The Man Who Ate Everything (46 page)

But why would a tourist come to New York to eat mall food in this city of fifteen thousand restaurants? Manhattan does have one mall, at South Street Seaport on the East River, and I visited the food court there for the first time to deepen my understanding. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and the river view from the third floor at the end of Pier 17 took my breath away, south to the Statue of Liberty and north to the Brooklyn Bridge, both of them erected in an age of stupendous engineering triumphs, when the city was eager for immigrant workers from everywhere in the world and rich beyond counting.

Just behind me was the food court. I eagerly tasted something at every counter. The Chinese food, from a regional chain, was distasteful and gummy—just footsteps from New York’s Chinatown, the largest aggregation of Chinese outside of Asia. The mealy, spongy bread was a disgrace, in this city with the finest bread east of San Francisco. The pizza was mediocre, a mile from Ellis Island, where this country welcomed the first Neapolitan immigrants, and two miles from the first pizzeria in the United States, on Spring Street, opened ninety years ago. Most painful was a delicatessen counter that could have prospered in St. Paul or Tucson (it’s one in a chain of 450), serving dank, reconstituted turkey loaves and albino, boneless boiled hams, in this city that was once a megalopolis of real delicatessens, and where the torch of true pastrami is still, today, held aloft.

A native New Yorker leaves the city he loves when he enters South Street Seaport. Nearly all the customers are tourists, and they could be anywhere in the country, spending and eating at Body Shop and Brookstones, and a dozen fast-food chains. I was once proud that establishments like these had never penetrated into my prismatic and unique city. Now, standing at the end of Pier 17 and ruminatively chewing on a thick and floppy pizza, I felt that I was nibbling on the corpse of a great metropolis.

I rushed down the stairs and into a taxi, hoping that the
meals on Theme Street would be better than this. Both menus and food were, for the most part, indistinguishable at Fashion Cafe, Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Cafe, the Jekyll & Hyde Club, and the Harley Davidson Cafe. If Planet Hollywood were serious about its theme, it would serve famous meals from the movies, like the lusty eating scene in
Tom Jones
and the dinner in the
God father
when Al Pacino assassinates the corrupt Irish police official played by Sterling Hayden, and a thousand more. Elvis’s favorite foods have been well documented, yet Hard Rock seems oblivious. And Harley Davidson Cafe could serve its theme drinks in miniature hubcaps or motorcycle gas tanks.

But interesting food is not the point. Above all, the menu must be familiar, inoffensive, and inexpensive. A family or a group of friends with diverse tastes should be able to dine together comfortably, order lots of alcohol, then concentrate on the merchandise. What better choice than fast food and theme drinks, which for five or six dollars extra come in twenty-three-ounce logo glasses you can take home with you?

Some of the foods deserve special mention. The ribs at Hard Rock were remarkably good (most other fast-food kitchens par-boil theirs first, turning both the meat and bones gray and diluting their sweet pork flavor), and most of the food at Harley Davidson was inedible. Le Bar Bat has real food and slightly higher prices than the others (tender lettuces, good bread and pecan pie, deliciously charred lamb, but an impenetrable icecream sandwich). Come to think of it, Hard Rock was also the most fun, with sixties mantras on the wall that brought a nostalgic mist to my eyes.
all is
one. love all, serve all.
Most theme restaurants take no reservations and make you wait, even when there is no need to. Nowhere did the espresso have a layer of
crema
on top. Espresso without
crema
is not espresso.

Why are these places so successful? People in the business tell me that most tourists need to feel safe and comfortable. Brand names do that for them. The streets of New York do not. In a city where the nightlife is stratified according to so many baroque and
unknowable rules of inclusion and exclusion, the theme restaurant is the ultimate in democracy: stand on a line and you are sure to get in, and once you are inside, your table will probably be assigned by a computer. In a nation growing less literate by the day, where the dominant culture has become Hollywood and Disney, anything connected with the movies—in fact, anything remotely
famous,
even Kato Kaelin—draws vast and milling crowds. So tourists travel from city to city and country to country, collecting Planet Hollywood T-shirts, identical except for the name of the city of origin printed below the logo. That’s why Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock refuse to sell their goods by mail.

These national chains with their shoddy, overpriced mementos are neither the first nor the only theme restaurants in Manhattan. When you’re on the prowl, it is amazing how a new specimen turns up every place you look. Near my house on Twelfth Street is the oldest theme restaurant of them all, the seventy-year-old Asti, where the theme is waiters who sing opera. And scattered around the city are Mickey Mantle’s and Rusty Staub’s and scores of lesser sports pubs.

Neither Fifty-seventh Street nor Times Square is a patch on the real boom area for the hottest trend in theme cafes and restaurants. The neighborhood around St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side has become home to the cybercafe movement, including Internet Cafe on Third Street; Cyber Cafe at 273A Lafayette Street, which offers full Tl access, eight multimedia computers, and a sparse collection of muffins and soft drinks; Heroic Sandwich on Fourth Street; and the most elaborate of them all, @Cafe at 12 St. Mark’s Place, which opened nine weeks before I arrived there.

@Cafe (http://www.fly.net) is a wonderful place whose only problem is that it opened nine weeks too early. Despite the full Tl access, ten Power Macs, three Windows, two Unix, two huge projection screens, Japanimation, a lovely blonde technical-support cyberfairy named Jessica, and an ambitious menu of Asian appetizers and Cal-Ital main courses, nothing worked right during our
visit. At least the farfalle with spinach and the grilled chicken sandwich tasted fine, though the bread was inexplicably closer to Wonder bread than to the real thing. I still have high hopes for @Cafe and will return when it has had a chance to work things out.

I will probably never return to Medieval Times. We boarded a $7 bus to Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and twenty minutes later pulled up at The Castle, where we joined many large families of fun-loving suburbanites (including Cub Scout troop 266) climbing out of their station wagons. The Castle is covered in beige simulated-stone-textured siding. Once inside, we were handed paper crowns (nearly everybody wore one for the next few hours) and were then continually battered by attempts to lighten our wallets before the dinner and jousting began. These included three extensive gift counters, two long cash bars, an extra-charge dungeon displaying a dozen gruesome medieval tools of torture I had never even read about ($1.50), computers that investigate and print out your personal heraldic devices ($19.99 and up), the opportunity ($7) to have your picture taken with the Count or Countess (she’s a native of Lyndhurst and has been the Countess for six months), and the rare chance to participate in a single ($10) or double ($20) knighting ceremony, complete with clumsily calligraphed scrolls.

After an hour and a half of this, in large and gloomy rooms that reminded me of American Legion halls, we were finally herded into the Grand Hall of Dinner & Tournament. In the center was an oval arena 50 by 100 feet in size and paved with sand; surrounding the arena were five stepped tiers of tables, at which hundreds of us sat and ate and watched the show. Hanging from the ceiling among the air-conditioning ducts, loudspeakers, and electrical conduits were bright red and yellow squares of cloth meant to set a medieval tone.

The only medieval thing about the food was the total absence of utensils with which to handle the vegetable soup, bagel pizza, whole roast chicken, ribs, and cherry pastry. The horse show (mainly Iberian dressage) and the extremely violent
jousting and combat (with lances, swords, whips, and maces) lasted two excruciating hours but were not without interest, though everything was choreographed like professional wrestling conducted in
Ivanhoe
costumes. The horses were amazingly fast. The people around me had a much more positive attitude than I
—
one woman cheered and stamped so deafeningly that I considered asking the management to calm her down, until I looked over and saw that it was my wife. Near the blessed end, our serving wench reminded us that gratuities were not included in the prepaid charges ($35.95) and then went from person to person shaking hands. Several large and festive frozen theme drinks in novelty glassware would have relieved some of my pain, but there was nothing to drink besides tiny glasses of feeble sangria.

Which brings me to my own theory about why the major theme places along Fifty-seventh Street and across the nation thrive. I remember my very first theme-restaurant experience, a million years ago when I was twelve, at the Trader Vic’s in the palmy Beverly Hilton Hotel. Trader Vic’s was the ultimate goal, at least for my sister and me, of our family’s automobile trip from New York City to California and back, in our turquoise-and-white Oldsmobile 98. And what an exotic theme it was. Polynesia! How many people, except the natives themselves, had ever visited the real island of Samoa or the actual country of Tahiti? So Trader Vic’s could take liberties with its grass and bamboo huts, its Pu Pu platters laden with deep-fried delights and fueled by reeking purple Sterno, and its widemouthed frozen drinks. The mai tai was the most justly celebrated—decorated with mint and lime and orange paper umbrellas. The Trader created it himself in 1944.

It is in these distant memories of Santa Monica Boulevard where it crosses Wilshire that I have discovered the fundamental reason why somebody would be attracted to the national theme restaurants. The secret lies in their long lists of frozen specialty theme drinks. Sipping from these frosty beverages surely made for my happiest moments at the dinners I endured along Fifty-seventh Street. Fresh fruit and rum, novelty glassware, straws a foot long—where else can such pleasure be found? If the real restaurants of New York City—the ancient pizzerias and hand-sliced-pastrami places, and the palaces of haute cuisine—would simply add frozen theme drinks to their standard menus, Fifty-seventh Street would, I feel sure, soon return to its historic and stately character. For starters, they might try these recipes for the original Trader Vic’s Mai Tai, Tito Puente’s Frozen Mango Mambo, and Jekyll & Hyde’s Dracurita.

Trader Vic’s Mai Tai

Adapted from
Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story

2 ounces 17-year-old Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum (Appleton Estate Dark rum makes a good substitute)

1/2
ounce Curasao

1/2
ounce orgeat or other almond syrup

1/2
cup rock-candy syrup (made by dissolving rock-candy sugar in an equal volume of water)

16 ounces shaved ice

Juice and rind of 1 fresh lime

Sprig of mint

Pour the spirits and syrups over the shaved ice in a double (16-ounce) old-fashioned glass (or something more festive and evocative). Add half the squeezed lime and the rind, and garnish with mint. (If you lack shaved ice, put 16 ounces of small ice cubes in a blender, add the other ingredients, and blend until smooth.) A “fruit stick” is completely optional; this is a short wooden skewer spearing a maraschino cherry and a cube of pineapple.

Tito Puente’s Frozen Mango Mambo

3
ounces frozen mango puree (two good brands are Perfect
Puree and Goya)

11/2 ounces Bacardi black rum

1/2 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1/2 tablespoon fresh lime juice

l/2 ounces sugar syrup (made by mixing 2 1/2 tablespoons hot
water with l 1/2 tablespoons granulated sugar)

10 ounces crushed ice or ice cubes

Garnish: 1 slice of fresh mango

Put the ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. This will fill a 22-ounce glass. Garnish with the fresh mango.

Jekyll & Hyde Club’s Dracurita

J
ounce white tequila

1/2 ounce Chambord

1/2 ounce Triple Sec

Splash of fresh lime juice

Splash of “sour” mix

16 ounces crushed ice or ice cubes

Combine everything in a blender and blend until smooth. Serve in a 16-ounce hurricane glass.

Note: One ounce of liquid equals 2 tablespoons; 8 ounces equals 1 cup. Small ice cubes work much better in a blender than large ones.

September 1995

Why Eating Out in New York Costs
Seventy-five Dollars a Person Except When It Costs Even More

A celebrated chef explained it to me this way: Take an entree of Skate with Brown Butter. Fourteen ounces of skate costs $1.31 wholesale. The ingredients for the quart of
nage
in which it is poached cost $1.92. The sauce requires four ounces of butter ($.44), an ounce of capers ($.26), two ounces of fish stock ($.22), salt and pepper ($.04), and a half ounce of vinegar ($.01). Total cost of these ingredients is $4.20, plus a 5 percent allowance for waste and spoilage, or $4.41.