A Bay Ridge Icon Has Closed!!!!!!!!!!!!! What Will Become Of The Building????????????

                            When I was a young ingenue, darlings--and I really was! -- I moved to Brooklyn in December of 1983.  Just in time for Christmas season in Manhattan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                               At that time, the building pictured above was known as the New Royal Restaurant.  The Bay Ridge Avenue subway stop was mine because I lived in that neighborhood, over at 6647 Bergen Place.  Many a night, after a tiresome day at work, or when it was too hot to cook--I had no AC then, though my bedroom had two windows that got a wonderful breeze from the bay.  And the view was gorgeous.  Still, it seemed like some nights I would float up the subway steps, and straight into my seat at the New Royal.  Margaret, the waitress, always served me, and I almost always had Chicken Parm.  It was delicious.  Not so when I had the scallops the night before visiting my father in Florida, back in 1992, when I developed a terrible GI illness that ruined the vacation.  I remember my father taking me to see a doctor, and all I got was a lecture on sexual morality and told to see a GI person when I returned to New York.  I did, and there was no sexual component to what I had, and it mysteriously cleared up on its own.  After three weeks, and a loss of eleven pounds!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                 Fifteen years later, after living in Woodside--the less said, the better--I come back to my beloved Bay Ridge, not only to find the New Royal is now Emphasis, but the staff and quality were lacking.  Something happened in those 15 years, and it was not good.

                                   Emphasis says it has been around for 21 years, and while that may be true, my experience proves it was around as a restaurant longer than that.  Try 30 or 40 years.

                                      It closed for good on January 9, 2026!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                    Still, I mourn the loss of a place once important to me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                     As Sally Bowles says, "It isn't that long a stay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"