Brunch has been big for the restaurant’s entire 16-year run.
Photo: Liz Clayman
Like Caputo’s Bake Shop from 1904 and the Episcopal church built in 1884, Buttermilk Channel in Carroll Gardens is a time capsule from another era, albeit one that’s slightly more recent. Open since 2008, the restaurant’s house-made pickles and cheddar waffles with buttermilk fried chicken call back to the years of selvedge denim and artisanal mayonnaise. But if the menu feels dated in 2024, that’s only because the restaurant’s many regulars wouldn’t let owner Doug Crowell change it. “Our relationships with our customers are really deep,” Crowell says. “I mean, their children grew up eating here.”
But now, 16 years after opening, Crowell is closing the restaurant to make time for other projects, including the Boerum Hill bistro French Louie that he runs alongside Ryan Angulo and which recently turned a decade old. “We’re starting to refresh it,” says Crowell. “We’re looking at what’s still working and what needs to be new.”
For that to happen, Crowell needs to close Buttermilk Channel, where he’s the sole owner. “It’s a very personal restaurant for me,” he says. “I can’t put it on cruise control or give it to other people. I have my eyes and hands on every detail.” Its last day is December 31.
Two Buttermilk Channel outposts in Japan will stay open, and Crowell hints he may reopen the restaurant in another location if the circumstances are right. That’s not much consolation for the restaurant’s regulars, who learned about the closure in an email.
Through the years, Buttermilk Channel offered the kind of comfortable space — paper on the tables that kids could scribble with crayons, outdoor seating for brunch on nice days — and easygoing food (duck meatloaf, fluffy pancakes, warm lamb salad with sturdy greens and a soft-boiled egg) that appealed to the area’s many families, and it quickly became a mainstay.
“It’s heartbreaking,” says Matt Polevoy, who lives in Park Slope. He and his wife have been dining at the restaurant for years. They recall stumbling into the dining room during a nor’easter when nothing else was open to order a pecan-pie sundae. In 2015, they got married at City Hall — then had dinner at the communal table in the back. “It was perfect,” he says. “That’s how I’ll remember that place.”
