THENASTYBITS (11 page)

Example? Deli. We have it; you don't. Even Los Angeles, with no shortage of Jews, can't get it right. For whatever mysterious reasons, no city on the planet can make deli like New York deli and the first thing I start to miss when away from home too long is breakfast at Barney Greengrass, The Sturgeon King, on Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street. Sunday breakfast at Barney's is one of those quintessential New York things to do: a crowded, ugly dining room, unchanged for decades; wobbly tables; brusque waiters; generic coffee. But their eggs scrambled with dark, caramelized onions and lox, served with a fresh toasted bagel or bialy, are ethereal, and the home-team crowd of Upper West Siders is about as "genuine New York" as you can get. Grab a copy of the Sunday
New York Times
and a copy of the
Post,
and dig in. If your waiter seems indifferent, don't let it bother you—he's like that with everybody. You can buy some of the legendary smoked sturgeon or Nova Scotia salmon at the counter to take away, but you will surely be committing a sin against God if, after breakfast, you neglect to purchase a pound of what is far and away the best chopped liver on earth. Hand-chopped chicken livers, schmaltz (chicken fat), sauteed onions, and hard-cooked eggs . . . it's the benchmark to which all others should aspire.

No visit to New York is complete without a proper pastrami sandwich, and New Yorkers will argue over who's got the best like they're fighting over Bosnian real estate. But a safe bet is Katz's Deli on East Houston for a nearly-as-big-as-your-head pile of steaming hot pastrami, sliced paper thin and stacked between fresh seeded rye bread. The appropriate beverage is a Dr. Brown's cream soda or Cel-Ray. And be nice to your waitress; chances are she can kick the shit out of you.

Pizza is another subject on which New Yorkers have strong opinions. If you feel like humping out to Brooklyn, to Di Fara's, you can get the best of the best. But I like the white clam pizza at Lombardi's on Spring Street, when I don't feel like getting my passport punched for a pie. They serve only whole pies at Lombardi's, so if you want to master the manly New York art of walking down the street while eating a slice of pizza, you'll have to grab one at any of the ubiquitous mainstream joints. Just remember: feet slightly apart, head tilted forward and away from chest to avoid the bright orange pizza grease that will undoubtedly dribble down. Be aware of the risk of hot, molten "cheese slide," which has been known to cause facial injury and genital scarring.

Everybody has seen Central Park on television, and yes, it is dramatic and beautiful, but I love Riverside Park, which runs right along the Hudson River from Seventy-second Street up to Grant's Tomb. On weekends during warm months, there's a large Dominican and Puerto Rican presence, huge picnics with radios blaring salsa and soca music, large groups of family and friends playing basketball, volleyball, and softball while slow-moving barges and tankers scud by on the river.

Speaking of sports, the West Fourth Street basketball courts on lower Sixth Avenue host some of the best nonprofessional, street basketball in the world. Professionals have been known to drop by—and they get a game, much of it elbows and shoulders. A large crowd rings the outer fence three and four deep to watch some of the city's most legendary street players.

When I've been home for a while and I need to treat myself to an expensive spirit-lifting experience, I always think sushi. And

Yasuda on East Forty-third Street is the place to go for old-school Edo-style sushi and sashimi, the fish served—as it should be—near room temperature, the rice still warm and crumbly. I always book the
omakase
(the tasting menu, literally, "you decide") on a day when Yasuda serves up sublime, tasty bits of screamingly fresh, rare, hard-to-get, flawlessly executed seafood. I can spend a whole afternoon there, eating whatever comes my way, working my way through every available option: mounds of sea urchin roe; top-drawer fatty otoro tuna; sea eel; yellowtail; mackerel—and the occasional surprise. On a recent visit I was served some Copper River salmon roe, before season, from the chef's personal stash. If I find myself in the neighborhood late at night, just across the street, through an anonymous office building lobby, down a flight of fire stairs to a cellar and through a plain door, is Sakagura, a huge, nearly all-Asian late-night joint with a mammoth selection of sakes and accompanying snacks. Guaranteed to inspire exclamations of "How did you find this place?!" among your envious friends.

Sneer at hot dogs all you want. A well-made wiener is a thing of beauty. Actually, even a bad hot dog can be a beautiful thing—if you're eating it at Yankee Stadium washed down with a warm, watery beer (as long as the Yanks are winning). I'll go so far as to say you will never understand New York, or New Yorkers, until you've eaten too many bad hot dogs and drunk too much cheap beer at a night game at the stadium. Similarly, Rudy's Bar on Ninth Avenue serves terrible hot dogs too. Free ones. But ambiance counts for a lot, and after plenty of mid-afternoon drinks (never go at night) listening to their magnificent jukebox, watching the daytime drinkers slump over onto the bar, those lightbulb-warmed weenies suddenly seem like a good idea. If you want a quality hot dog, however, the best by consensus is at the legendary Papaya King on East Eighty-sixth Street. Be sure to enjoy your dog with their frothy delicious papaya drink—and if you put ketchup on your dog I will fucking kill you.

New York's subway system is certainly not among the best in the world, and I miss the full-length graffiti pieces, the tribal markings that once made the cars so menacing and evocative of classic New York films like
Death Wish.
But I still love the people-watching late at night on the Number 9 or A train. The sound of people talking, that gorgeous, jazzlike mix of Brook-lynese, Spanglish, Noo Yawk; the hard faces New Yorkers put on like masks to get through the day. There are, once in a great while, magical moments, when united by a shared laugh or outrage, passengers will let the veil drop and actually acknowledge each other with a sardonic smile, a shaken head, a caustic remark—or like one time, when a deranged drunk was harassing a tired-looking woman and the entire car rose up and chased him off the train, a momentary united front.

For late-night bad behavior, I am a devoted regular at Siberia Bar, located on Fortieth Street in Hell's Kitchen, a few doors east of Ninth Avenue. There's no sign. Just look for the unmarked black doors under the single red lightbulb—and leave your conscience at the door. If Satan had a rumpus room, it would look a lot like Siberia: squalid, dark, littered with empty beer cartons, the ratty furniture stained with the bodily fluids of many guilty souls. It's my favorite bar on earth; it has a great jukebox of obscure mid-seventies punk classics, and no matter how badly you behave at night, no one will remember the next day. The crowd is dodgy and unpredictable. You never know who's going to be draped over couches upstairs, or listening to live bands in the dungeonlike cellar; rock and rollers, off-duty cops, drunken tabloid journalists, cast and crew from
Saturday Night Live,
slumming fashionistas, smelly post-work chefs and cooks and floor staff, kinky politicos, out-of-work bone-breakers, or nodding strippers. It's heaven.

If I gotta put on a tie or a jacket, the food better be damn good—and the food at Scott Bryan's Veritas on East Twentieth Street is always worth struggling into a shirt with buttons. It's also got the best wine list and one of the most knowledgeable sommeliers in New York. (Not that it matters to me; I usually drink vodka.) Scott's a friend, so I often sit at the bar and snack off the appetizer menu, but his braised dishes and seafood mains are always exceptionally good. Eric Ripert's Le Bernardin on West Fifty-first Street is, in my opinion, the best restaurant in New York, but then Eric is also a pal, so don't trust me. (The Zagats, Michelin, and the
New York Times,
however, are similarly enthusiastic.) Le Bernardin is my default special-event destination—even though Eric busts my balls fiercely every time I dine there: "What are
you
doing here? You sell-out! This ees not your kind of place! What ees happening to you? You've changed, man. You used to be cool!"

The ultimate New York dining experience, however, may not be in a restaurant at all. For me, it's a rainy, lazy night at home in my apartment. I'll smoke a fat spliff, lay out some old newspapers on the bed, and call out for Chinese. I'll eat directly out of that classic New York vessel, the white cardboard takeout container, and watch a rented movie from nearby Kim's Video. Kim's specializes in hard-to-find exploitation, genre, cult, and art-house favorites, organized by director, so I can say, give me a Dario Argento, an early John Woo,
Evil Dead II, The Conformist,
or that Truffaut film where the two guys are both fucking Jeanne Moreau. Food never tastes better.

HARD-CORE

gabrielle Hamilton, at thirty-eight
, with no expression on her face, gazes out the open French doors of Prune, her restaurant on New York's Lower East Side, and considers my question: "How has kitchen culture changed since you got in the business?"

"No one has sex with each other anymore," she replies, almost wistfully. "It's no longer 'Mom and Dad divorce and you have to wash dishes.' Now, it's 'Mom and Dad sent me to cooking school.' People now
choose
to be chefs. It's clean, educated, squeaky."

Though she is seven months pregnant, avoiding alcohol (and the smoke from my cigarette) assiduously, Hamilton clearly still misses the bad old days. She misses "sitting at the bar after closing, drinking for a few hours. It's amazing how you can get a third wind after you've been covered in meat juice all day."

Her particular road to becoming a chef and owning her own restaurant was not an easy one. Hamilton grew up one of five kids in Lambertville, New Jersey, an industrial town of lumberyards and factories (now undergoing something of a renaissance as a weekend getaway). Her father, a theatrical designer, and her French mother split up when she was eleven. After a year with her mother in Vermont, she returned to New Jersey to live with her father. By age twelve, she was working in restaurants.

"Were you a problem child?" I ask.

She gives me a very dry, sardonic smile and replies, "Only if you consider kleptomania and drugs a problem." After school, and for summer jobs, she began washing dishes at The Picnic Basket in New Hope, Pennsylvania. "I needed the money," she says. "I wanted the money." Restaurants were "the only thing I knew how to do." Fortunately, her mother, an excellent cook, had given her and her siblings "a lot of skills already." At various establishments, she continued to wash dishes, bus tables, wait on customers. "I did everything," she says, "bartended, pastry . . . everything." At fifteen, she got her first cook's position. She rolled into New York in the early eighties and worked as a food stylist and catering employee until 1999, when she opened Prune.

When Hamilton says she did "everything," it's sort of like Keith Richards with sleepy understatement telling you he "used to party a little"; her description is tantalizingly inadequate. Stories of Hamilton's long hard road of "wilderness years" between dish jobs and later chefdom have become something of an urban legend. According to who you talk to, there were brief stints in everything from stripping to murder-for-hire. Of course, I believe them all. She's hard-core. Example? Much later, when I ask her what she first looks for in a potential employee, she responds with, "First thing? If I'm standing there in my whites in the dining room, and they ask me 'Is the chef here?' They're not getting the job."

You should probably know that she is, by turns, ardently feminist, reactionary, and refreshingly (even painfully) candid. She is absolutely devoid of artifice, and she has a very low tolerance for bullshit. New York's freebie paper,
The New York Press,
included her in its list of New York's fifty Most Loathsome People last year, and it's not hard to imagine her stepping—if not stomping—on some toes. It's no surprise that I like and admire her tremendously. Had she written her version of
Kitchen Confidential
before I did, I'd probably still be flipping steak
frites.