4.7/The Lived Worlds/Class and the City

The Good Table: Class at the New York Restaurant, 1989–2001

The Good Table

The lunches that ceiling paid for were sorted with the same precision the accounting was casual about. At Michael’s, the media restaurant that opened on West Fifty-fifth Street in 1989, where a table sat was information other people paid to read. The front room held the tables that counted, and the ones nearest the door and the garden light counted most; the rooms behind were where a magazine sent a writer it did not need to flatter. Which editor had which table on a given Wednesday was tracked and gossiped over — the press that covered the magazine business read the seating as a running index of who was ascending and who was quietly being let go.¹ The food was Californian and beside the point. What a person bought at Michael’s was the public fact of having been placed where the room could see them, and the bill for two, before wine, ran past what an editorial assistant spent on food in a week.

The power lunch was not new in 1989; it had a room and a name a decade older, the phrase itself coined in an Esquire article in 1979.² The Four Seasons, in the Seagram Building on East Fifty-second Street since 1959, had made the midday meal into an instrument of business, and its Pool Room — the marble basin, the seasonal trees, the tables spaced so that no conversation carried — was where publishers met agents and editors met the people who owned the companies they worked for.³ The rules were understood without being stated. A regular was seated in seconds and by name; a stranger waited. The check was a formality settled later against an account. The whole apparatus existed to convert money already possessed into the appearance of ease, and it was expensive precisely in proportion to how effortless it was made to look.

The distance between the two rooms marked a distinction the decade spent itself rearranging. The Four Seasons sold arrival — the confirmation that its diner had reached a level where the effort of reaching it need never again be visible. Michael’s sold currency — the daily, perishable evidence of being, this week, someone worth seeing. One room served capital that was settled; the other served capital that had to be re-earned every Wednesday, which was the condition of the media class exactly. A byline was worth a table until the next byline was due.

The Fall of the French Room

The restaurants that signified the top of the scale in 1989 were French, and their Frenchness was the whole of the argument. Le Cirque, which Sirio Maccioni had opened in the mid-1970s, seated the city’s wealth by a geography only the maître d’ fully held; Lutèce, run by the chef André Soltner, and La Grenouille, the surviving grand room of the genre, traded in the same proposition — that a cuisine of butter, ceremony, and untranslated menus was the natural language of people who had money and meant to be understood as having always had it. The old-guard American room, the “21” Club, worked a parallel exclusivity in a different idiom. The formality was the barrier. A menu in French that the room did not condescend to explain sorted the diners into those who could order without hesitation and those who revealed, in a pause over the card, that they were guests in a world rather than natives of it.

The recession that arrived in 1990 fell on these rooms with particular weight. The expense accounts that filled them at midday contracted as the finance and media industries shed jobs; the boom-era restaurants that had opened on the assumption of a permanently rising market found the market gone, and several closed outright.⁴ The French temple did not vanish — La Grenouille kept its clientele, and the “21” Club its history — but the idiom stopped being the only available signal of having arrived. Into the vacancy the recession opened, a different kind of room began to make a different kind of claim, and the claim was that ceremony itself had become a thing the truly secure no longer needed.

The turn was legible as class before it was legible as taste. The people who had spent the 1980s demonstrating wealth through the acceptance of French formality were, by the early 1990s, in the same austere mood that had emptied the fashion floors of visible logos — the recession and the epidemic together having made conspicuous ease read as a failure of tact. What replaced the temple was not cheaper. It was a room that cost as much and worked to look as though it did not, and reading that room correctly required a fluency the old formality had never demanded. The menu one could no longer be caught failing to understand was, increasingly, in English.

The Democratic Room

The model for what came next had opened before the recession that made it legible. Union Square Cafe, which Danny Meyer opened in 1985 at the age of twenty-seven, on East Sixteenth Street a few doors from a square the city still counted as unsafe, proposed a room that served food as serious as the French houses in a register that refused their hierarchy: New American cooking, warm and unintimidating service, a dining room built to welcome conversation rather than to stage rank.⁵ When Meyer opened Gramercy Tavern in 1994 with the chef Tom Colicchio, on East Twentieth Street, the proposition was confirmed and named — cuisine that could stand beside anything in the city, in a room that read as American, democratic, and at ease, its excellence delivered without the apparatus of condescension.

The democracy was real as a feeling and partial as a fact. A room that welcomed everyone equally still seated only those who could pay its prices and secure its tables, and the warmth of the service was itself a refinement — a thing the diner learned to recognize and value, another code layered over the older one. The new grammar rewarded a specific literacy: the ability to prize the unpretentious room over the grand one, to understand that the absence of ceremony was now the higher signal. A person who felt more comfortable at the “21” Club than at Gramercy Tavern was revealing something about when they had learned the rules. The barrier had not fallen. It had moved inward, from the visible test of the French menu to the invisible test of knowing which kind of ease to prefer.

The finance money that recovered as the decade went on built rooms of its own, and these made a plainer claim. Daniel, which the chef Daniel Boulud opened in 1993, and Jean-Georges, which Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened in 1997, were the laboratories of a new-money palate — expensive, ambitious, French in technique but contemporary in idiom, and unembarrassed about costing what they cost. They belonged to a different fraction than the media rooms did. Where a magazine editor’s table was worth a byline and lasted until the next one, a banker’s table was worth a bonus, and the bonus, unlike the byline, arrived on schedule every December. The two classes ate at the same tier of restaurant and read each other across the room, each fluent in a code the other only half spoke.

Downtown

The creative class kept its own geography, south of the rooms where it was flattered and priced. The Odeon, which opened in 1980 on West Broadway in TriBeCa, had established the type — the downtown restaurant as canteen for the media-and-arts world, a brasserie in a former cafeteria where the clientele was the attraction and the lateness of the hour was part of the point.⁷ Indochine, on Lafayette Street across from the Public Theater, served the same function for the art world and the theater. These were rooms where the performance was of not performing, where the currency was a face known to the other faces rather than a table certified by a column, and where a person could arrive at eleven at night and be somebody without having paid a lunch bill to prove it. Below even that pose sat Fanelli Café on Prince Street, a genuine old bar since the nineteenth century, cheap and unimproved, where the downtown world went when it had stopped performing altogether.

The reservation became, in these years, a form of capital in its own right. When Nobu opened in 1994 on Hudson Street — the chef Nobu Matsuhisa in partnership with the actor Robert De Niro, the restaurateur Drew Nieporent, and the investor Meir Teper — the difficulty of securing a table became inseparable from the value of having one.⁸ A booking at the hardest room in the city was a thing a person could possess and mention, a social asset that cost nothing but the access required to obtain it, which was the one thing money alone could not reliably buy. The restaurant sorted its aspirants not by the size of the check but by the reach of the call that got them in.

The room that fixed the downtown idiom for the rest of the decade arrived in the spring. Keith McNally opened Balthazar in April 1997 on Spring Street in SoHo, a French brasserie built with such deliberate patina — the aged mirrors, the tin ceiling, the red leather banquettes, the zinc bar — that it read as though it had stood for a century, and it drew the fashion-and-media world nightly from the day it opened, selling steak frites by the hundreds.⁷ The press credited McNally with having invented downtown, and the phrase held a precise irony: the most convincingly authentic room in the city was a new construction, an act of scenography executed by a man who understood that the appearance of unselfconscious history was the era’s most valuable finish. Downtown had become a thing money could build to order.

The Expense Account

The table that did the sorting was rarely paid for by the person being sorted. The working currency of the editorial floor was the expense account, and the business lunch it funded was at once a transaction and a tutorial. A senior editor taking a writer to lunch in 1993 chose from perhaps fifteen rooms within walking distance of the office — Midtown or the Flatiron, depending on the magazine — and the meal ran to an unwritten script: a drink, mineral water or a glass of wine and rarely a second before two in the afternoon without a remark; a shared first course or separate ones; a main course; dessert only if the conversation needed the extra twenty minutes. The bill ran sixty to ninety dollars for two, higher at the power rooms and forty to fifty at the casual ones — Mesa Grill, where Bobby Flay had opened a Southwestern kitchen in 1991 on Fifth Avenue, sat at a price an editor could expense without comment.

For the assistant, the lunch was the only affordable way into a culture priced well above the salary. An editorial assistant earning eighteen to twenty-two thousand dollars a year had a food budget of ten or fifteen dollars a day — bodega coffee, a deli sandwich, dinner assembled at home — and no independent way to eat at the level the magazine treated as ambient. The senior editor’s account was the scholarship. Being taken to the midrange business lunch was where an assistant learned the grammar the floor assumed everyone already carried: how to read a menu without appearing to study it, how to order without hesitation, how to address a waiter without performing either deference or command, how much wine was too much and at what hour. The tutorial was never named as one. It was lunch, and the education was the part of it that did not appear on the receipt.

The Counter

Beneath every tier of the sorting machine ran one room that did not sort, and it was dying as the decade watched. The Greek diner — the coffee shop with the Corinthian-columned paper cup, the counter of chrome and laminate, the menu of a hundred items none of them expensive — had been the city’s democratic dining room for two generations, and its defining property was that it refused to read its customers.⁹ A person could sit at the counter of Veselka on Second Avenue, open since 1954, or Eisenberg’s on Fifth, with its marble counter and its twenty-four stools since 1929, and occupy a stool for two hours over a single cup of coffee at seventy-five cents, and no one would ask them to order more or to leave or to make room for a reservation, because there were no reservations and the coffee was cheap enough that the arithmetic never required it. The room compressed a banker and a bike messenger onto adjacent stools and charged them the same, and the equality was not a philosophy but a fact of the pricing.

The forces that closed the diners were additive and specific. The footprint that made a diner viable — two to five thousand square feet of floor turning thin margins on dollar coffee and six-dollar club sandwiches — became untenable as Manhattan rents climbed through the decade, and when a lease came up the numbers frequently no longer worked; a boutique or a chain pharmacy could pay per square foot what a plate of eggs could not.¹⁰ The second-generation children of the Greek families who had run them, having watched the hours, often declined to take the business over. And the arrival of Starbucks — the first New York location opened in 1994 — trained a generation to expect a coffee the diner urn could not match, and to pay two dollars for it without noticing that the price bought a curated hospitality where the diner’s had been free.¹¹ The Kiev, which the Ukrainian immigrant Michael Hrynenko had opened on Second Avenue in 1978, closed abruptly in 2000 — its owner, by his own account, had “got bored with it.”¹⁰ Dozens of unnamed rooms closed more quietly.

What went with them was not replaceable by anything that succeeded them. Starbucks was more expensive, more designed, more insistent about the mood it sold; the bookstore café and the brasserie each sorted by price and taste as the diner never had. The single room in the city where a person could be alone in company, unread and unbilled for the privilege of sitting still, was the room the decade’s rising rents found least defensible. A city learning to price every square foot of itself had no rent bracket for the democratic counter, and one after another the counters closed.