Lonnies
112 Bond St., at Pacific St., Boerum HIll
Like Ingas, the brand new restaurant takes over a nook house.
Photograph: Courtesy of Lonnies
Sean Rembold and Caron Callahan, the married couple who run Ingas Bar in Brooklyn Heights, are very deliberate after they title issues. Maybe overly so: Per week after the delivery of every of their kids, the hospital known as demanding they lastly give their infants names. “We’re perfectionists,” Rembold explains. “We work collectively and need one another to be joyful,” Ingas, which they opened 4 years in the past, is called for Rembold’s great-aunt from Louisville; it was the one title they might give you. This time, when confronted with opening a brand new restaurant a few neighborhoods south, they confronted the identical problem. “For sure, names don’t come simple — and we didn’t need a b.s. title,” Rembold says. This Wednesday, Might 20, they’ll formally open Lonnies (which, like Ingas, is styled sans apostrophe).
Lonnie Lanham was a big, near-mystical determine throughout Rembold’s formative years in Kentucky. The actual Lonnie was the dad of Rembold’s buddy, a Vietnam vet turned hairdresser, and, Rembold says, probably the most free-spirited and complex particular person he’d ever met. “We’d go to Lonnie’s to sit back out, do what we needed to do — it represented full freedom.”
The objective is to increase that very same sense of freedom to the menu, to characteristic no matter’s contemporary and enjoyable. Ingas opened in winter, so Lonnies already has the benefit of debuting within the spring, when precise produce is rising. “We have now peas, greens — it’s a lot simpler,” Callahan says. The menu is “lo-fi, simple, and approachable,” Rembold says. The one restriction for him and his government chef, Eddie Acosta: no fuel, however fortunately Rembold can reminisce and possibly even revisit some preparations from his induction-range-only days cooking at Marlow & Sons.
Lonnies will have fun native elements, however it’ll additionally serve a low-key prime rib, served day-after-day with minimal garnish that might be, surprisingly, a price play when in comparison with the high-grade porterhouses round city. Rembold’s culinary sensibilities lean traditional, or what he describes as “elegant, fewer elements, no more. To not a monastic diploma.” He’s additionally reviving rooster beneath a brick from his repertoire — a spatchcocked chook cooked in a forged iron that he’s carried with them by way of his profession — and, essentially, a burger, with beef coming from Paisano’s butcher just a few blocks away. Callahan, for her half, is most enthusiastic about dessert: “a creamy Basque cheesecake!”
Callahan says the objective for the design is to match the menu: “Nothing’s overly designed, like Sean’s meals.” In changing the previous Café Kitsuné, Callahan took some inspiration from the sorts of diners she frequents throughout children’ soccer journeys — “we deal with ourselves to an enormous slice of pie in a comfortable sales space” — whereas giving it an Artwork Deco makeover. Two-seater, freestanding banquets Callahan calls “sweeties” will anchor the house, with rectangular cream-colored tiles main company into striped and stained Scandinavian-ish wood flooring. She discovered classic lights from the Czech Republic that glow streetlamp yellow, not LED cream, and bleed into the cherry-red branding, which exhibits up on menus and in different innate particulars all through the restaurant. There might be half a dozen seats on the bespoke bar in again, accessible through reservation. “We all the time wish to sit on the bar,” Callahan says, “and this one is extra intimate, no folks standing behind you.” Up entrance, there’s a separate chrome-banded bar topped with honeyed marble. This might be open for walk-ins.
One spot that’s a noticeable improve from Ingas is acoustics (that’s largely as a result of tin ceilings in Ingas). The playlist consists of Invoice Callahan (no relation) and the Nationwide — a pure thematic match with Nan Goldin’s stark, unflinching {photograph} on the wall, and a mixture that ought to make the neighborhood dads really feel proper at residence.
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