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.