Making Time for Sweetbreads, Even Amid a World Crisis

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/nyregion/making-time-for-sweetbreads-even-amid-a-world-crisis.html

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Jan Eliasson came close to calling off lunch. The Syrian crisis had kicked into high gear a few days earlier, and on this morning a convoy of United Nations chemical weapons inspectors found itself under fire. Mr. Eliasson, No. 2 at the United Nations as its deputy secretary general, was an extremely busy fellow.

“This meeting was in danger, I must say,” he said after settling into a corner booth at Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant on East 55th Street.

It is not every day that a routine appointment in New York is almost undone by a possible war crime thousands of miles away. But Mr. Eliasson, 73 next week, with a long diplomatic résumé both at the world organization and in his native Sweden, wished to keep his commitment to have lunch. So with the yearly convening of the United Nations General Assembly drawing near, he kindly made time to talk about a diplomat’s life in New York. (He also came with a watchful security agent, who sat discreetly a short distance away on a bench with a clear view of the booth.)

In two weeks, world leaders will once again descend upon the city en masse for nonstop speechifying, endless meetings and, yes, hopelessly snarled traffic on the East Side of Manhattan. “Some call it the Crazy Week,” Mr. Eliasson said after the waiter took the lunch order. It is “when we think the science of cloning hasn’t advanced fast enough. We need to be in so many places at the same time, the secretary general and I.”

One logistical detail that does not fall to him or his aides is making sure, say, that mutually hostile countries do not wind up by mistake in the same hotel. Let them work that one out on their own. But security is a constant concern. “I’m not supposed to talk about that,” Mr. Eliasson said, “but I think we’re in close contact with the N.Y.P.D.” As for the inevitable traffic jams, “we are deeply sorry that we cause inconvenience.” He continued:

“When I was perm rep” — that’s diplo-speak for a country’s permanent representative to the United Nations, in his case Sweden’s, from 1988 to 1992 — “I had difficulty even getting to the General Assembly through the security screens on Second Avenue and First Avenue. We know it’s really a nuisance. But I would hope that New Yorkers realize how enormously we value that New York is the host town.”

“I hope,” he said, “that New Yorkers see that maybe there could be discussions inside that building that in the end may result in a cease-fire or peace or an agreement between two nations about fighting polio, or a strong reminder of the importance of human rights to someone who needs to hear it from someone very important.”

Still, he acknowledged, with the faintest of sighs, “it’s hard to see that when you sit in a car stuck in traffic.”

Mr. Eliasson, a former president of the General Assembly who has been in his present position for 14 months, suggested Aquavit after his first choice, a classic French restaurant, turned out to be very French: no way was it open in the final days of August. While Aquavit is Nordic-themed, he is not a regular. “I’ve been here twice,” he said.

Both he and his interviewer started off with charred gravlax in a mustard sauce. A dish of sweetbreads, better known to him by their French name, ris de veau, caught his eye. “I have a weakness for that,” he said. “My wife never serves it.” It was a temptation that the interviewer easily resisted; he chose a Chilean turbot. Both drank French cider, skipped dessert and finished with coffee — cappuccino for Mr. Eliasson, a double espresso for his tablemate.

It is no secret that the United Nations is widely unloved in New York. One reason is its perceived hostility to Israel, which led previous mayors like Edward I. Koch and Rudolph W. Giuliani to use it as a punching bag.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, more globally minded than his predecessors, takes a comparatively benign view. His Economic Development Corporation, relying on figures nearly a decade old, calculates that the United Nations generates 18,000 jobs and $2.5 billion a year in economic activity for New York. And it is more than likely that some local businesses have benefited in recent years from the extensive renovations that are under way at the organization’s East Side campus.

There is, too, a belief held by many New Yorkers that diplomats do little more than drive around all day looking for places to park illegally. In fact, as a result of a 2002 agreement with the State Department, most embassies and consulates here have become pretty solid citizens when it comes to paying parking tickets. Their total debt — put by the city’s Finance Department at $16.6 million, which is barely enough to keep the municipal government running for two hours — has even shrunk a bit in recent years. The chief deadbeats are the same ones just about every year. Egypt perennially tops the list with nearly $2 million in unpaid summonses going back years.

If New Yorkers are angry over a matter like parking, he hasn’t heard it, said Mr. Eliasson, who is an easy conversationalist. “When I go around town and talk to people, when they hear I’m from the U.N., they may ask how things are going with Syria, or what are we doing about this or that,” he said. “That’s the kinds of reactions I get.”

Not surprisingly, his life here is circumscribed by the nature of his position and by security imperatives. “I can’t move as freely as I sometimes would like to,” he said.

But that does not mean forgoing all pleasures. In mid-July, for instance, he joined the crowds flocking to Central Park to hear the New York Philharmonic, led by Alan Gilbert — “who, by the way, spent eight years in Sweden conducting the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra,” Mr. Eliasson tossed in, a touch of national pride there. “It was 85 degrees,” he said. “The sun was setting in a blue-pink light over the trees. There were 50,000 sitting on chairs or having picnics.”

“In Manhattan, it’s incredible,” he said. “You still have these oases. I remember when there was snow when I was ambassador. I walked into Central Park and felt like I was in northern Sweden. When I see the barges and ships go down the East River, it’s like my hometown, Gothenburg. We have a river going through the city.”

“But I must tell you I get my frustrations also,” he said, answering a looming question about what he finds irritating here before it could be asked.

“The sirens, why do they sound so enormous?” he said. “I’m very high up, and still I’m waking up at night. It sounds like the Third World War has broken out. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a higher decibel level of ambulances, fire and police cars. For me the word ‘decibel’ has lost its meaning.”

Griping about noise. Does it get more New York than that?