At the River Café, Assessing the Losses of the Finer Things Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times Michael O'Keeffe, owner of the landmark River Café in Brooklyn. On a cold and bright afternoon last spring, a close friend - an avocational cook and oenophile - married a British film scholar, after a long dating life that had now come to its welcome end in her 40s. My friend is a native New Yorker but she is not among those who have developed antibodies to the obviously or voluptuously beautiful, and so it was with little deliberation that she chose to marry at the River Café. A new Steinway was ruined by flooding from Hurricane Sandy, and much food and wine had to be discarded. Many restaurants in the city suffered as a result of the hurricane, but perhaps none of them as dramatically as the River Café in Brooklyn, which has occupied a barge in the East River at Fulton Ferry Landing, with its unsurpassed views of Lower Manhattan, for 35 years. On the night of the storm, two workers stood guard until it was no longer safe to do so, at which point they opened the doors of the main dining room so the water would merely rip through rather than accumulate. Still, the flooding reached several feet; the restaurant's red banquettes were ripped from the wall. Refrigerators toppled; salt water corroded electrical wiring. A new Steinway piano was destroyed; Georgian antiques were damaged. Walls remain, but the presence of mold means they need to be taken down and reconstructed. The restaurant's closing - there is no date yet for reopening - puts more than 100 people out of regular work in an already exhausting job market. And then there is the funereal matter of inventory. By Monday, three cargo vans of caviar, lobster, beef, veal, duck, foie gras and other perishables costing vast amounts of money had been filled; their contents would be thrown out. That afternoon, the pastry chef loaded trash bags with dozens of perfectly formed tart shells, ice cream, rolls, flat breads and lemons. Rare wines, too, were among the casualties. Under the direction of Joe DeLissio, who has run the River Café"s wine program since the beginning, the restaurant was one of the first in the city to promote high-end California varieties in the "70s when lists were given over entirely to the French. Some of those were lost. "Anything that was floating in water is destroyed," Mr. DeLissio told me, a consequence of cork damage. Bottles from which labels had slithered became unsalable. The restaurant carries wines that cost thousands of dollars a bottle, nearly all of them bought by Mr. DeLissio not at auction but from the makers. "This is heartbreaking for me," he said. The heartbreak was widely distributed. When my friend who had married at the River Café saw a picture online of what had happened to it, she wept. Others who had planned weddings there in the coming weeks were forced into exigent refocusing. The River Café is a restaurant that in the best way does not belong to the young, which is to say that it doesn't adhere to the Brooklyn of vintage motor gear and skinny jeans and biases against reservations. The culture of expensive restaurants in the current age is the culture of culinary fashion, turnover, alliances, brand experience, the cultivation of an intellectualized relationship to food. The River Café is about none of those things. Since its opening in 1977, there have been a total of six chefs, the restaurant having helped inaugurate the careers of Charlie Palmer and Larry Forgione, who is said to have created the term "free-range chicken" there. Currently in command is Brad Steelman, who has been in place for more than 10 years, and enslavement to foam, to layers of pork belly and to food that seems like it ought to be consumed medicinally has largely been avoided. The River Café"s history of buying from small, organic purveyors long predates the current trend. It took the restaurant's owner, Michael O'Keeffe, 12 years to receive a permit from the city to open on the river, and the senior staff he amassed early on has remained virtually unchanged since. The restaurant's talented resident florist, Maureen Andariese, has been with him for more than 20 years; its pianists for more than 30. The steward, a former stockbroker named Peter Demers, has not taken a day of vacation since 1988, his colleagues told me; he drives two hours every day from his home in central New Jersey. If there has always been a feeling of fragility accompanying the River Café - it is constructed, after all, on water - there has been at the same time a corrective air of resistance to the fleeting and impermanent. The River Café is not a second-date restaurant, or a deal-making restaurant, or a 25th-birthday restaurant. It is a place where intimate relationships are formalized and honored, where long lives are commemorated.