'Let's Do Lunch'
Lyn Dobrin

Even though the lunch menu at Bryant & Cooper Steak- house offers a wide range of choices, you'll still see lots of items from the dinner menu - most particularly porterhouse steaks and prime ribs - coming out of the kitchen.

Gillis Poll, co-owner of the popular steak house, says that dinner items are readily available to lunch diners. "Many of our business customers tend to want a dinner- size portion of meat so they order from the dinner menu," he says.

Bryant & Cooper draws an audience from Huntington to Queens who find the terrific steaks, handsome decor, relaxing ambiance and good service to their liking. There's very little turnover in staff and Poll, who eats at the restaurant almost every day, prides himself on customer relations. "Because we're family-owned," he says, "we're a presence and known in the community." Some customers eat there three times a week, with others specifically coming in to dine at the bar or at the comfortable tables and easy chairs in the bar area.

Comfortable is the perfect word to describe the atmosphere. It is a place in which those wearing business attire and others dressed in jeans and a T-shirt can sit across the table from each other and feel welcomed and at ease.

When Bryant & Cooper opened 18 years ago, their chief competitor was Peter Luger. Today, with the resurgence of steak houses, there's a line-up of such restaurants along Northern Boulevard which, says Poll, has helped business. "We've never been busier," he says.

When asked what sets Bryant & Cooper apart from most other steak houses, Poll talks about their fresh hung meat. They select their own meat, age it themselves and put it out when they want to. The aging meat is on view through a glass window in the adjacent food shop where most of the signature dishes of the restaurant are sold for take-out.

In addition to a variety of prime meat, Bryant & Cooper offers large cuts of fish and what Poll describes as the "homey" touches: baked clams oreganato, tomatoes and mozzarella, creamed spinach and five styles of potatoes: hash browns, cottage fries and Lyonaise at lunch, with baked and mashed at dinner. A must is the crisp combo of cottage fries and French fried potatoes. "I pride myself on our sides," says Poll.

Bryant & Cooper is also justly famous for its special chopped salad of shrimp, string beans, tomatoes, onion, sweet pimento and bacon.

For lunch we started off with a delicious assortment of Eli's bread and then moved on to shrimp cocktail and clams oreganato. Then came the Bryant & Cooper salad. For entrees we had Porterhouse, prime ribs and the fish of the day, Dover sole. Each was cooked exactly to order, the sizes were substantial and the sides were terrific. The restaurant has its own buyer at the fish market (the popular Riverbay in Mineola is also owned by the family) and so fish comes directly from the market to the restaurant. For dessert we hd to try to two most popular offerings: banana cream pie and rice pudding. We didn't eat dinner that night.