Brooklyn

Brooklyn's restaurant record begins with its oyster houses and chophouses. Gage & Tollner opened on Fulton Street in 1879 under Charles Gage, took its familiar name in 1882, and by the 1910s was among the few oyster houses left in the borough; run by the Dewey family for nearly seven decades from 1919, it closed in 2004 and reopened in 2021 under St. John Frizell, Sohui Kim, and Ben Schneider. Peter Luger, founded in Williamsburg in 1887 and owned by the Forman family since 1950, established the borough's dry-aged porterhouse tradition.

Beer was Brooklyn's defining industry: at least 43 breweries operated here in 1879, including the Bushwick cluster known as Brewers' Row, where eleven breweries occupied a twelve-block area and used underground vaults for lager fermentation. F. & M. Schaefer and S. Liebmann & Sons (Rheingold) closed their Brooklyn plants in 1976; the first commercial light beer, Gablinger's, had been formulated at Rheingold in 1967 by brewmaster Joseph Owades.

Immigrant and neighborhood kitchens supply the rest of the canon — Totonno's coal-oven pizzeria (1924), later joined in the conversation by Di Fara and Grimaldi's, and Junior's, opened by Harry Rosen in 1950 on a site his family had run as a diner since 1929, known for New York-style cheesecake. Williamsburg's Diner, opened by Andrew Tarlow and Mark Firth with chef Caroline Fidanza writing daily seasonal menus, and its 2004 annex Marlow & Sons, anchored the borough's turn toward local sourcing.