neighborhood, certainly anywhere else that I know of. And it's like very tucked away in the back. Whereas the first floor is very kind of public facing and faces the street and it's very open and high and this one's very kind of low ceiling and cozy and you know, downstairs the history is all real and upstairs the history is completely fake.
Ofer Cohen: 21:40
I usually ask, tell me something nobody knows about you but I think maybe we can do something a little different and we can ask, tell me something nobody knows about the Gage and Tollner.
St John Frizell: 21:51
There's just a lot of them. I don't know where to start. Let's see.
Ben Schnider: 21:58
Well I found an old box of like cough drops from like 1895 in the wall. And also like fun things like the old wallpaper in the bathrooms. We're going to take the a piece that we found was an extra piece that they kind of left up in the ceiling and we're going to frame it and put that up.
St John Frizell: 22:15
The old maitre d of Gage And Tollner was a gentleman named Wade Siler, who a lot of people remember cause he was very dapper and he's very kind and he still lives in Fort Greene. He's 92 years old. I got to go to his home and then brought him to a Gage and Tollner he still gets around very slowly, but he still gets around. And uhe's got a beautiful baritone singing voice and uwhile he was at Gage and Tollner, I asked him if he could sing. He sang love is a many splendor thing and it was just acapella and it was just incredible. He was a singer. He tried to make a go of it as a singer in the fifties and sixties. And he went under the name Wade Sinclair. And so some people know him by that name still, but he has promised that he will come to the opening and perform. So I look forward to.
Ofer Cohen: 23:16
The team is putting the finishing touches on the space. Ben and St John say eventually they plan the stage the third play in the trilogy that began nearly 20 years ago into Red Hook backyard. This time at Gage and Tollner, thanks so much guys. Gage and Tollner back in Brooklyn.
St John Frizell: 23:32
Thanks for having us over. It's has been a blast.