How Two Brothers Made a Boat the Hottest Table in NYC

There is something about sitting on a boat, sipping a spritz, eating a lobster roll and breathing in the fresh water that truly captures the essence of summer. And if it happens that the boat is filled with beautiful people imbibing Aperol spritzes while looking at the sunset, then so be it. If you’ve found yourself enjoying this simple formula of boats and drinking (but not actually sailing) in New York City in recent years, you should probably tip your sailor hat to brothers Alex and Miles Pincus and their company Crew.

Though there are plenty of other lovely establishments with great oysters and waterfront views—The Fulton, Brooklyn Crab, Baylander Steel Beach, even Blu on the Hudson or the rooftop bar at The Rockaway Hotel—there is something different about a Crew property. It’s the perfect blend of Nantucket quaintness, St. Tropez glam, and yacht club cool mixed with a bit of New York grit. With multiple properties under their name, the recent opening of the 20,000‑sq‑ft indoor-outdoor seafood destination Yacht Club, this pair has established themselves as the kings of nautical-themed dining in just 10 years.

The brothers, who hail from New Orleans, both found their own paths to water at a young age. Miles attended sailing camp and quickly fell in love with it, even buying an old sailboat and rebuilding it before age 16. Alex loved kayaking and went on to do a number of white water rafting expeditions, but he also learned to sail.

Hospitality was in their blood as well—their father worked in hotels. They opened New Orleans bar Seaworthy back in 2016, but it wasn’t until Alex had a birthday party on a ship built by Miles that they came up with the boat element. The party had become too crowded, and they thought if they were on a boat that wasn’t moving, it would be safer but still fun.

Related: Like a Local: Your Guide to Cape May, NJ

And that is how the city came to board and love the boat bars Grand Banks and Pilot. Both old sailboats—the Sherman Zwicker AKA the Grand Banks boat is an octogenarian 142-foot sail-powered cod fishing schooner brought down from Maine—that now are floating restaurants were fully embraced by New Yorkers and Brooklyners alike looking for something a bit different in their cocktail experience. Though Grand Banks had a rather auspicious start (let’s just say those whitewater rafting skills were put to good use) it quickly became one of the most popular summer spots in the city. They went on to open landlocked Tribeca bar Holy Water, a tribute to their New Orleans roots, as well as water-adjacent venues Sailor’s Choice (Hudson Yards), Drift In (West Side Highway), High Tide (Fulton Ferry Landing), Fairweather (Highline), and now Yacht Club.

Yacht Club is perhaps their most ambitious undertaking yet. Alex describes it as feeling like “you are on a boat in the sky,” and that description is quite accurate. Perched on the 10th floor of the Starrett‑Lehigh Building in Chelsea, you get the perfect panoramic view from any spot of the river. Seating 125 inside, it will stay open through the year, unlike their more seasonal bars such as Drift In, Pilot, and Grand Banks. It follows suit with the rest of their fleet with its menu, decor including columns made to look like masts, using the building’s curves as lines of a ship, walnut-lined interiors, and Art Deco rope detailing.

Food52 chatted with Alex Pincus, CEO of Crew, about cornering this particular dining market. “We create all of our projects because we have to. We fall in love with a location or a boat or a building, and it becomes an obsession. So whether it is a good idea or a bad idea, or somewhere in between, when we believe in it, we just start. There’s certainly a DNA to what we do and we’ve found that this manifests itself in unique ways in each new environment.

With Yacht Club being your first year-round, all-weather space, how has that changed how you think about hospitality and what Crew can offer?

Over time we’ve become comfortable with the idea that our vision for hospitality is the right vision, at least for us, and that we have the potential to offer something meaningful to the world of restaurants. Still, it’s always a challenge, and this is by far our biggest challenge since opening Grand Banks a little over a decade ago. We’ve put together an incredible team of supremely talented folks from the kitchen to the bar to our leadership, and I’m beyond excited to see what we can do together.

Was there a moment when you realized you had essentially cornered the NYC market on chic, nautical dining?

Ha! I’ve never thought about it like that. My brother Miles and I are very in our own world in a way. We’re so busy with trying to create things together, and make stuff that we believe in, that it’s almost like the outside world doesn’t exist (except for our wives and kids, and friends). That said, I’m always ending up somewhere nautical that is super chic or perfectly divey that I wish I made, or eating something incredible I wish we had put out of one of our kitchens.

It’s not about cornering anything for me so much as it is about realizing ideas, and hopefully making them great. We’re just doing our thing and trying to have some fun together and if we ever get to the point where we feel like we’ve cornered the market, if that’s even possible, I think I would be suddenly very depressed because that’s kind of the end of the journey, and I’m so heavily invested in the process.

Why do you think New Yorkers are so drawn to the boat-and-bar experience—even those who’ve never set foot on a sailboat?

There is an incredible history of maritime dining in New York City. That’s how we ended up making Grand Banks in the first place. In the 1800s the primary source of food for all New Yorkers was oysters, and they were served in floating saloons all along the waterfront called “oyster barges”. Miles and I used to have a little sailing company that we started and I read a book about the early oyster barges and was just blown away by the idea.

At the same time, there’s just something about being on the water, where the land and sea meet, that is magical. It’s urbanity and nature colliding. And then old boats are gorgeous and alive and they mediate that space between these dynamic forces that shape our lives. Add some delicious food and drinks and how can you not love it?

When we are at our best, and the elements are on our side, I really don’t think there is a better food and beverage experience in New York than sitting on the deck of Grand Banks eating a freshly shucked oyster and sipping a cocktail.

Related: How to Shuck Oysters—Our Complete Guide

Do you see yourselves expanding this concept beyond New York—or does it only work in a city with this kind of energy and waterfront?

It’s hard to beat New York and the juxtaposition of its energy and its waterfront!

But we are working on a few projects outside of the city. We just bought a building in the French Quarter in New Orleans, built in the 1830s that was originally a ship’s chandlery, that sold supplies to boats going up and down the Mississippi River. We’re making a proper French Quarter restaurant, something that I think is in our DNA, and I can’t wait to see it come to life.

We are also in the midst of restoring America’s oldest yacht, the Gilded Age schooner Coronet, which was built in New York in 1885, and which will hopefully take that New York spirit with her out into the world.

What’s been your biggest challenge in building this kind of business—sailing logistics, real estate, hospitality competition, or something else entirely?

Funnily, we’ve taken the two things everyone always says are hard – boats and restaurants – and combined them! So we’ve got all of the challenges of each, from maintenance of historic ships on a dynamic waterfront to the wild and hyper-competitive nature of restaurant life in New York City. It’s an insane undertaking, but it’s never boring.

The journey of bringing Sherman Zwicker from Maine to NYC must’ve been epic. What challenges did you face, and when did you realize it could become more than just a restored vessel?

We had an idea. And that’s it. No track record. No investors. No boat. No location. And everyone we spoke to said it wasn’t possible. But we just put our heads down and tried to solve each problem one by one, with a smile on our faces, and luckily I think, an innocence or naivety about how hard it would actually be.

After convincing all of the relevant authorities that it was possible to operate a floating oyster bar on New York Harbor, and after convincing the prior owner of the Sherman Zwicker to gift her to us, and convincing Hudson River Park that this could be an amenity for the city, we built out the restaurant together with friends and family in a sleepless six week marathon, paid for [with] credit cards and the little savings we had.

As we approached the opening, we assumed that at the very least, we’d have a few salty fishermen on board who thought it was a nice place to have a beer on the water. It wasn’t until the first few days of being open, with a line that stretched down the pier, that we realized we had created something with so much potential.