When Hurricane Sandy sent the East River surging in October 2012, Buzzy O’Keeffe, the owner of the River Café, ordered his staff to open the doors. By letting the water go through his restaurant, which is on a barge at Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn, he believes he saved it from sinking under the weight of the flooding. Even so, the River Café was ravaged.

The kitchen? Gone. A brand-new $75,000 Steinway piano? Ruined. Electrical system? Corroded by the salt water. The wine room, which held more than 10,000 bottles, many of them precious? Fuhgeddaboudit, as the Brooklyn saying goes. Half the collection was lost.

“Everything was floating around in there,” said Joseph DeLissio, the longtime wine director. “Your head would’ve been under water. It was a mess.”

That was then. Now, the River Café, a radiant portal to fairy-tale New York City, is aglitter again, catering to romantics for whom nothing is quite so breathtaking as the Manhattan skyline twinkling across an ice-filled East River on a snowy winter night. A new Steinway will provide tinkling background music for the parade of marriage proposals, weddings, graduation dinners and anniversary commemorations to come in the dining room. The chef, Brad Steelman, has a new kitchen, and Mr. DeLissio has restocked the wine room, though in a new and different way.