Five O’Clock at Restaurants Is Baby Hour
Gus’s Chop House, which opened a little more than a year ago on the border between Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens neighborhoods, has a dining room of rustic severity. The bench seats resemble church pews; a Shaker-style monolith of a fireplace broods against the far wall like a disgruntled patriarch. The menu is standard chophouse fare—you could happily make do with a steak and a couple of Manhattans—with occasional dramatic twists and flourishes. An appetizer of octopus dressed with shiso and Habanada pepper is served as a stark, single tentacle, unfurling atop the plate like a cephalopod “Spiral Jetty.” On a recent Sunday evening, during dinner at the ungodly hour of 5 P.M., a surprising number of tables were full. This was not because Gus’s is trendy and reservations are sc...