Lil' Deb's Oasis has announced it will close in mid-October. On Sunday, October 4, Lil' Deb's is planning a block party to celebrate the closing, from early afternoon to evening, in the street outside the restaurant at 747 Columbia Street.
Yesterday, Elazar Sontag, food critic for the Washington Post, published a paean to Lil' Deb's Oasis, which opened the same year he started college at Bard: "One of America's most important restaurants is closing. It feels personal." The following is quoted from the article:
I'd heard plenty about the buzzy new restaurant before I made the 30-minute trek from campus, but nothing could have prepared me for what was inside. A bag of tennis balls swayed from the ceiling like a mobile over a baby's crib. Displays of tropical fruits erupted from the bar, and seat cushions were splashed in trippy tie-dye patterns made by a friend of the restaurant. A cook worked the line with their hair wrapped up around a ripe banana. Another had fashioned a shoelace into a necklace dripping with makeshift charms.
I had walked into an iridescent beach shack where to be different was to be normal, and to be gay--something I still had very little practice being--was the only way to be, at least judging by the staff and other diners. I wasn't even seated yet, and already I knew I needed to be a part of this. Not just to eat here, but to become the kind of person who inhabited this impossibly cool restaurant as matter-of-factly as if they were stopping by their local diner. I needed to belong.
Lil' Deb's Oasis closes forever on October 12.
Any bets on whether the legendary stage purchased by the ill-fated Tourism Board will finally make an appearance at this block party?
ReplyDeleteWill Theresa Joyner stop by to reminisce about the years Deb’s spent in Planning Board purgatory while she presided over the board; delays that certainly didn’t make their attempted expansion any easier?
And will Jeff Dodson and Tom DePietro give a farewell address on the Restore NY debacle? Deb’s withdrew its own application for state funding to restore the expansion property after being possibly encouraged (by whom? 🤔) to clear the path to fund the demolition of Bliss Towers (something that wouldn’t qualify for the grant anyway). Then, following a contentious and deeply divisive public hearing presided over by Tom, the city’s application for HHA was never completed.
Between years in Planning Board limbo and a state-grant process that went nowhere, there’s quite a bit of local-government history behind the story of why that expansion never happened.