Eating With Strangers

Late Nights in Hell's Kitchen

New York’s world of night owls is dark and habitually drunken.  From Battery Park to Harlem, from Bed-Stuy to Hell’s Kitchen, those who dock their togs after two a.m. or later don’t have bed on the mind, at least not immediately.  It’s not our fault that the B train stops running at nine o’clock, and if that’s how the MTA’s going to be, well, why not just stop for a nightcap on the way home? 

If midtown Manhattan is one of the world’s power centers, the Time Warner Center is surely one of its most commanding foci.  Yes, it’s a mall.  Get over it already.  Betwixt Hugo Boss and Barnes & Noble live three of the best restaurants in the world.  Southampton Sarah mans the line at one of them. 

On a night when we both clock out reasonably early, just after midnight, I meet her at a bar in upper midtown.  She’s already enjoying her second Stella with an international posse of equally battle-battered colleagues, who are busy vehemently drinking their own pints.  The restaurant staff where Sarah works is probably as global as its business clientele—the line hears snatches of French, German, British, Hebrew and that funny Swiss accent, at once clipped and barbaric; the plongeurs mostly speak Spanish.  The waiters, as they are all over New York, are from small towns in Ohio, military towns in Virginia, farm towns in east Washington State—places where having moved to New York means having made it, no matter what you end up doing there. 

Autobiogeography

Now that I'm in Ireland with nothing but time and inborn nerdiness on my hands, I've made up my AUTO-BIO-GEOGRAPHY: a Google Maps mashup of the restaurants, cheese shops and bookstores I've visited and loved over the years.

Now, whenever anyone asks me where to find the best taco in El Paso, a comfortable hotel in the Hindu Kush, or antique postcards on the west coast of Wales, I can point them to my map. 

Would love to hear what you think?

p.s. Welcome New York Times readers!  Thanks for visiting Eating With Strangers!!

New York the Chimeric

New York, we’ll agree, is one of the world’s great cities with the least amount of obvious ties to its physical past—holding company with, say, Dubai and Nagasaki.  Who’d ever have guessed that the word Manhattan might once have meant “island of hills”? 

Look around at the soaring buildings.  The gothic spire of 40 Wall Street, a seventy-story skyscraper completed in 1930 that was very briefly the tallest building in the world, now belongs to Donald Trump, who bought it in 1995 for a mere $8 million.  Consider 23 Wall Street, for years the headquarters for JP Morgan, bombed to bits in 1920 by a horse-drawn carriage filled with 500 pounds of dynamite.  It’s currently under construction by Philippe Starck, who plans on turning its roof into a garden and pool accessible to inhabitants of the new Downtown by Philippe Starck buildings right next door, themselves equipped with a basketball court, bowling alley and ballet studio.  Or how about the Deutsche Bank building?  It was condemned after the 9/11 attacks tore a twenty-four-story gash in the façade.  Inside, human remains from the attack are still being recovered, along with asbestos, dioxin, lead, silica, quartz, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chromium, manganese, and other toxins directly related to the attack.  Next year, who knows?  I’m hedging my bets over its conversion into a new Balazs palace or hotel.

Looking at Lower-Lower Manhattan means staring change right in the face, but it takes real imagination to rewind.  The birth of New York City took place at the juncture of the East and North Rivers with the construction of Fort Amsterdam in 1625 and the smelting of the cannons at Battery Park.  Today, looking upwards at the vertiginous gray arrows spearing the sky, and across the water at the jagged skyline of smokestacks and blocky buildings limning Staten Island and New Jersey, those days seem more than a measly 350 years of constant evolution away.  It takes a real squint of the eyes to imagine the fort changing times eight hands in battle, including the comically named “Battle of Long Island,” during which volleys were exchanged between the fort and British emplacements on Governor’s Island.  (Can you imagine?)

I haven’t even finished apologizing for my lateness before Robert Lavalva launches into the history of lower Manhattan.  Did I know that Peck Slip, where we’re having lunch, didn’t exist before ballast discharged by arriving ships filled the water in with land?  I did not.  In fact, I realize, I know nothing about the history of lower Manhattan.