![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/38fcadcb55fe7d143957934a9ed97c70de-20260717-NYmag-CapitaineL1002224-1.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Capitaine, a new \u201cseafood tavern\u201d that opened in June.
\n Photo: Scott Semler\n <\/p>\n
They\u2019re back again, the taverns. Not in the drinkable-museum sense \u2014 though you can still visit Fraunces Tavern<\/a>, the 18th-century inn where George Washington celebrated the routing of the British, which has been in near-continuous business ever since \u2014 but the living, breathing, beer-breathed one. In the past few months, here come Trudie\u2019s Tavern<\/a> in Carroll Gardens and Grimm Tavern<\/a> in the old Olmsted space, even a self-styled \u201cArgentine tavern\u201d<\/a> in Graciela<\/a>. Why the onrush?<\/p>\n A healthy republic suds itself at taverns. In colonial Massachusetts, the General Court levied fines on any town that did not operate one. America as such was born in them, where the future of the colonies was debated: Taverns, one English satirist correctly observed in the 18th Century, are \u201cthe nurseries of profaneness and treason.\u201d Alternatively, 250 years ago, Samuel Johnson aphorized mistily that \u201cthere is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.\u201d Does his pronouncement still hold? Was it merely inevitable that the taverns would follow the wave of wine bars that crashed, in greater or lesser Parisian style, onto our shores? Or is it that the tavern represents a retreat and a retrenchment, a defusion of restaurant fuss?<\/p>\n What the tavern telegraphs isn\u2019t gourmet or cosmopolitan. Even the word is shorthand for a kind of hard-worn simplicity (elsewhere in the early republic, a tavern was known as an \u201cordinary\u201d). Twenty years ago, any tavern worth its duck fat gussied itself up under the imported mantle of gastropub. Our new taverns hide their sophistication under a bushel. They\u2019re taking a page from the playbook of other non-\u201ctaverns\u201d like Gramercy<\/a>, Red Hook<\/a>, or Minetta<\/a>: You know what you\u2019re going to get, or so you think.<\/p>\n The rough-and-tumble taverners of olde would have been surprised to enter Trudie\u2019s on a sticky early Thursday evening recently and stumble directly onto a family of four with their dueling soothes: two kids under 10 plugged into their iPads, two parents plugged into their cocktails. Lusty darkness has no purchase here. A tavern, Nate Adler, one of Trudie\u2019s proprietors<\/a>, told me in his soft-shouldered, family-friendly dining room, is \u201csomeplace that brings the neighborhood together.\u201d<\/p>\n Turns out the appetites of the tavern regular and the after-schooler may not be as disparate as all that. Trudie\u2019s balloon-size hot pretzel, which comes to the table with honey mustard and salted butter, pleased both the adults and the 15-year-old at mine. Trudie\u2019s roast chicken \u2014 another tavern staple \u2014 is brined and burnished, its inclusion on the menu inspired by the Zabar\u2019s rotisserie chickens of Adler\u2019s Upper West Side childhood. The Zabar\u2019s mention should be enough to flag the Jewish American influence. There\u2019s \u201cOne Big Potato Pancake\u201d to start (not really all that big, honor compels me to report, though nicely sprinkled with smoked trout and tobiko); egg noodles; and, with the chicken, Adler\u2019s German Jewish grandmother\u2019s cucumber-and-sour-cream salad. There are plenty of drinks to be downed alongside, including the house\u2019s own custom-brewed beer: A tavern demands as much. But maybe it\u2019s a measure of our leaner peptide present that Trudie\u2019s savory, schmaltz-dotted martinis can be ordered, as is increasingly an option, in regular or half-sizes.<\/p>\n If Trudie\u2019s, with a sleeping infant in the dining room and no nuts for the allergen-averse in the carrot cake, is a tavern for the family, Lonnies<\/a>, the new Boerum Hill spot from Sean Rembold and Caron Callahan of Brooklyn Heights\u2019s Ingas Bar<\/a> and a tavern in all but name, is one for date night. It has a dressier, more modish affect with slabs of pink marble, framed Nan Goldin posters, and a soundtrack heavy on early-aughts indie, but the food is close as kin. The locally famous Ingas burger is ported over basically unchanged, though it\u2019s joined here by a brick chicken with garlicky chermoula. While much else on the menu reaches toward the gourmet, the two bars in one space leave little doubt that the tavern mind-set prevails. The bartender, pouring out multi-gin house martinis, mentioned that plans are already in place to expand in the coming months to the currently unattached bar next door.<\/p>\n Capitaine<\/a>, a \u201cseafood tavern, of sorts,\u201d is a tavern retrofitted: It takes over the space that was Libertine, Cody Pruitt\u2019s far-West Village bistro. I liked<\/a> Libertine\u2019s scruffy Gallicism well enough, but I found its prices punishing, and Capitaine suggests I wasn\u2019t the only one. Pruitt and partner Jacob Cohen have rejiggered the focus from the kitchen to the bar and the land to the sea. While not cheap, the prices have come down some, and the seafood focus (fruits de mer towers start at $65) makes it easier to nibble piecewise. New executive chef Mike Gutterman, who helped open nearby seafood-heavy Crevette, is now in the kitchen. What is a seafood tavern, of sorts? Not one that can dispense with either a cheeseburger or steak-frites, though the usual roast chicken has been swapped out for a flat-grilled dorade with a punchy bird\u2019s-eye-chile a\u00efoli. The house lobster roll is taken from the fish shack to somewhere more urbane, the usual mayo replaced by a light and welcome dressing of lobster-infused brown-butter hollandaise.<\/p>\n On a Sunday night, the bar was buzzier than the dining room. This, more than anything else, gave Capitaine its tavern airs. For all the good old gruffness promised by the tavern branding, a contemporary clean dominates. When the next revolution is plotted, it won\u2019t be over Capitaine\u2019s salt-flecked slices of black-and-white ice-cream cake. In a few weeks of tavern-going, I found what I most missed was the ripe, filthy possibility of profanity or treason. Is it wrong to wish for worse?<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now<\/a>
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 27, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n
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\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 27, 2026, issue of
\n New York Magazine.<\/p>\n