And if you’re hankering for a taste of beefsteak after all this seafood bounty, call for the Portuguese “Prego” steak sandwich, which the kitchen will dress with a mess of fat fried oysters surf and turf–style for an extra fee.

Compared to the great seafood palaces across the river, the prices are a bargain. Depending on the season and availability, you might find all sorts of strange and delicious little wonders served up in the tiny, railcar-size Cobble Hill dining room, including silvery anchovies plated with moons of unmelted vanilla butter, bowls of risotto folded with chopped conch and smoked eel, and steamy helpings of that ugly-delicious Catalan speciality, goose barnacles, served with proper ceremony in a fold of white linen. The announcement of a new Alex Raij and Eder Montero restaurant is always a happy occasion, but when the joy of seafood is the specific theme in these seafood-challenged times, it’s cause for special celebration. You can obtain a fish or crustacean dish for every occasion at this excellent waterside establishment, ranging from a first-rate lunchtime crispy fish taco, to bowls of lobster-rich Cantonese-style “Longevity Noodles” for dinner, along with an entire perfectly cooked black sea bass baked to order in a fish-shaped pastry crust. Add in the million-dollar seafood lover’s view, which stretches from the iconic bridges to the north (Brooklyn, Manhattan, etc.), down south to the ferries and sailboats cutting to and fro in the open harbor, and you have one of the finest new seafood joints in town.Ģ64 Clinton St., at Verandah Pl., Cobble Hill 34 Jean-Georges Vongerichten has made a career of taking tired old formulas (French cooking, Asian fusion, farm to table) and standing them artfully on their head, and at this impressive new destination restaurant down on Pier 17 at South Street Seaport he does the same thing for that most finicky and exacting of restaurant genres - seafood. But mostly go because this kind of painstakingly elegant establishment is vanishing from our dining world faster than the fish are disappearing from the sea, and when Maguy Le Coze and chef Ripert do finally decide to close their doors for good, we won’t see a restaurant like this in the city again. Go for the impeccable technique emanating from the kitchen in everything from the baking of bread to the work of the legions of sauciers to the legendary butcher Justo Thomas, who breaks down his fish in the basement for eight hours a day. Go, of course, for the rainbow of seafood textures and flavors, which, despite the challenges of maintaining variety, quality, and sustainability in the face of mounting odds, has retained its color and range for all these years.

Go for the classic, old-world table service, which rivals any of the grand dowager restaurants in Paris. Go for the wine service, which is the finest in the city and possibly the entire USA.

When Maguy Le Coze and her brother Gilbert opened for business in 1986 at the bottom of the Equitable Life Assurance building on West 51st Street, their restaurant instantly became the top seafood destination in the city, and until Mme Le Coze and her chef-partner Eric Ripert decide to retire from the city’s dining scene, that’s not going to change.

Gish restaurant