Randazzo's Clam Bar is Starboard

[krieger for the nytimes]The sauce. That's what got Pete Wells to Randazzo's Clam Bar in Sheepshead Bay. He breaks from filing on the city's hot new restaurants with a review of the 50-year-old Brooklyn seafood shack today.

"Randazzo’s makes any number of tomato sauces," writes Wells, "but only one Sauce. It has two speeds, spicy and medium, but the dark, intense, concentrated, oregano-accented essence is the same," he continues. "A pure distillation of Italian-American cuisine, the Sauce tastes as if a chemical analysis would reveal the blueprint for every great dish in every red-sauce joint in the country."

The restaurant closed after Hurricane Sandy, but was able to reopen just before Christmas. Much of the interior is new, but Helen Randazzo's recipes there are still the same. And with the exception of a stuffed lobster dish, lobster bisque, and corn-and-crab chowder, Wells is pleased by much of what the restaurant has to offer. He gives it one star.

[NYTimes]