It’s often been said that there are two kinds of people in the
world – givers and takers, optimists and pessimists, lovers and haters, those who make things complicated and those who make things simple, those who like Neil Diamond and those who don’t. “There are two kinds of people in this world,” wrote Robert Benchley in his Law of Distinction, “those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.” City parents are raising one of two kinds of New Yorkers – door holders or door closers. Living in an elevator society, most of us are constantly faced with the choice of whether to throw our arm in front of the doors and let the people following close behind inside, or else scrunch ourselves into the front corner that’s out of view while frantically pressing the “door close” button in an otherwise empty car.
Sometimes I’m surprised by who turns out to be a door closer versus a holder, especially when it comes to celebrities and famous politicians, and other times I’m not at all surprised. Then there are the Tony Award–worthy performances by those pretending to be hitting the “door open” button, smiling like a gracious host and wildly gesturing you aboard while pounding on the “door close” button and then looking crestfallen and apologetic when you don’t make it. This category will be called Best Fake Nice Person in an Almost Empty Elevator. I’m not saying there’s going to be an Elevator Judgment Day at the end of life’s ride, but when New Yorkers lay their heads down at night they know in their hearts whether they’re holders or closers, and just like being a subway pole leaner on crowded trains, there’s still time to change.
Chapter 14
I’ve Always Depended on the Knishes of Strangers
When my grandfather was first working in Manhattan and experienced periods of unemployment, he’d buy a bunch of bananas for 5 cents, and those would last him two days. When I arrived in the city with a bank account in the low two digits, I found that combining a soft pretzel with a soda created some sort of chemical reaction that filled me up for the entire day. Likewise, a bowl of lentil soup with a roll also did the trick. Other NYU students lived on bagels bigger than hockey pucks, ramen noodles, and Entenmann’s pastries. It may not be desirable to eat on less than $5 a day, but it can be done. The main difference between Buffalo and New York City cuisine was that menu items here seldom contained the word surprise, crushed potato chips, or cream-of-mushroom soup casserole.
Despite Manhattan’s reputation as a racy city, you’ll rarely hear women utter four letter words such as cook, iron, wash, mend, dust, or fold. “What does a real New Yorker make for dinner?” Reservations. And the more impossible the restaurant is to get into, the better it is, just like with doctors, schools, shows, food co-ops, and pole dancing classes. How can it possibly be any good if you can get a reservation,
appointment, interview, ticket, or place within six months’ time without knowing someone?
Most New Yorkers have more takeout menus than cookbooks. They jam every drawer, are used to scribble notes, plug leaks, do origami, housebreak puppies, line birdcages, roll joints, and stabilize tables and bedsteads. Takeout is to the New Yorker what the buffalo was to the Native Americans – giver of all life. As a result, New Yorkers will pay just about any price for home delivery. Along with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it’s routine to order some batteries for the TV remote in the morning, a can of cat food in the afternoon, and a tube of toothpaste before bed. To get to the store, you’d have to go all the way down in the elevator and then walk to the corner.
Food delivery is not just for offices and apartments. People regularly have entire meals delivered to their cars while waiting for alternate-side-of-the-street parking to kick in or while picnicking in the park. Kids order breakfast and lunch delivered to their schools (sometimes through a restroom window). Cops order deliveries on the streets they’re patrolling. Boats pull up to piers to meet the guy with their BBQ spare ribs and sodas. Bands order food delivered to the weddings they’re playing. And the truly brazen order meals to be delivered to restaurants if they’re part of a group but don’t like what’s on the menu. Still, I think the prize goes to the guy who had a pizza delivered during a Shakespeare in the Park production of The Trojan Women, a tragedy about people starving in a prisoner-of-war camp. Evidently he didn’t learn in kindergarten that you’re supposed to bring enough for everyone.
There are more than 20,000 restaurants in New York, from four-star places with world-famous chefs to checkered tablecloth bistros and hole-in-the-wall joints. Most are affiliated with some ethnicity or another. The only thing I’ve never seen is a Canadian restaurant, unless you count the dozen or so Tim Hortonses. The four major New York food groups are Chinese, Italian, Mexican, and Indian. Irish coffee contains the other four food groups: caffeine, alcohol, sugar, and fat. Cronuts (a croissant/doughnut hybrid) are New York’s equivalent of the state fair’s deep-fried Twinkie. Cake balls are the new cronut, and one of the best
places to load up on these is at Ronnie’s in the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. Guinea pig is on the menu at a few restaurants in heavily Ecuadorian sections of the city, though sometimes you must call ahead to order it. And if you wake up hankering for the home-cooked Himalayan food from a past life, try the terrific Top Café Tibet in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. The dumplings are to die again for.
There are more than a dozen Ray’s pizzerias in New York but few family-style restaurants. With space limited and tables jam-packed, it’s already loud enough without a fight going on. If a restaurant has a sign saying it’s closed for renovations with no reopen date, this means it’s been condemned by the health department. Either payoffs weren’t made or they weren’t accepted. Rent in New York is too high – if your restaurant needs repairs you bring in a crew and do it overnight or during a slow weekend.
After street vendor food, Chinese is the default cuisine in New York because most everyone can find something they like and there’s plenty that’s free of the dreaded lactose-gluten-nut triumvirate. It’s reasonably priced, the restaurants are almost always open, and the meal is at your door by the time you’ve poured a drink. If you’re dieting there’s not much temptation as far as dessert goes since they’re basically inedible except for the sliced orange and stale fortune cookie. There’s a theory that one enormous Chinese kitchen operates underneath the city and shuttles the food to all the different neighborhoods from there. When ordering, it’s best to use the numbers alongside the menu. The phone operators and waiters have little knowledge of English and usually sport name tags that say Tom, Bill, and Mike. Because people tend to order the same thing with some degree of regularity, the Sex and the City scene where a Chinese restaurant phone operator knows Miranda’s order by heart and giggles at her is pathetic but all too familiar.
The Slow Food Movement, which has more than 100,000 members in 45 countries, arose in France and Italy in the 1980s as a backlash against societal and culinary velocity, and decrees that a good meal should take several hours. (France is also where career waiters can’t be fired, even for surly service, and earn salaries that don’t incorporate tipping, so they needn’t worry about turning tables or paying their rent.)
However, the Slow Food Movement has made barely a ripple in this Syncopated City. In fact, the words Grab and Go regularly appear in deli and diner windows as a major selling point. Restaurants want to turn their tables several times a night. And while it’s true that people in other burgs may eat a breakfast sandwich or a rolled-up slice of pizza on the run, New Yorkers can consume a three-course meal and beverage while racing to catch the F train.
Few eateries were willing to risk having outdoor tables in the 1970s and ’80s for fear that the customers would “chew and screw” or if they did pay, the cash would be snatched by a passerby. It wasn’t an optimal experience for patrons either, as they were often panhandled, cursed, and solicited while trying to enjoy a burger and bus fumes. Nowadays almost every block has tables outside in nice weather, and customers relax with their friend
s and dogs and many are able to smoke. Why, it’s almost like Gay Paree, just without the churlish wait staff, dog crap everywhere, and anti-gay marriage protesters.
Waiters and waitresses across the country are known for being hyphenates, usually as waiter-actors or waitress-musicians, although I’ve heard actresses paying the bills with temp work refer to themselves as “temptresses.” New York City servers tend to be at least triple hyphens, such as waiter–tour guide–blogger or waitress–visual artist–Olympian-in-training. Like their French comrades, they also have a reputation for impatience, though you can never be sure if they’re “in character” for an audition. On more than one occasion I’ve been brought something completely different from what I ordered, such as a meat dish instead of a vegetarian one, and after pointing out the error was asked, “So does that mean you don’t want it?” Still, New York diners themselves have a reputation for being an exacting, complaining lot so I can’t say the attitude is completely unexpected. Manhattan servers have been known to ask recalcitrant customers, “Is anything okay?”
There is a prepared food store called Lorenzo & Maria’s Kitchen on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Maria screams at her employees, suppliers, and customers all day long. My friends and I regularly e-mail one another the scathing Internet reviews about her shrieking barrages of abuse at anyone and everyone. Two of our favorite reviews are:
“Very odd environment” and “There is often a lot of noisy vocalizing going on – usually management getting angry with customers on the phone.” “Management” would be Maria. There are no other authority figures. In fact, the staff tends to silently cower under her malevolent gaze. I don’t speak Spanish, but another patron told me that she’s particularly insulting and obscene in that language. There are no prices listed on anything. Yet, they’ve been in business for more than forty years. The food is delicious. Customers make recommendations to others standing in line – you must try the beef Wellington and potatoes Anna – if it’s possible to speak above the hollering. I’m in there at least once a week, wearing noise-canceling headphones. I’ve never seen Lorenzo and am petrified to ask about him, though it’s probable his leave-taking involved a massive amount of shouting.
One of the more colorful restaurants in New York is the family-owned and operated Shopsin’s, previously located in Greenwich Village for thirty years and now at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. For decades it wasn’t listed in any guidebooks (by threat of owner and chef Kenny Shopsin), and so before the Internet you had to know about it to go there. If a potential customer phoned and asked if they’d contacted the restaurant, Kenny replied that it had closed and was now a shoe store. There were rules about how many people could be in your party (no more than five), and you couldn’t split your party and pretend to be two separate parties. When the French ambassador was turned away, a nasty letter was sent on diplomatic stationery and promptly framed and displayed in the window. If people asked to look at a menu, Kenny’s wife, Eve, who worked as hostess and waitress, said it would be like allowing them to look in her husband’s underwear drawer. When I brought an older minister with me for lunch, Eve looked him up and down and announced, “You’ll have the diet plate,” to his great shock. Sometimes models would stroll in, order food, and not eat it. Eve would put the leftovers off to the side and finish them during her shift. If asked what a certain dish was like she could be counted on to reply, “It’s a nice plate of food.” If asked about the contents she said, “Whatever Kenny feels like.” A famous food critic ordered several different dishes and Eve said, “No, that’s a waste
of food.” He explained that he was a restaurant reviewer and planned to pay for everything. She told him he could have one entrée and either an appetizer or a dessert. When a customer ordered a cheese enchilada appetizer and a cheese tortellini entrée, Kenny refused, saying the man wouldn’t be regular for a week, though not in those exact words. The place is always bustling, and it just goes to show you that deep down New Yorkers secretly like to be taken charge of. But you need to earn their submission.
The best movie theater usher I ever saw was a retired school bus driver. He shrieked at people to get in line, to stay in line, to be quiet in line, and threatened them with expulsion. A fifty-year-old woman sheepishly raised her hand and asked permission to use the lavatory. It’s such a demanding city that there’s actually a certain amount of relief in knowing that someone else is in control, especially someone as highly qualified in keeping miscreants under wraps as a high school bus driver. Let him guard against the line-jumpers, and there are many.
While service in New York varies from restaurant to restaurant, the food on balance is good. There’s too much competition to get away with serving unappetizing fare. So it’s easy to get meals containing fresh ingredients at reasonable prices. Even farm-to-table restaurants are gaining in popularity. Heavy turnover and foot traffic ensures that nothing sits around too long. New York is known for a number of foods, in particular hot dogs (if not the quality then the prevalence), cheesecake, Italian ice, Waldorf salads, bagels, baked pretzels, and pizza. However, when I moved here the pizza in Buffalo was better than New York’s and it’s still better. Even Dad had to concede that point.
New York is also famous for eastern European Jewish cuisine, including celery soda, pastrami, brisket, corned beef, lox, cream cheese, potato pancakes, kugel, babka, knishes, dill pickles, matzo ball soup, chopped chicken liver, challah bread, gefilte fish, blintzes, rugelach, and egg creams (milk, soda water, and vanilla or chocolate syrup – no eggs or cream). New York actor Zero Mostel, the son of eastern European Jews, declared, “Romanian-Jewish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler.” At Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse on the Lower East Side they have bottles of schmaltz – pure, bright yellow chicken fat – on the
table in case there’s not enough fat on your brisket. Chalushes (khal-ush-ess), by the way, is Yiddish for “nausea.” My thrifty father’s favorite Manhattan eatery was Dubrow’s Cafeteria in the Garment District, where he regularly enjoyed a bowl of cold borscht. Over the sounds of robust kibitzing and noshing he’d say, “The streets of New York might not be paved with gold, but at Dubrow’s seltzer flows from the water fountain.”
When I first moved to the city, most New York specialty food wasn’t available in the rest of the country, or if it was, it wasn’t nearly as good. After my father retired to New Mexico I had to send him a monthly fix of pastrami and rye bread. However, bagels are the best example. The steamed and frozen Lender’s “bagels” I was raised on were rubbery and tasteless compared with baked, boiled, and seasoned New York bagels. Back then many of the famous New York bagel shops had delivery services and would express their products overnight around the country. Nowadays it’s possible to enter a bakery in almost any town and get a decent bagel with a schmear of anything from a dozen different flavors of cream cheese to peanut butter. The only difference is that New York bagels technically have zero calories since they’re usually consumed while running to catch a train.
Chapter 15
Twelve Angry New Yorkers
One could make a case that New York is actually a great city for shy people because they can disappear into a crowd and mostly avoid the pleasantries required for one-on-one encounters. This would not be correct. Chutzpah prevails here. Chutzpah is a Yiddish word typically described as a guy who kills his parents and then begs for mercy because he’s an orphan. A colleague’s wife was walking in Times Square when she looked down and saw a man’s hand atop her open purse. The explanation: “Oh, I saw it open and was just closing it for you.” Chutzpah was perhaps best exemplified by Mayor Ed Koch who said, “I’m not the type to get ulcers. I give them.” And after not being reelected in 1989, “The people have spoken, and now they must be punished!”
However, one need not be Jewish to be a contender. Real estate entrepreneur, reality show star, and Queens native Donald “The Donald” Trump is a purveyor of fine chutzpah with statements such as, “Let me te
ll you, I’m a really smart guy,” and “I’m not a schmuck. Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.” Likewise, Republican senator Alfonse D’Amato when he called his Democratic rival Chuck Schumer “a putzhead” in the 1998 election and proceeded to lose. The Paris, a 581-seat single-screen theater on West 58th Street, is an archetype of chutzpah. It shows one movie all month long – if you don’t like it too bad. In New York City the shy person will not get taxis, dates, or restaurant service, and most important, will not be equipped to deal with impudent New Yorkers. As a result, therapists, support
groups, and assertiveness trainers are standing by, ready to fix all of the chutzpah-challenged.
In 1964 the city, and to some extent the nation, became transfixed by a story about a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Catherine “Kitty” Genovese who was stabbed to death in Queens, and despite thirty-seven onlookers, no one came to her aid. This developed into an urban myth used to exemplify how New Yorkers were callous, irresponsible, and only out for themselves. However, on closer inspection, the “evidence” for this portrayal of apathetic bystanders turned out to be laden with inaccuracies. The truth is that if you are in distress, people will help you. The exception, then and now, is that there exists in the population a number of illegal immigrants, people with arrest warrants, and parole violators who are compelled to assist anonymously or not at all.
Life in New York Page 11
