At Walter’s, Life in Brooklyn Reads Like a Timeless Poem
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I don’t remember the first time I went to Walter’s; each visit feels like an old, comfortable habit. To me, this Fort Greene fixture is the ideal of an anytime restaurant, and its magic is in its capacity to accommodate whatever type of group or scenario it’s called to: close friends, hot dates, my parents, my colleagues, and revelations of news good or bad.
Walter’s makes first meetings comfortable, and momentary awkwardness tender. And on any given evening, the booths and bar seats are packed with a mix of young families and old salts, with people who have lived in Brooklyn for five months or 50 years. Often, Walter’s accommodates just me, when I want to be alone among others.
Opened in 2011 by Brooklyn restaurateurs Dylan Dodd and Danny Minch, Walter’s is the rare neighborhood restaurant with enough staying power to reliably rack up a waitlist 15 years later, even on weeknights.
Inside, it’s simple yet alluring, intimate yet boisterous, with four-tops crowded with bottles and dwindling plates of fries. The interiors conjure both the private and public spaces of New York City — the tin ceilings and woodwork of a Victorian-era brownstone, and the slatted benches and spherical milk-glass lamps of a turn-of-the-century subway station. The menu is oysters and shrimp cocktail, French dip, steak frites, points of crab toast — the kind of food you might see labeled as “New American” on a review aggregator site, but that you’ve been able to order in New York City for ages.
I don’t remember the first time I read Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” either. Reading it has since become a ritual.
First published in 1856, the poem meditates on the evening boat ride back to Fulton Ferry from what is now South Street Seaport, and the people, places, and things its narrator sees during the journey. But also, the comfort and beauty of knowing: “A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,” too.
I return to the poem every now and then, when I feel the need to make myself cry. The thought will strike me while I am going about my business, and I’ll realize that it’s just what I need. It is neither an obscure nor difficult poem, nor one that is special only to me; many high-schoolers have read it, along with many yearning 20-somethings and old men of letters. In what is probably the most famous line, Whitman seems to address all of us directly: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.”
Walter’s feels like home to me … in the same way that Walt Whitman’s poem distills the shared experience of living in a city like ours.
Walt Whitman never dined at Walter’s, but part of what makes it Walter’s is that, if someone told you he had, you’d almost believe it. He wrote “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” when he was living in Clinton Hill — about a 15-minute walk from where the restaurant is now. At the time, there was yet to be a bridge over the East River. Brooklyn was then even more its own small town.
Walter’s feels like home to me in the same way that Brooklyn does, in the same way that Whitman’s poem distills the shared experience of living in a city like ours. Through the little mundanities that punctuate our days together here, his narrator is able to reach into another dimension, and we meet each other across time. This is the nature of cities, he reasons — the spiritual plane they can bring us to.
Walter’s brings me there, too. Its walls of windows look out onto the southeast corner of Fort Greene Park and I watch its constant thrum of runners, readers, market shoppers, stroller-pushers, and people tucked into each other as they walk arm-in-arm along DeKalb. I recognize my neighbors as Whitman did: “Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.”
From these windows, I have seen the years cycle through: snowdrifts, magnolias and cherry blossoms, bare-skinned sunbathers, and crispy leaf-pile jumpers. I know I’m not the only one for whom Walter’s is a backdrop to the forward motion of a Brooklyn life, seasons marked with Caesar salad and a burger paired with a martini, all the while with tile underfoot and watching a bow-tied bartender with shaker in hand. As Whitman would’ve said: “These and all else were to me the same as they are to you.”
I remember one night, sitting alone at the bar, before me a glass of sparkling Vouvray and four halves of deviled egg topped with a jumble of crispy-fried capers. Looking around at the other people that made up Walter’s that night, I felt a warm and sudden kinship — safe in “the certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.” There was a distant closeness with my fellow diners, people whose names I did not know, but who loved a place that I loved, and I loved them for it. I remember this scene so clearly, but the timeline blurs. I could have been 24 or 29 or 33. Maybe I was somewhere in the future — 50, 70. Maybe I was all of these at once.
Walter’s is open daily for lunch and dinner, and brunch on Saturday and Sunday starts at 9 a.m.
Hannah Walhout is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor covering food, travel, design, sustainability, and the ways they collide. Follow her on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.
