A woman slim, tall, blond, elegant and pretty walks to the deli counter of Cherry Hill Gourmet Market. She’s wearing black high heel boots, a leather black miniskirt and a white and beige long fur coat. At Cherry Hill Gourmet Market, the most crowded area is the takeout gourmet food counter that is close to the kitchen –a kitchen that once used to cook lobsters, clams and oysters for thousands of diners when this market was a restaurant.

The woman orders, in Russian, some food to take out a few pounds of cooked duck with fruits and some kebabs with fresh tomato sauce. The lady at the counter answers, also in Russian.

After two decades of many attempts to revive the legendary restaurant called Lundy’s –most of these ending in failures- David Isaev opened Cherry Hill Gourmet Market in May and the old Lundy’s closed its doors for good.

Customers at Cherry Hill Gourmet Market. Photo from Sheepshead Bites.

The legendary Lundy’s was at this corner, Emmons Avenue and Ocean Avenue, for almost five decades. After the Lundy family sold it, Lundy’s was never quite the same. The original restaurant closed its doors for the first time in the late seventies. A decade later, three different managements tried to revamp. But the place got smaller, the food got more expensive and regular customers no longer came.

Since the Lundy’s era, Sheepshead Bay has turned into an enclave of Russian immigrants first followed by other nationalities –Turkish, Asian, Pakistani, Greek- who have found a home in this bay. You see them shopping at Cherry Hill Gourmet Market.

“That is the direction the neighborhood is going. This part of Brooklyn is no longer the blue-collar Catholic middle class person living here,” says Ned Berkes, editor of Sheepshead Bites, a local news blog. “If you see the Lundy’s Mall you’ll see there is a Japanese restaurant, a Turkish café and now Cherry Hill Gourmet Market.”

David Isaev, Cherry Hill’s owner, is from Azerbaijan. He walks around his store talking to customers, talking to his employees, switching from Russian to Hebrew to English to Spanish within a blink of an eye. A Hispanic man comes to him carrying a box of green grapes. Isaev picks them up, looks at him and quickly decides. He doesn’t want them. “No las quiero, no tienes nada mejor?” said Isaev.

Historic Lundy´s Restaurant closes its doors to become Cherry Hill Gourmet Market. Photo from Gothamist.com

Irving Lundy started his restaurant in 1926. The first Lundy’s was across the street from what is now the Lundy’s building, on the pier where the family fish store used to be. Later, in 1934, Irving Lundy moved the restaurant to the corner of Emmons Avenue and Ocean Avenue –right across the street from the pier – and it was a block-long restaurant. Its fame did not stop growing and it was once billed as America’s largest restaurant, seating up to 2,400, according an article in The New York Times. By the early fifties it was well known all around the country.  Edna Mugno, 84, lives in Sheepshead Bay. Mugno, who was born and raised in this bay, remembers Lundy’s well enough. She says celebrating holidays were like nothing she has seen anywhere else. “Thanksgiving was out of this world at Lundy’s,” she said. “The racket, the voices, the noise and the festive ambience were incredible.” Mugno remembers that the floors were of marble, “so if you dropped a fork or a knife, yahoo! It would echo in the whole restaurant.”

Lundy’s used to cater to another kind of Brooklyn: Immigrants from Italy and Ireland or Jews well established in South Brooklyn. It was a family restaurant. The place was big enough to fit large groups and the prices were very affordable.  Mugno says that when she was a teenager, every Friday, her mother sent her to Lundy’s clam bar. “I would get a quart of clam chowder for a dollar!” Mugno says, “Can you imagine? A quart for three people for a dollar?”

People in Brooklyn celebrated birthdays, engagement parties, bar mitzvah and even weddings at Lundy’s. Helen Evans, who still lives in Sheepshead Bay, was born before World War I. About five decades ago, Evans decided one morning to go to court with her husband to be and get married. Right after the newly wed couple headed to Lundy’s to celebrate with friends and family.

Outside Cherry Hill Gourmet Market, the façade of the old landmark building remains the same but once you open its doors, Cherry Hill resembles all the changes Sheepshead Bay has gone through since Lundy’s Restaurant’s golden era.

“Things have changed,” says Isaev, “Nobody here in this neighborhood wants another restaurant for 2,000 people. The people that live here now are not the same that lived when Lundy’s was around.”

Inside Cherry Hill store, to the left, bouquets and multicolor arrangements of imported flowers for special occasions welcome shoppers. They are placed by the window that faces Manhattan Beach, where a long row of the most demanded Lundy’s tables used to be. To the right, towards the wall, beautiful jars of syrups from Georgia, marmalades from Macedonia, German coffee, Russian candy and goods from all parts of the world adorned the shelves waiting to be bought by Sheepshead Bay residents. The long row of tables with pristine white clothes that was in the halls 40 years ago has been replaced by colorful stands of jars of all sizes and warm colors: Jars of pickled mushrooms from Serbia, pickled peppers from Italy and more than 20 types of olive oils from Greece, Spain, Italy and Israel. Some walls are covered by olive green marble. Left from old Lundy’s is the stairway with its original terrazzo marble steps and the wrought-iron railings in the foreground. They take you up to the mezzanine level, where is now Cherry Hill’s Café, the gathering place for men and women that live or work around Emmons Ave.

Lundy’s Restaurant lives in the memories of Brooklynites of the fifties. Those who come to Cherry Hill, missed out on Lundy’s prosperous days, but they don’t need it. All they need to stay in touch with their motherland and their own nostalgia is found here in the shelves of Cherry Hill.

Photo by Katerina Valdivieso/Brooklyn Ink

By Katerina Valdivieso

“That’s the one! That’s the portrait! Let me see?” Victor Coker was stunned when he saw the picture of his missing portrait in a page of the book I had brought to show him: Lundy’s: Reminiscences and Recipes from Brooklyn’s Legendary Restaurant. I had opened it to a random page and, ironically, it opened at the page of the portrait of Mr. Irving Lundy, Coker’s missing portrait.

I was interviewing Coker, 51, for an article about Cherry Hill Gourmet Market, a new store in the building that once housed Brooklyn’s legendary seafood restaurant of the 50s, Lundy’s, when he realized his portrait was lost. Coker has been taking care of the building for the past 16 years. He is the superintendent of entire building, including adjacent stores and Irving Lundy’s old house. Lundy’s Landing occupies the whole block on the corner of Emmons Ave. and Ocean Ave. in Sheepshead Bay.

Coker, a resident of Canarsie, has taken it upon himself to take special care of this historical landmark and all the things that belong to it. For more than a decade he has kept the old pictures of the Bay and other artifacts that used to adorn the old restaurant. Among those artifacts was Irving Lundy’s portrait.  Coker said that the last time Lundy’s restaurant closed-it has had four incarnations since the original-someone trashed this painting. Coker rescued Mr. Lundy’s portrait from the garbage and took it to Lundy’s old house, which is in the middle of Lundy’s Landing. “I placed the portrait in his house where he belonged, and I looked at Mr. Lundy and told him ‘It’s all good. You are back home now,” said Coker.

When Coker was a child, he used to come to Lundy’s to eat delicious lobsters and oysters, but the biscuits are what he remembers the most. Someone from Kentucky called Coker not too long ago asking for Lundy’s and they both had a conversation about the biscuits. “There are no biscuits like the used to make them at Lundy’s,” said Coker.

It is not unusual for Coker to get phone calls from people asking for Lundy’s restaurant. He has kept the same landline and phone number and he likes it like that. “I get phone calls from all over; from people from Florida, from California, even from other countries. And they ask me if they can get a reservation.”

Coker now works for David Isaev, the owner of Cherry Hill Gourmet Market. But over the past two decades he has seen at least four different managers coming and going of this building. In 1995, Lundy’s Restaurant re-opened with Frank and Jeanne Cretella as new owners. Coker was there. He said it was the closest it ever got to the original Lundy’s restaurant. The service and the food was much like the original, he said, except the place was less than half as big. The original Lundy’s accommodated more than 1,600 chairs, one of the biggest restaurants in America in the 19th century. The Cretella’s thought, said Coker, that it was important to keep memories alive in their new restaurant so they hung old pictures of the Bay inlcuding the portrait of Irving Lundy, the original owner and founder of the restaurant. Coker also thinks like the Cretellas. He said it was wrong to trash the portrait, he said, it was disrespectful.

The old Lundy’s house and his portrait intrigued me so I asked Coker if he could show me the painting. He agreed but after talking a phone call, he came back to Cherry Hill Gourmet Market some 30 minutes after talking on the phone. Coker looked pale and disturbed. “My portrait is gone. Someone took it,” he told me. During those 30 minutes he had gone to the old house and found out the Lundy’s portrait was no longer where he left it.

Coker remembered that some contractors had come to the building not too long ago to do some work so he made several phone calls, including one to the landlord of Lundy’s Landing, Steve Pappas. Someone told him over the phone that probably the contractors moved the painting so it didn’t get damaged and forgot to put it back where it was. But Coker could not find his portrait, and he was upset.

Isaev, who is most of the time walking around his gourmet store, stopped his work and asked Coker what was wrong. Then Moisha, Cherry Hill’s manager, also stopped his work and joined Isaev and Coker. Isaev tried to ease Coker by telling him that the portrait was probably misplaced, not lost or stolen, as did Moisha. For more than 20 minutes they speculated about the destination of the absent painting.

Every night, Coker turns off all the lights of Lundy’s Landing -the whole block. “This is when you hear things at night,” said Coker. Mr. Lundy he speculated that is probably checking out his property. Now that the portrait is gone, Coker said he will keep caring for his beloved building but he is concerned that Irving Lundy’s is not around. “Mr. Lundy should be in his home, where he belongs. I worry about the building now.”