Flatbush Avenue runs the length of Brooklyn and most people only ever use the top half of it. Follow it all the way south, past Marine Park and Floyd Bennett Field, and just before the bridge to the Rockaways there is a lobster house with its own dock on the water. Nick's Lobster House at 2777 Flatbush Avenue is a seafood near me result that comes with a waterfront, which is not something the rest of the borough's seafood restaurants can say.
Ask Karpo whether the deck is open today, how late the kitchen runs at the weekend, and what else is worth stopping for on the way out.
The hours have a shape, and Tuesday is out
This is the first thing to check. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday the kitchen opens in the early afternoon, around two, and runs to about ten. Friday and Saturday it opens at midday and runs to eleven. Sunday it opens at midday and closes at ten. Tuesday it does not open at all.
A restaurant that does not serve lunch on three days of the week is unusual enough to catch people out, and this is a long way to drive for a closed door. The weekend is when the full day is available, and it is also when the deck is used properly.
The water is the reason
Mill Basin is a tidal inlet off Jamaica Bay, and the restaurant sits directly on it with a dock, outdoor tables and boats tied up alongside. In a borough of two and a half million people, the number of places where you can sit outside beside working water and eat is very small, and almost all of them are at the southern edge.
Boats can and do arrive by water, which tells you what kind of place this is. The clientele is local, the tables turn slowly, and on a warm evening the deck is the whole point. Ask for outside when you book and take inside only if the weather has already decided for you.
Order plainly
Lobster is the headline and steamed is the version to take. A lobster house that has been doing this for decades does not need to dress it up, and the test of one is whether the meat is cooked through without going stringy, which steaming handles better than any other method. Butter, lemon, a cracker and a bib is the entire apparatus.
Beyond that, the menu runs the familiar ranges: clams, oysters, fried platters, pasta with seafood. Order the raw bar first if it is running, share a fried item, and keep one lobster per two people if you are also ordering anything else, because the portions assume it is the whole meal.
Getting there
This is the far end of the borough and it is a driving destination for most people, with parking on site — a genuine luxury in New York. On transit, the B41 runs the length of Flatbush Avenue and the Q35 continues toward the bridge, but from Manhattan the whole journey is over an hour and involves a bus at the end.
If you are combining it with anything, combine it with the nature. Floyd Bennett Field, the city's first municipal airport and now part of Gateway National Recreation Area, is minutes away, and Marine Park's salt marsh has a trail through it. Both are underused, both are free, and both make the drive south worth more than a meal alone.
It is worth understanding how much water this part of Brooklyn actually has. Jamaica Bay covers some twenty square miles of open water, marsh islands and creeks, most of it inside the city limits and protected as part of a national recreation area, with an airport on one side and a barrier peninsula on the other. Mill Basin is one of the inlets cut into its northern edge. That geography is why there are boats tied up behind a restaurant on Flatbush Avenue, and why the bird life over the table is herons and osprey rather than pigeons.
The seasonal swing is sharper here than in the rest of the borough for the same reason. Summer evenings on the deck are the version everybody wants; from November the wind off the bay makes outside a short proposition and the room inside becomes the point. Both work, but they are different restaurants, and the drive is easier to justify in the months when the deck is open.
What Mill Basin is
The neighbourhood itself is residential, low-rise and quiet, built on filled land around the inlet, with a large Russian-speaking and Italian-American population and almost no visitor traffic. It looks nothing like the Brooklyn that appears in photographs of Williamsburg and Dumbo, and that is a reasonable argument for going.
The edges are where it gets interesting: the marshland, the bay, the bridge across to the Rockaways, and the long horizontal light that comes off open water in the late afternoon. Time the meal so you are on the deck for that rather than arriving after dark.
Practical notes
Nick's Lobster House is at 2777 Flatbush Avenue in Mill Basin, Brooklyn. It opens around 2pm to 10pm on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 11pm on Friday and Saturday, and noon to 10pm on Sunday. It is closed on Tuesdays. There is a dock and outdoor deck on the water, and parking on site. The B41 bus runs down Flatbush Avenue. Floyd Bennett Field and Marine Park are both minutes away.
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know whether the deck is open today, how late the kitchen runs at the weekend, and what else is worth stopping for on the way out? Ask Karpo for this week's hours, a table order that does not double up on lobster, and a marsh walk to pair with the drive.
