NYC Ferry Restaurant Tour, Part VII: Lobster Pound (South Brooklyn Route to Red Hook)
Hell-bent on lobster roll, I boarded the NYC Ferry at Corlears Hook Pier 42, the northern terminus of the South Brooklyn Route. First time I’ve done this, and possibly the last, since getting there requires long walk through the Lower East Side, as opposed to my usual roost at Wall Street Pier 11, a shorter stroll from the Wall Street 2 or 3 trains. Look north along the East River and you’ll find Corlears Hook commands an excellent view of the Williamsburg Bridge.
In the other direction, looking south, is the Manhattan Bridge. Both connect Manhattan with Brooklyn, along with the Brooklyn Bridge, farther south.
You can just see the Brooklyn Bridge, below, behind the Manhattan Bridge. The East River was choppy that day. It was quite noticeable as I sat in the covered Corlears Hook ferry terminal tossed up and down by the waves.
Perhaps they were stirred by the unhappy souls of the 43 Wecquaesgeek natives slain on the site by Dutch settlers in 1643, touching off a two-year war. The tribe were also known as the Manhattoe and they gave Manhattan its name. The ramp dropped down as the South Brooklyn boat prepared to load passengers.
I enjoyed my dirty-window views of the Manhattan Bridge…
…and the Brooklyn Bridge.
The ferry braved the turbulent East River to zigzag to and fro, stopping at DUMBO in Brooklyn, Wall Street in Manhattan, Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and finally a short hop down the Brooklyn waterfront to my destination, Red Hook. From there it would go on to Governors Island (off the southern tip of Manhattan) before making its final two stops in Brooklyn, Sunset Park and Bay Ridge. I have had memorable meals at all of those last three in previous episodes of the Tour.
At Red Hook I said goodbye to the good ship Owl’s Head, which had safely carried me to imminent bliss involving a lobster roll.
As the ferry steamed away from the Atlantic Basin, I realized that Red Hook remains an active port.
Here’s a shot of it, to the left of the humongous cruise ship, as seen across the water from Governors Island.
There was something about the walkway along the parking lot that spelled Adventure! Not the good kind, though, as the sidewalk ran out and forced me into an active roadway with trucks passing up and down. Not the best way to approach the neighborhood, I realized too late.
But of course, it was designed for docks and dockworkers and warehouses, not to be a pedestrian paradise for some Manhatto elitist. I did get to see the mobile massage studio (Serene Touch Hand Massage Therapy, associated with Spa Chicks Mobile Spa Events) and a bus styled like a tram carriage labeled Chipotle.
These two beautifully ornamented warehouses were labeled NEW YORK DOCK CO. They seemed to be well maintained, at least from the outside. Seeing them was almost worth the hazard of walking along the basin.
I managed to make it down Van Brunt Street to the restaurant without incident, admiring the area’s few remaining Belgian-block streets along the way. More about the neighborhood after lunch.
Welcome to the Red Hook Lobster Pound. A neighborhood resident poses to give you an idea of the scale. She was in many of my exterior shots and I asked if that was OK. She graciously said, no problem.
It’s the home of World Famous Seafood and Lobster Rolls.
Some kind of proud familial moment, I think.
I didn’t inquire whether the Pound’s attractive, colorful, and sturdy looking outdoor dining shed would survive the mayor and city council’s new regulatory rampage against outdoor dining sheds. Under a new city law all of them must be dismantled in the winter months and rebuilt every spring. Ninety percent of restauranteurs have said they can’t afford the onerous regs and expense.
Inside, looking toward the front, next to my table.
Here’s the bar area.
Behind my table. T-shirts available!
More seating was available at the back, including a long table that might accommodate a large-ish group.
The entrance to the restrooms was scenic…
…and the restrooms were both gender-neutral…
…and well-appointed.
For your delectation, the food menu. Check the World Famous Lobster Roll selection in the center.
And here is the drinks menu. I was sorely tempted by the Painkiller martini (with nutmeg?!) and the Reef Retreat martini (cucumber gin, presumably Hendrick’s, and St. Germain elderflower liqueur — I am so there), not to mention the situationally appropriate Lobster Claw Bloody, but I wanted to explore the neighborhood after lunch and decided I’d rather do it sober.
And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for. I went for the Maine Lobster Roll — it deserves, somehow, to be all-uppercase even if I added the “Lobster Roll” myself for clarity. It was described simply as “lobster salad, lettuce,” though like the other selections it was topped with paprika and served with a choice of fries, potato salad, or green salad. The other options were the Connecticut Lobster Roll (poached in butter), the California Lobster Roll (with cucumber and avocado), and the Fried Lobster Roll (in beer batter, tossed in lobster caramel…mmmm, lobster caramel).
You can see which side option I chose, after asking: “Is there anything noteworthy about the potato salad?” I figured it might have egg or some crunchy veg. The answer was noncommittal, so I went for the green salad, which may have been dressed with peanut oil.
The salad tasted almost as good as the lobster…
…and the lobster was a…maz…ing. It was juicy, with the distinctive flavor of lobster, strong but not rank, the flavor of fresh marine crustacean.
It looked amazing too. Because I sat near the window, with an adequate supply of gentle natural light, I didn’t even fiddle with the color in postproduction…
…though as I worked my way through the food-porn angles, the Samsung A14 phone-cam took a different approach to color when I moved it around.
I probably should have savored it more slowly than I did, but I was very hungry, and it was very tasty, and it disappeared very fast, and if you object to my use of very, let alone the repeated use of very, verily I say unto you, write your own blog. We don’t need no steekin’ copyeditors here.
The obligatory empty-plate shot. The empty roll holder reminds me now, as I write, how perfectly toasted, structurally sound, and delicious was the white-bread vessel that ferried (or should I say lobbed) the lobster to my happy gullet, as the NYC Ferry had carried the rest of my body to this appointment with pleasure.
So what would it be like to live in Red Hook? Historically it has been a poor and working class neighborhood, home to dockhands and factory workers (who I saw but didn’t shoot, through doorways, during my walk). Perhaps not coincidentally, today it hosts the largest public housing project in Brooklyn: the interconnected Red Hook Houses, divided between Red Hook West and Red Hook East, home to a combined 6,600 residents.
But these rowhouses along Van Brunt Street, where the restaurant was located, are more representative of the traditional 19th-century low-income Red Hook housing look. Look more closely at one of them…
…and you may notice that it is faced not with red brick, like most of its neighbors, but with wooden slats.
As soon as you’ve noticed one, you see them all over the place. They have a nice way of standing out.
A property owner went for vertical slats in this $2.5 million home. I’m guessing that was not the original look, though it is a handsome one.
Here’s one for sale. Get your bids in quickly — nowadays every hipster in the universe wants to live in Brooklyn. This one was listed at presstime for for just over $2 mil, 1,500 sq ft, 2 bed, 1.5 baths.
Splashes of bright (Caribbean inspired?) color are rare, so this one stands out, though a patch of earthtone masonry matches the wood facade next door.
Red Hook’s side streets are peaceful, unremarkable, and occasionally graced with more Belgian block.
Another side street featured signs of old and new: a derelict house and a two-car garage, side by side. Note the wood under the old and partly removed hexagonal tile. Perhaps the house is a work in progress.
As younger and (maybe, maybe not) hipper residents have moved into Red Hook, signs of gentrification have set in. Here’s an art gallery.
I like the sense of humor (“Merchants & Thieves”).
At this point a geography lesson might be helpful. Cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by a Robert Moses expressway running under the water from Lower Manhattan, Red Hook is south of Governors Island (across the Buttermilk Channel, no less!) and southeast of Liberty Island. It is referred to as South Brooklyn, for historical reasons relating to the borough’s growth and consolidation, though if you look at a map at the totality of Brooklyn, it appears in the northeast corner. Check that structure hooking around the blue IKEA label on the map. That’s the Erie Basin.
And so is this, looking down the short waterway next to the “I” in IKEA above. Many boats were docked here.
Some may have been pleasure craft while others were water taxis connected with a medical center and other local institutions. I walked to the end of Erie Basin and turned 180 degrees toward the street to get several of them into one shot.
That looong redbrick behemoth to the left, as long as the Amazon building across from it, was home at presstime to design agency Largent Studios and the Brooklyn Artists Waterfront Coalition, though other parts of it may have remained some kind of working warehouse or industrial space, as it surely was originally. I spotted men at work (not shown) as I passed.
Among the area’s biggest employers are probably Amazon, shown here, at the corner of Beard and Richard streets…
…and IKEA, shown here across the water, where you can satisfy your urges for both flat-pack furniture and, in the cafeteria, Swedish meatballs.
Next to the Amazon facility — three cheers, by the way, for Amazon and its hardworking employees, for shipping copies of my books hither and yon — these dudes are off on a fishing trip.
Recalling The Case of the Missing Waterfront Sidewalk, which surely would perplex Sherlock Holmes himself, I decided to approach the ferry stop from the opposite direction, south not north, taking a turn down Beard Street next to Amazon and IKEA. There, in the distance, I saw another of Red Hook’s attractions…
…its frontal view of Liberty Island.
The view was magnificent, I thought, as I strolled along the waterfront near Pier 44, next to the Waterfront Museum. (Perhaps I’ll get to that on a future visit.)
Near this old warehouse, now converted to apartments, I saw something else that resonated.
A vintage tram, once slated for possible use in a transit project. Trams have not run in Red Hook since 1956, though the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association had hoped to bring them back.
If it had been funded — and I’d say, barring a Scrooge on Xmas Morning miracle, the odds are against it ever happening — it would have run along the tracks on either side of the red brick. Among the difficulties were some sharp right turns.
Trams ran here and made right turns for generations. Why is that now impossible? My expertise doesn’t extend that far. But general observation of recent events suggests that New York is not governed by people favorable to cities or transit, so for the foreseeable future Red Hook will remain a transit-poor neighborhood, with sketchy bus service and no subway station. And the occasional ferry.
Check out Lady Liberty via the big binoculars, if you like. What an extraordinary city this is.
If only it were run by people who love it as much as they love their cars. Real cities = multi-mode transportation. Isn’t the freedom to choose traditional urban living another form of liberty?
As I approached Pier 12 for the trip home, I thought: all this, and the Freedom Tower too.
I boarded the ferry for the journey home. While I sometimes travel to lunch on the ferry and back on the subway — when the ferry breaks down — today I made both trips by water.
I was slightly awestruck to note that Grimaldi’s, whose coal-fired pizza ovens are a Brooklyn institution up by the Brooklyn Bridge, has its own freighter. They must deliver a lot of pizza!
My ride home was the Time Traveler. Savvy readers will note the Brooklyn Bridge lurking to the right, indicating that we have already docked at Wall Street Pier 11. And so I went home after an excellent date with a lobster, and I may well have one with a crab (singular) — I hear the Lobster Pound’s crabcakes calling out to me. Perhaps I will have the wisdom to eat them more slowly so that I might savor them longer.
Previously on the NYC Ferry Restaurant Tour:
Part I: The Wharf (Rockaway Route to Rockaway Park)
Part II: Kimo’s Kitchen (Rockaway Route to Rockaway Beach)
Part III: Big John’s (Rockaway Route to Sunset Park)
Part IV: Salty Dog (South Brooklyn Route to Bay Ridge)
