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Dame’s Second Act Is Here — and It Has Nothing to Do With Fish and Chips

At Lord’s, it’s all about offal

Erika Adams is the editor of Eater Boston.

Prior to the humble basket of fried hake that upturned their lives and sparked the idea for Dame, owners Ed Szymanski and Patricia Howard had been dreaming up plans for a modern, meat-focused English restaurant.

A man in a green apron and white shirt sits in a booth with a woman leaning over top of the booth behind him.
Lord’s co-owners Ed Szymanski and Patricia Howard.

“It’s so weird to me that we’ve become known for seafood cooking,” says Ed Szymanski, the chef behind arguably the most popular seafood restaurant to open in NYC in the past two years. Dame was the first seafood restaurant he had ever worked in, let alone run. “The extent of my fish cooking was putting it on as a special every now and then.”

The pre-seafood-era restaurant was going to be called PESH — an acronym of their names, they recall with a grimace — and it built on the more experimental British meat cooking that Szymanski was building a reputation for at Cherry Point, the now closed Greenpoint restaurant that received a two-star nod in the New York Times under Szymanski’s tenure.

A couple years, a pandemic, and a slam-dunk rendition of fish-and-chips later, a sibling to Dame is coming to life. Szymanski and Howard’s highly anticipated second restaurant, a modern English bistro now called Lord’s, is set to open on October 3 at 506 Laguardia Place, between West Houston and Bleeker streets.

If Dame was the team’s pandemic pivot, Lord’s is picking up where Szymanski’s cooking left off at Cherry Point, and nods more directly to his English roots. He cites chefs from London’s dining scene that he worked for prior to New York, including James Lowe and Tomos Parry of Michelin-starred restaurants Lyle’s and Brat, respectively. His love for Fergus and Margot Henderson — the godparents of nose-to-tail cooking — is reflected at Lord’s.

“This my wheelhouse,” Szymanski says. “This is the kind of food I fell in love with and made me want to cook.”

A golden, oblong meat pie covered in a golden pastry shell with other plates of food surrounding it.
Szymanski’s meat pies — a signature dish from his days at Cherry Point — are also on the menu at Lord’s. Fillings will rotate out, but to start, the pie is stuffed with chicken, pig’s trotter, and leeks.
A pink block of terrine with orange relish and yellow mustard on the side.
Pig’s head terrine with a piccalilli relish and mustard.
A vintage bowl decorated with blue flowers holds a serving of brown braised tripe.
Braised tripe with cipollini onions and madeira.

It is perhaps easiest to describe Lord’s by what it is not. It’s not a steakhouse, nor a gastropub, according to Szymanski and Howard. There’s no honking burger or glistening, plate-sized roast. Seafood plays a supporting role on Lord’s menu in preparations like deviled crab on toast and skate with a seaweed called sea spaghetti — “It’s like tagliatelle, but from the sea,” Szymanski says — to appease customers who see the Dame duo and instantly imagine plates of fish. But this is undoubtedly a place that respects meat, from the nose to the tail. Pig’s head terrine and braised tripe are on the opening menu, and Szymanski lights up as he ticks off future charcuterie plans, from goose rillettes to duck liver parfait to saucisson hanging in the downstairs cellar space. “It is a more nuanced and offal-y approach to meat cooking,” Szymanski says.

A wide plate layered with black lentils, an orange egg yolk, and a skewer of mushrooms laid over top.
Vegetarians can eat a meal here, too. Lord’s grilled mushroom kebab is served with lentils and egg yolk.
Three vintage plates displaying food laid out on a marble surface.
From L to R: Steamed clams with black pudding and cider, deviled crab on toast, and a curried lamb scotch egg.
A plate of four browned, saucy oysters in their shells.
Oysters Kilpatrick layered with guanciale and a warm mignonette of brown butter, Worcestershire sauce, and shallots.
A Queen of Puddings dessert on a white plate with a blueberry-garnished cocktail to the left and a spoon sitting on the right side of the plate.
The Queen of Puddings has a bread crumb and custard base, jam, and toasted meringue layered on top. “It’s like a precursor to baked Alaska,” Szymanski says.

The duo is nearly as excited about the amount of space that they have at Lord’s as they are about their forthcoming charcuterie game. The elegant, high-ceilinged dining room, designed by Howard, fits 60 seats, including 10 stools at a bar running the length of the room. There’s hundreds of bottles of wine stored in the basement.

Stacks of gold-rimmed plates with a vintage painted design of people in the countryside in the middle.
Szymanski and Howard sourced vintage plates for Lord’s during a summer trip to Paris, London, and Rome — and then upstate New York, after the plates didn’t all make it back from Europe in one piece.

To compare: at 24 seats, Dame is a tiny restaurant. The kitchen, squeezed in the back of the dining room, can’t fit more than two people at a time. There’s no freezer, or proper dishwasher. “We’ve been making do with something so shoebox-y that it’s nice to have a real space and go back to that style of cooking that we were originally planning on,” Szymanski says.

Lord’s is open from Monday to Friday, 5:30 to 11 p.m. Reservations are available via Resy.

A brick-walled dining room with dark green accents and dark wood tables and booths.
“Dame is very light wood and we were scared of color,” says Howard. “It’s mostly off-white with wood and some navy accents. Here, I wanted something more bold.”
Three repeating wooden arches are installed behind a brick-walled bar with a dark green, marble-topped counter and brown bar stools in front.
Le Coucou’s singular arch over the bar was the inspiration behind Lord’s bar design.
The dark wood exterior of Lord’s, with double doors and a dark green awning decorated with gold tassles.
Lord’s opens on October 3.

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