The Dog Days Are Over for Marlow & Sons

Have you checked on your elder millennials this week? It’s been a rough one for our lost generation. First the Pencil Factory in Greenpoint announced its closure after 25 years, and on Monday, Marlow & Sons, a micro-generation’s date-spot-slash-proto-co-working-space, said its preemptive farewell after 21 years as well. (It remains open through Sunday.) Two decades in business deserves a victory lap, not tears, but if you remember where you were when Night Ripper came out, your inboxes will have filled with lamentations and reminiscences. Mine did.

“I’m just watching that 2008 Ford Edge commercial and crying,” texted my friend Celia, whose first date with the local indie-rock bassist on the rise had been at Marlow way back when. Oysters, wine, bread, and cheese — “the original girl dinner,” she told me. I had to confess I wasn’t familiar with the apparently canonical car ad, but there it is: pitched directly at the youngish and hip, at the moment that “Williamsburg” as a trope was breaking through to the mainstream. A gang of friends piles into their Edge, beep-boops an address into their primitive GPS, and, as Band of Horses plays in the background, off they go. Our heroine, doe-eyed in the backseat, is enraptured by the city as seen through the moonroof, so much so that she forgets to get out at their destination: Marlow & Sons. (It goes without saying that no one who lived in Williamsburg would’ve actually driven an Edge.)

Marlow was the second restaurant from Andrew Tarlow and Mark Firth, who helped codify the idea of the new-old Williamsburg restaurant with Diner a few years before. If Diner was the restaurant that made the neighborhood, Marlow was the everything-else complement: “a commissary/newsstand/tavern/oyster bar,” wrote The New Yorker, with a kind of out-of-time energy — “pure ironic-nostalgic pastiche.” That would have been cringe — not that we’d have called it that back then — but for the fact that the food was simply, excitingly good: piles of oysters; snout-y, nose-to-tail piggery (the Marlow group soon had its own in-house butcher and then its own butcher shop); chalkboard menus; flattering low light. If the flacks and ad men of the ’50s had ‘21’ and the machers of the ’60s had The Four Seasons, the newly digital creative class had places like Marlow. There were the in-house celebrities, who were cooler than the big celebrities — this magazine noted the patronage of alt power couple Alexa Chung and her Arctic Monkey, “drinking too much at Marlow” — and the longtime staff, who had a local-celebrity glow of their own. “It really did have the reputation of being the greatest hang with the tastiest food,” says Natasha Pickowicz, whose first job in New York was as a pastry cook at Marlow in 2013. “You felt rich even though you were making minimum wage.”

That all was, we noticed suddenly and with a shock, more than 15 years ago. Celia’s got two kids and a house in Sullivan County with that first-date bassist. We made our way over to Marlow on Tuesday to find the bones we remembered and a place we really didn’t. Marlow’s menu had changed over the years, its rustic-tavern cuisine swapped at some point for Japanese, then into more of a casual café. For its final week, it’s open only 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. — no evenings, which at one point would’ve been inconceivable — and by the time we arrived at 1:30 p.m., the day’s sandwiches had sold out. What had happened, we wondered? But then, we hadn’t been in years. Even Ford discontinued the Edge after 2024.

Still, Marlow’s influence endures. If Diner seeded the idea of this kind of “Brooklyn cooking,” first to Manhattan, then to the world, Marlow helped pioneer the all-day café and the market that doubles as a restaurant, or vice versa. (Tarlow’s wife, Kate Huling, sold her occasional clothing and accessories collections there, including bags made of leather from cows that provided the restaurant’s beef.) Their cooks and servers and staff — if you cooked at one, you ended up cooking at the other — fanned out, forming a Marlow diaspora that still influences cooking in the city. Caroline Fidanza, its first chef, opened Saltie, her Williamsburg sandwich shop, before returning to the Marlow Collective fold. Sean Rembold, her compatriot and then successor, now runs Ingas Bar in Brooklyn Heights, a Marlowish place if ever there was one. The partners of the Hart’s-Cervo’s-The Fly-Eel Bar group all met at Diner and Marlow.

Our attempted Irish wake had run aground. So much has changed in these parts from the places that our little cohort loved and patronized: Dressler gone, the DuMonts gone, the Bonitas gone. Once upon a time, journalists visiting the neighborhood to scope out the new Brooklyn scene would be treated to colorful reports of “a cocaine dealer who sells vegan cheese” — “the kind of guy,” Tom Mylan, the Marlow butcher once said, “who makes this place tick.” The clock has probably stopped on that. We left Marlow & Sons and walked down the block to the butcher shop, Marlow & Daughters. We bought loaves of She Wolf bread and considered some $32 artisanal vinegar. Nothing lasts forever, but on the speakers overhead, Passion Pit was playing.

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