Sunken Harbor Club
Nine years as a Thursday-night party in a Red Hook bar, and now a tiki room one staircase above an 1892 landmark steakhouse.
Why go
St. John Frizell started this in 2012 as a weekly party at Fort Defiance, his own bar in Red Hook, and it did not get a permanent address until October 2021, when it took the floor above Gage & Tollner. The Infatuation enjoys the collision: the dining room downstairs still very much looks like somewhere you'd eat steak with a 19th-century industrialist, but sister establishment Sunken Harbor is, for some reason, a tiki bar. Don't question it.
The list has a source behind it. Frizell reads Charles H. Baker, Jr., the cocktail writer who drank his way around the world in the 1920s and 1930s, and the bar says Baker's accounts inform the menu, which is where the rum depth comes from.
Order this / avoid
- Order: a single-malt old fashioned in the dark wood, then anything built on the housemade banana liqueur. The Infatuation's framing is that "the cocktail program is very serious (in that the drinks are plentiful and well-engineered) and also not so serious (in that the beverage names lean heavily into the pirate theme)." Drinks ran around $20 when it wrote that in 2022.
- Avoid: turning up late for a seat. The room is small and takes no reservations.
What locals & experts say
- The Infatuation (22 August 2022):
Despite the name, this place isn't exclusive, although it is small and walk-in only. So come on the earlier side to guarantee yourself a seat.
1 - Local rec: Jeff's note credits Dave Arnold.
Good to know
- Timing: evenings, up the stairs from Fulton Street.
- Booking: walk-in only, so early is the plan.
Jeff's take (his words)
- Rec via: Dave arnold rec
- Note: Dave arnold rec
Verdict
should-visit — St. John Frizell ran this as a Thursday-night party in the back of his Red Hook bar for nine years before it got a permanent room, and what it got was the floor above Gage & Tollner, an 1892 landmark dining room in Downtown Brooklyn. Bryan Kim wrote it best: the steakhouse looks like somewhere you would eat with a 19th-century industrialist, and one staircase up is a tiki bar. Frizell built the list off Charles H. Baker's 1920s and 1930s drinking accounts, so the rum reading is real and the pirate drink names are a joke played on top of it. The Infatuation calls the program well-engineered and points at the housemade banana liqueur. Walk-in only, small, so come early; and the only published verdict on it is four years old.