Profile of the week: Lundys Restaurant.

The view from Times Square

Last summer, Lundy's--a seafood restaurant founded on Sheepshead Bay in 1918--opened a new branch on the corner of 50th and Broadway, here in Manhattan. They gutted the space, installing enough tables to accommodate 600 diners at once. If that sounds like a lot of bellies to fill, consider that the original Lundy's can feed 1,000 people at once.

The restaurant's renown is largely due to its founder F.W.I Lundy, whose eccentricities and vast fortune are mythical in proportion. It can't hurt the restaurant's reputation that the food is top-shelf.

F.W.I Lundy's tale is colorful--and seemingly tragic--enough to warrant it's own treatment, which it fortunately has in the form of newspaper feature stories and even a coffee table book.

This account, however, deals with Lundy's newest outpost on Times Square's northern reach overlooking Broadway, and the market factors that tested its mettle after Sept. 11.

Like so many other tourist-driven businesses in New York City, Lundy's Times Square location was hit hard by the terrorist attacks. Since it banks on a theater *, the place was virtually empty for weeks following the attacks. Fear kept theater-goers away, and the restaurant hemorrhaged money.

"It was a rough time for us all," says Anthony Golio, president of Tam Restaurants, parent company of Lundy's.

Golio reacted quickly after Sept. 11. He immediately filed for business disruption insurance, and began working with the city to get his restaurants back on track. One of Tam's other restaurants is located in Battery Park, by the water, and it served as a make-shift police precinct on Sept 11.

"There are just so many moving parts in the restaurant business, especially when you serve seafood. It's a tough business," said Golio, whose lifetime has been spent in the food business.

He is critical of NYC & Co's (New York City's tourist bureau) efforts to drum up support for an expansion of the Javits Center at a time when so many restaurants, his included, are trying to get back on their feet. He equates the tourism bureau's efforts to putting the cart before the horse, and he isn't the only one who feels this way.

"A lot of other restaurants are suffering, and they're talking about expanding a convention center?" he says, shaking his head.

Golio is waiting to hear back from the SBA about securing a loan. He's #207 on the SBA's list, a list that he says is 16,000 businesses long.

Despite his concerns, Lundy's was booming on a recent Wednesday afternoon. Very few of the restaurant's seats were vacant.

The conversation in question occurred at a table for four perched two stories above Broadway. The large plate glass window allows customers to see a busy intersection cutting through the center of Manhattan. On certain days in November, it also serves as an ideal vantage point for the Macy's Day Parade. Golio rented it out to American Express last year, and he's hooked the plastic-dispenser for another round this November.

The restaurant itself has dozens of black and white photographs of the original Lundy's seafood palace, which was built on a barge in Sheepshead Bay. Other photographs of famous Brooklyn natives grace the stairwell above and below the dining room.

Inside that dining room, one passes a raw bar over chipped ice, over which sit oysters, fish and other Atlantic Ocean refugees. A steamer-trunk sized lobster tank occupies the center of the room, its denizens sporting white rubber bands on their crusher claws. A brick-oven was built into the back wall to cook pizzas, an offering that Golio praises as "one of the best dishes" on the menu. Clearly, variety is one of the missions here. There's linguine, fried shrimp, fried flounder, fried diver sea scallops, New England Channel scrod, veal chop Oscar, white clam chowder brick oven pizza, and even "angry" lobster (which deserves a footnote here).

The angry lobster dish consists of a brick-oven roasted crustacean served in a spicy seafood broth served over pasta.

It's difficult to imagine, seated at a table inside Lundy's, that the restaurant was spawned by a young boy who hawked clams and chowder to longshoreman when he was nine years old.

As Brooklyn Borough president Howard Golden said, "Lundy's holds a special place in Brooklyn history. For decades, Brooklyn families would gather at the legendary restaurant to enjoy fine seafood, exquisite desserts and good company. Today, that legacy has been brought to life again.

*[Text unreadable in original source]