Walt Whitman never dined at Walter\u2019s, but part of what makes it Walter\u2019s is that, if someone told you he had, you\u2019d almost believe it. He wrote \u201cCrossing Brooklyn Ferry\u201d when he was living in Clinton Hill \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
Walter\u2019s feels like home to me in the same way that Brooklyn does, in the same way that Whitman\u2019s 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\u00a0reach into\u00a0another dimension,\u00a0and\u00a0we meet each other across time. This is the nature of cities, he reasons \u2014 the spiritual plane they can bring us to.<\/p>\n
Walter\u2019s\u00a0brings me there, too.\u00a0Its walls of windows look out onto the southeast corner of Fort Greene Park\u00a0and\u00a0I watch its constant thrum of runners, readers, market shoppers, stroller-pushers,\u00a0and\u00a0people tucked into each other as they walk arm-in-arm along DeKalb. I recognize my neighbors as Whitman did: \u201cJust as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019m not the only one for whom Walter\u2019s 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\u2019ve said: \u201cThese\u00a0and\u00a0all else were to me the same as they are to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
I remember one night, sitting alone at the bar, before me a glass of sparkling Vouvray\u00a0and\u00a0four halves of deviled egg topped with a jumble of crispy-fried capers. Looking around at the other people that\u00a0made up\u00a0Walter\u2019s that night, I felt a warm\u00a0and\u00a0sudden kinship \u2014 safe in \u201cthe certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.\u201d 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 \u2014 50, 70. Maybe I was all of these at once.<\/p>\n
Walter\u2019s is open daily for lunch and dinner, and brunch on Saturday and Sunday starts at 9 a.m.<\/p>\n
Hannah Walhout is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor covering food, travel, design, sustainability, and the ways they collide. Follow her on Instagram<\/a>. Follow Resy<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n \t\t