
With Crevette, the Duo Behind Dame and Lord’s Turns to Spain, France — and More Seafood
In June 2021, on the heels of their wildly successful pandemic-era pop-up, Patricia Howard and chef Ed Szymanski opened their petite British seafood spot, Dame, on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Less than 18 months later, they debuted Lord’s, a meatier restaurant that also looks across the pond for inspiration.
Now, they’re ready for their third act: Crevette, a West Village seafood restaurant opening on Feb. 4 in the old Holiday Bar space. For the first time, the married duo is turning their attention away from Britain and toward coastal Spain and France. And, with 95 seats inside and plans for 40 outside when the weather turns, it’s a big jump forward for the team, one that represents where they are both as restaurateurs and individuals.
“We opened Dame when I was 27 and P[atricia] was 29,” Szymanski says. “We’re not much older now, but we crave a little bit more comfort. Dame is a magical, intimate experience. And we love that, but we don’t just want to create more of those. We want to really provide a deeper sense of hospitality than we’ve been able to with the tiny spaces that we have.”
At Crevette, they hope diners can come for a long dinner (or lunch, come spring) in a space that’s more dressed up than their other restaurants. The food may also feel a touch more approachable. “A few years ago, I was really trying to impress everyone with every dish. Now, I still do a little bit of that. But I also want to make people happy more than anything else,” Szymanski explains.
We met up with Howard and Szymanski at Crevette in December when a stove and their daughter’s pack-n-play were still sitting in the restaurant’s dining room. We chatted about the books that inspire them, designing iconic restaurant bathrooms, why straying from British cooking is “freeing,” and more.
Note: This interview has been edited for accuracy, clarity, and length.
Resy: This is your third restaurant opening in only a handful of years, which is an impressive timeline. Tell me a bit about that.
Ed Szymanski: We’re quite creative people and when we have new ideas that we want to express that don’t fit in the current restaurants, that’s when we open a new one. We have had quite a few ideas and quite a few different restaurants that we want to bring to life in New York.
After a year or so of running Dame — it’s such a cramped kitchen — I wanted a larger venue to cook [in], and I missed cooking meat and vegetables. So that’s how Lord’s came to be about, and that’s the food I grew up eating and fell in love with. And we’re very fortunate that Lord’s has been quite successful, [which] allows us to think, “Well, what else are we excited about? What else do we want to exist?” And that leads nicely into Crevette. This style of seafood restaurant — there aren’t many of them in New York.
How do you see Crevette?
Szymanski: What we’re envisioning here is that idyllic south of France, maybe the Catalan coast of Spain — the beach across the street from you; you’re eating in a white linen suit, but it’s a very casual restaurant. You have a raw bar with lots of great oysters, clams, lobster, and shrimp, and then an assortment of different vegetables. If we were actually in this part of the world, they would come from our garden. We’re in New York, so they come from the farmer’s market. And then simple entrees of grilled meat and grilled fish.
[It’s] the kind of restaurant that becomes an extension of you and it’s part of your way of life — it’s not really chef-y. It’s very casual and laidback. We missed that. We go on holiday to this part of the world and eat at those kinds of restaurants.
Patricia Howard: Our house is covered in every cookbook from this region right now.


What are some of the ones that you’re gravitating towards?
Howard: The Blue Trout and Black Truffles has really changed Ed’s whole world.
Szymanski: That’s a little more like La Grande Cuisine of old-school France. It’s about a gourmand’s growth from young boy pre-World War I in, I think, Czechoslovakia, and how he eventually moves to America and then rediscovers a love of Europe and eating at all these great restaurants. There are these vivid stories of making bouillabaisse off the side of a boat in Marseilles — how could you not want to eat that, live in that time? That’s sort of what we’re going to do here.
Richard Olney’s books are a big source of inspiration. His writing is so evocative, and the recipes are so simple, and they really cut to the core of what we’re trying to do here. There’s a modern British chef, Alex Jackson, who has written a couple of books on Provence, and had a very successful restaurant in London called Sardine. [Also] books of Liguria. There’s some old Marcella Hazan thrown in there, too. Simplicity and the quality of the product is what we’re looking to do here.
As you were saying, if you were cooking in this part of Europe, the vegetables would come from your garden and the sea, just 20 feet away. How are you approaching sourcing in New York?
Szymanski: If we had tried to open this restaurant four years ago, we would have had a hard time because our relationships with our purveyors wouldn’t have been as deep as they need to be to source such high-quality products.
Our main seafood purveyor, a lady called Sherri [Liepper of Liepper & Sons], is an investor in our restaurants because she’s become such a close member of the family. I go out to Sherrie’s warehouse in Long Island and see the way they’re cutting the fish, see where they’re storing the fish and offer feedback.
We’ve developed these relationships. Now I know to get the tuna from this person, the oysters from this person, [and] the lobster from this person at this time of year. It’s a lot of pushing them to find higher quality, more exciting products.
You’ve shared a bit on Instagram about menu development. It starts with many ideas for you that that you then whittle down into a menu. Can you tell us a bit about it and what you’re most excited about?
Szymanski: It starts with several thousand little ideas that pop into mostly my — but really anyone who works for me’s — head, and then we keep it all in a note doc, and a lot of photos, too, of different food from books or from restaurants that we’ve seen around the world. And then we find the ideas that most excite us, make them, and taste them. Oftentimes, what you think is going to be delicious is not so delicious.
I’m most excited, in general, for the style of restaurant that it’s going to be. Our raw bar selection, I think it’s going to be very delicious and slightly different than some of the more unadorned, raw bars that you see in town. So, that’s going to be a really cool thing.
Because of our relationships with seafood purveyors, we’re going to get quite limited stuff [like red shrimp and live scallops] and be able to change the raw bar offerings as frequently as we want to.
What else can we expect?
Szymanski: I’m really excited about the vegetable offerings. This is a seafood restaurant, but we’re going to have a whole [selection] of vegetables where we can be quite creative and draw a lot of inspiration from the south of France.
Pasta is one thing that I haven’t made a lot of before. We’ve been testing some really cool recipes — from the Veneto, Liguria, and the South of France.
I bought a soft-serve machine for here. We’re going to do interesting flavors: chamomile; buckwheat honey and kumquat jam; and sorbets like Meyer lemon and new seasons olive oil. And then offer different garnishes. For dessert, we’ll do pears poached in cassis with whipped mascarpone, and a reimagining of a tarte tatin as a choux bun. We’re calling it a choux au tarte tatin.


Amazing. What about some of the entrees?
Szymanski: We’re going to have steaks to share, and grilled duck kebabs served with piperade, this red pepper and onion stew with oregano. We got these really nice golden chickens from a guy I know in Brooklyn named Carlo, and we’re marinating them in confit garlic, lemon, and olive oil, serving them with chicken jus, confit lemons, persillade, and a tall pile of fries and aioli for dipping.
For the vegetables, because it’s winter to start, we’ll make very bright and refreshing fennel salad with dates, pecorino, and mint. We’ll do citrus salads with caper leaves and goat’s milk ricotta salata. We’ll do little parcels of braised Swiss chard stuffed with large Spanish chickpeas and fresh goat’s curd.
The pasta dishes: there’s something called cassopipa, which is an old Veneto [dish]. So, this is a clam, mussel, and [scallop] sauce, but seasoned with wintery spices, carrot, leek a little bit of tomato, and then tossed in a housemade tagliatelle.
We’ll make a rice dish that will be loosely inspired by the wet rices of Portugal — it will be somewhere between Portuguese rice and a Spanish dry rice. We’re calling ours a seafood rice, and it’s a slightly drier version, with bomba rice and sofrito, served with grilled lobster and aioli on top. It’s going to be an aioli-driven restaurant.
Howard: Every dinner party we have is aioli-driven as well.
Szymanski: For sharing, we’re going to do a bouillabaisse served in the traditional style, where it’ll come out as a soup course, or broth, with croutons and rouille, and then an assortment of poached fish served on the side for adding into the broth. It’s a very immersive experience — true to how you would eat it if you were in Provence.
Tell us about the wines.
Szymanski: We’ll pull from regions that we’re cooking from: the textural whites of the south of France and Catalonia, and the heartier reds. It’s a great part of the world for making rose. There’ll be a selection of Burgundy and Champagnes, because it’s my first love in wine.
What about the cocktails?
Szymanski: There will be an apero-forward cocktail program. There will be pastis, and a very succinct martini selection, and negroni variations, too. We’ll bring back a cocktail called the Trident, because it’s seafood inspired, but that’s like a more bitter, nautical version of a Negroni with aquavit instead of gin and Cynar — very delicious and old school.
We’ll also have three to four low-ABV cocktails, because in the summer, we’re going to have 40 seats out on the patio. And we want people to come and have oysters and a cocktail on a weekday. We want people to feel comfortable just snacking and drinking at the bar.
Both of the other restaurants draw on your heritage, Ed. Does it feel more challenging to open something that goes in a different direction?
Howard: It’s freeing.
Szymanski: I think it’s easier, actually. We joke about this: we’ve managed to convince New Yorkers to eat British food — that’s the real challenge. We’re now trying to convince people to eat the sunny food of the south of France, that should be a little bit easier.
How did you settle on this space? I’ve read that you’re constantly looking at spaces.
Howard: We started touring two months after Lord’s opened. The process takes so long that two years later, here we are. We’ve been looking for a corner specifically; and to be so close to our other restaurants is key for us. We just had a baby, and the ease of being able to run back and forth between the restaurants and share staff has been crucial. And the address here is 10 Downing Street, which is ironic as our first non-English restaurant; [it’s] the prime minister’s address.


Patricia, you do all of the design work for your restaurants. How have you approached designing this space?
Howard: Designing the restaurants is my favorite part of owning restaurants. All the little problem solving that goes into the finished product is what I love. I think, similar to Ed designing a menu, I do a similar process of gathering inspiration. Then you have to go source it from the world and make it work within the walls. It’s a difficult, but very rewarding, exciting process.
At this point in the game, it’s all starting to come together, and the light fixtures that I’ve been waiting to see for three months are going to arrive today, and the chairs cleared customs from France. There’s $17,000 of chairs that came over on a boat, and I’ve never sat in them.
One of your design signatures is amazing bathrooms. You shared your saga with the black-tiled bathrooms you inherited on Instagram. How did you decide on these cheerful colors?
Howard: When I first toured the space, Ed said, “It’s a beautiful space, but wait until you see the bathrooms.” Four bathrooms, all floor-to-ceiling tile with TVs installed. I thought we had to re-tile them all. So, I spent a long time coming up with stripe combos that I wanted to do in each of the four bathrooms. And I went to our contractor all excited, and he said, “You do not want to rip out four bathrooms worth of tile.”
So, we ended up painting it. I morphed those stripe plans into very distinct color combinations for the walls and the floors in each of the bathrooms. I wanted to bring a lot of color to the space without overwhelming the dining room.
Are you already looking at the next space? What are some of the ideas that you’re excited to explore in the future?
Szymanski: The next one I really want to do is a New York-y steakhouse. We have ambitions to do stuff with Dame, too — a more casual version of that. There’s a long document with all of the different businesses we want to open one day. I’d love to open a bakery, specifically an English bakery, where you can get toasties and English sweets — and a wine shop to show off our large collection. But, one step at a time. We want to open this restaurant first and make this really special, make it a great place to work and eat. And when that is all up and running, hopefully the next space will present itself, and we’ll be able to do that.
Crevette will be open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Dinner on Sunday and Monday, as well as lunch service Friday through Sunday will launch in April or May.
Devra Ferst is a Brooklyn-based food and travel writer who has contributed to The New York Times, Bon Appétit, Eater, NPR, and numerous other publications. She is co-author of “The Jewish Holiday Table: A World of Recipes, Traditions & Stories to Celebrate All Year Long.” Follow her on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.
Ben Hon is a New York-based photographer. Follow him on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.