Jeffrey’s Grocery

Oysters at the corner counter

Oysters come over the counter before the room has fully settled; Gabriel Stulman, chef at Jeffrey’s Grocery in Greenwich Village, New York City, built the place around that kind of daily appetite. The restaurant opened in October 2010 at 172 Waverly Place, across from Joseph Leonard, after Stulman and his team had already learned the block’s rhythm. Gina Stulman, chef James McDuffee, Matt Kebbekus and Brian Bartels were part of the opening group, with the first idea closer to a food market and lunch counter than the seafood room it became. Shelves held Orwasher’s bread, Stumptown coffee beans, cereals, pickles, Sriracha sauce, farm-raised meats, house charcuterie and domestic cheeses. Then the demand made the decision. Guests wanted to sit down. The team added tables, kept the grocery face, and let the raw bar become the station that gave the room its pull. Stulman’s own education runs through service as much as school: University of Wisconsin–Madison, bartender work in Fairfax, Virginia, then ownership in New York City rooms including Little Owl and Market Table. At Jeffrey’s Grocery, that lineage reads as neighborhood discipline rather than biography.

A seafood program made from tight space

The method here is not built on grand equipment. Food has been prepped in the basement and finished behind the oyster bar, with the room holding just 60 at peak. That limitation shapes the craft. New England clam chowder comes thick with clams, bacon and roots; the lobster roll stays buttery; fish and chips arrive with donut holes and malt maple vinegar. The raw bar keeps the menu’s center of gravity: oysters, clams, prawns, king crab legs, lobster salad and shrimp cocktail, with East and West Coast oysters moving through the count as the season allows. Stulman’s team has kept the cooking plain enough to show the sourcing. A braised brisket sandwich, unchanged since opening, puts tender meat with red beet-horseradish slaw and muenster on toasted sourdough. Brunch brings crab biscuit Benedict with poached eggs, crab meat, lobster hollandaise, potatoes and greens; breakfast can be as direct as smoked salmon on flat toast or an egg-and-cheese sandwich. The program works because the bench is close to the guest. The pass has nowhere to hide.

The room keeps its grocery memory

The corner still carries the old conceit: a storefront with the ease of a local shop, not the posture of a formal dining room. Inside, the counter and the room work at a village scale. Music runs lively, the staff stays young and conversational, and the noise belongs to people using the place rather than posing inside it. The original market idea left traces in the materials and in the attitude, even after the room became a full-service restaurant. A plate of oysters can sit beside chowder, a sandwich, a cocktail or a glass from the curated wine program without needing a change of register. Stulman has described his work through corners, foot traffic and a demographic willing to support neighborhood establishments. Jeffrey’s Grocery makes that sentence physical at Waverly Place and Christopher Street.

Continuity across the street

Joseph Leonard opened in 2009 across the street, and Jeffrey’s Grocery followed in October 2010. The two rooms explain each other without copying each other: one corner taught the team the neighborhood; the next gave them a seafood counter, a grocery facade and a tighter working method. Stulman’s wider Happy Cooking Hospitality group has grown, but this room still depends on repetition, the same kind of return that keeps a lobster roll, a bowl of New England clam chowder and a dozen oysters in the local order at Jeffrey’s Grocery.