Why Downtown Needs Diners Now
|
Version 0 of 1. THE lights went out in the heart of the American restaurant scene for a few days last week. The storm did far worse things than shutting down kitchens in southern Manhattan. When so many people have lost their homes, their businesses or their lives, the temporary loss of electricity in several thousand restaurants looks insignificant. Sandy did not wipe them out, as it did whole communities near the ocean. But the damage was real enough. Restaurants in the blackout zone lost their perishables and the better part of a week’s revenues. This is a big hit for businesses that get by on small margins, and for workers who are often paid by the hour. A few places may not survive. All will struggle. There is no review in this column today. After a week when any place that stayed open was providing a genuine service, it would be pointless to complain about a long wait between courses or a less than perfect sear on a lobe of foie gras. Instead, I would like to use this space to celebrate the Manhattan restaurants that were dark last week. While other neighborhoods suffered more, downtown needs support now, too. Nowhere in the United States is so much culinary tradition and innovation crammed into so few square miles as in the southern end of Manhattan. In their concentration and their diversity, their roots in the past and their restless forward momentum, not to mention what they tell us about the communities they feed, those restaurants make up one of the country’s great cultural treasures. Chinatown alone is worth fighting for. With its plates of chicken feet, its slack-mouthed fish in glass tanks, its brisk and imperturbable waiters, its cheap bottles of Tsingtao and even cheaper pots of oolong, its tanned hides of roast duck with S-curved necks in the windows, its bubble tea in eye-shadow colors, its char siu and $1 dumplings and platters of sea snails, the neighborhood often seems to be the last line of defense against a single, homogeneous culture in Manhattan. A museum: Chinatown feels that way at times, if you are ducking under the lintel of a basement entrance like Wo Hop’s or Hop Kee’s to find Cantonese crab or lobster. Sometimes the museum gets an energetic new curator like Wilson Tang, who has made the dim sum standards like char siu bao and cheong fun noodles at his family’s Nom Wah Tea Parlor dance again. And there are stalwarts that don’t yet have the mantle of history on them, like Great NY Noodletown. But there is always something new in Chinatown, too, a Fujianese rice noodle, a Sichuan pickle, an unexplored dumpling. If it’s nostalgia you want, go. If you crave discoveries, go. The neighborhood depends on visitors to stay alive. Downtown offers other discoveries as well, the kind that are unearthed only by chefs who like to drive down unmarked roads. Manhattan below 23rd Street has not a single restaurant with three Michelin stars and only one, Del Posto, with four from The New York Times. For the most part, luxury is not the game here. Downtown is the place where chefs come to think big thoughts, still, even with Brooklyn rising. Paul Liebrandt of Corton in TriBeCa, for instance, may be the city’s most virtuosic manipulator of flavor and texture. He proposes ideas that sound cruel (huckleberry and black garlic?) and then reveals their unexpected delights. If Mr. Liebrandt were a pianist, his piano would have an extra 88 keys. His is not everyday food, and that is its value. Not far away is Bouley, a restaurant that few now would locate on the cutting edge. Yet David Bouley’s mind won’t stop whirring. One current obsession is surreptitiously trying to make his food healthier. He recently swore off dairy in his ice creams, and thickens both soups and chawan mushi with kudzu starch, used in Chinese herbal medicine to treat migraines and hangovers, among other things. Downtown has other thinkers, like Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar, Wylie Dufresne of WD-50, Alex Stupak of Empellón Cocina and Jung Sik Yim of Jungsik. You’ve been to their places already? They’ve all had new ideas since then. Major restaurant groups with world-class operations thrive in this part of the city, of course. It’s the home base for Danny Meyer and Tom Colicchio; David Chang and Mario Batali; Andrew Carmellini, Drew Nieporent and Keith McNally. Beginning with the Odeon, Mr. McNally has made a career as downtown’s court portraitist, devising restaurants that paint the area in the most flattering light possible. Downtown also gets two of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s best efforts, Perry St. and ABC Kitchen. But chefs with highly distinctive voices also work at more-modest places, the kinds of restaurants that may not be as well protected when an unexpected calamity blows in off the Atlantic. At Annisa, which brings an air of low-key refinement to its Greenwich Village side street, Anita Lo prepares cuisine that is open to global influences but answers only to her own, uncannily perceptive palate. At Dirt Candy in the East Village, Amanda Cohen strips all the grim self-righteousness out of vegetarian cooking. Every plate is a vegetable party. Nearby, too, is Hearth, where Marco Canora can still wring surprises from his long-running mission of showing how deep simple flavors can run. On one block of Mulberry Street, Balaboosta runs freely through the flavors of the Mediterranean as experienced by Einat Admony, a chef born in Tel Aviv, while Parm and Torrisi Italian Specialties explore the cuisine of Little Italy and nearby blocks as experienced by two local kids, Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone. Other chefs have staked their own claims. Any five of them could make the culinary reputation of a midsize city. Southern Manhattan has dozens of them. Then there are the places we go not only for the food (and in a few cases, not at all for the food) but also for the feeling that we are downtown and nowhere else. All New Yorkers have their own lists, but here is mine, in part: Fanelli, Raoul’s, Lucky Strike, the Old Town, Shopsin’s, John’s on Bleecker Street, Veselka, B & H Dairy and Katz’s. Not one of these establishments requires help as desperately as a family whose home was destroyed by water, fire or wind. Basic food and shelter are urgent requirements for many New Yorkers this week. But a city where doing many things at once is as natural as breathing can certainly help out more than one cause at a time. Right now, these restaurants, the people who own them and, even more, the people who work for them, need us. And we need them. Downtown’s restaurants show us who we are. |