The Gotham Palate

If you love New York, do not give L’Express your patronage. It’s patently unfriendly and unless you’re planning on having dinner or look as though you have won’t sweat forking over one month’s rent for a Tribeca loft for a restaurant tab, the plastic and rudely dismissive hosting staff will deny you a seat. It captures all of the ugly, corporate, market-driven,  forces that are eroding the character and mystique of that New York of decades yore. The kind of New York that was filled with establishments that made an night out in New York the benchmark experience of “a night on the town.”

L’Express is a shrill reminder of an over-inflated real estate market that has alienated the middle class and robbed us of our cafe’s, intimate places to meet, family and independently-owned restaurants and shops in order to cater to Wall Street’s uppercrust and the real estate moguls with alienating, behemoth-size  restaurants headed by celebrity chefs (and this is not a swipe at the chefs for I am a fan of a great many of them)and ubiquitous, non-descript coffee and sandwich chains.

It was a night in late spring and a friend from Berlin was visiting. It so happens that this friend is a novelist who is in love with New York and is arranging her life so that she can spend at least three months out of the year here. So on one Friday in June, I took the day off so that my friend could take in some of the shops and stands in Noho and Chinatown . Until dusk, we walked, window-shopped, tried stuff on, haggled to make sure my friend got the most bang for her Euros and schlepped our purchases of clothing and souveniers in our environmentally-friendly canvas bags. Just as my friend bought her last gift, we looked at each other and then almost in stereo, we’d acknowledged that we’d worked up quite an appetite. 

While I knew it would be futile, I thought I should at least try to get us a table at Amazing 66. There were three families ahead of us and there was no way that our by then ravenous appetites would have civilly withstood the wait.

As it turned out my friend,  was also secretely hoping that there would be a long wait as she’s a huge fan of Joe Shanghai’s. We decided to walk to Pell St. and managed to get a private table upon arrival. The seafood soup we ordered was substantial and divine and everything else from the dumplings to our shredded pork and bok choy hit the spot. My friend’s love for Joe Shanghai and Chinatown was staunchly reinforced.

Blissfully sated, we agreed on walking off the flavor-charged carb feast by walking back to Union Square North, which is where she was staying anyway. New York in late spring can be beautiful, even by night. The weather was mild - on the verge of  a light jacket being required and the streets were populated, but not teeming with hipsters and yipsters. It was well after the NYU summer exodous.

It’s on nights like those that you feel like you want to soak the whole city in and there’s no other place in the world, you’d rather be…until you start looking for a place to have a night cap at 11:00 in Gramercy Park. When my friend asked me if we could go get a night cap, I immediately thought of taking her to the bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel.

Confident that my friend would enjoy Picasso- insipired art work that hangs in the lounge and myself willing to shell out $25.00 for a Grey Goose cosmo because of our bargain-basement dinner tab, I led her there. To my surprise, the bar was closed. I then thought to go West to Bar Stuzzichino. It was on the verge of closing. “My friend asked me innocently, what is going on here? Is it normal for restaurants to close so early on a Friday night in New York City?” I was starting to feel embarassed. I told her that while Gramercy Park and Flat Iron have great restaurants, they are lacking in the way of cafe’s and friendly neighborhood bars.

Then the idea flashed in my head. Why not try L’Express? After all it’s open 24 hours. It’s now 11:20 when we make our way over there. In the interim another New York friend had joined us. We started making our way toward the bar to see if we could find a couple of stools, before we get blocked, Gestapo-style by a silicon-enhanced hostess asking us how many are we for dinner.  We told her, that we would like to have drinks and perhaps share some small appetizers. “We’re only seating for dinner.” She said coldy, without offering us any alternative whatsoever. So cold was her attitude that I decided that pointing out that it was almost midnight and the majority of people coming in will have already dined, would be to no avail. Instead I decided to offer a constructive solution: to be seated at one of the empty bar table. I got a robotic response. “We are only seating for dinner.” My novelist friend looked at me astounded.

Feeling my blood pressure rise, at the lack of cooperation and/or apology that I was getting from the hostess from hell, I gritted my teeth and shot the hostess a look that said: you’re lucky that I’m a better person than you are and that I have too much class to tell you and your idiotic managers what you really are in front of these guests. I counted to ten and remembered that I had a bottle of Amaro Averna on my bar shelf and lemons in my refrigerator. I invited my friends over to my place and we slammed the corporate scum that is shaping the NY bar and restaurant scene, thought of ways to fight back (for eg.: boycotting those places with rotten service, attitudes and crass corporate practices and patronizing and promoting the places that treat their guests with dignity and respect) and enjoyed a lovely digestif on ice.

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