Flying into Newark airport is something spectacular if your flight path takes you over New York city at nighttime. As the vast sea of twinkling lights hoves into view, the leg-numbing journey from London, crammed into economy class, is swiftly forgotten and you experience a little frisson of anticipation. Then you get closer and can make out the shapes of the individual boroughs. The light-spangled grid of Manhattan island appears below, like a tiny three-dimensional model of itself, laid out with unlikely geometrical precision, and then the Hudson river and Liberty holding aloft her flaming beacon. Then you’re over New Jersey and the contrast is marked – luckily, the darkness obscures the ranks of dingy tenements on the fringes of Jersey City and the industrial wasteland of the Jersey Shore. Newark itself is best speedily departed and the journey made back to Manhattan by taxi, impatiently waiting at the Holland Tunnel in the inevitable queue before debouching onto Canal St in the lower part of the city.
I was travelling with a teenage daughter and her friend and, although tired after the long flight, we were also ravenous, so we headed straight out for dinner. I had chosen the Union Square Café as our first stop; it’s long been voted by New Yorkers as their favourite restaurant and I was anxious to discover why. The restaurant was opened in 1985 by Danny Meyer, little known in the UK but highly regarded in the States. This is the man who crystallised the concept of “hospitality” as opposed to just “service” in restaurants. His book, Setting the Table, should be textbook reading for aspiring restaurateurs. In it, he sets out to explain hospitality as not just providing customers with expert service, but making them feel at home. There is a fine line between over-familiarity and aloofness and few restaurants manage to tread it with any skill but Union Square Café is one of them. Bursting at the seams with contented diners when ewe entered, we were still greeted with unhurried grace and looked after from start to finish. Of course, being treated with such care and consideration makes it all the more difficult to complain when the starters aren’t up to scratch. The wild mushroom soup was thick and turgid and my sardines small, dry and tasteless – when our hostess bounded over to to enquire how we were getting on we guarded our criticisms like a guilty secret, not wanting to offend her any more than if we were guests in her house. Fortunately, the main courses in the neo-Italian restaurant were vastly better, gnocchi light and fluffy, ravioli perfectly al dente with its unctuous filling of gorgonzola and baby spinach, pan-fried striped bass crisp-skinned on top, sweet and tender underneath and full of the flavour you only get with a proper wild fish, not the flabby cotton-wool texture of its poor farmed cousin. It’s always a good sign when a restaurant is prepared to fork out three times as much for the real deal. Tired after our long journey from London, we passed on desserts and headed back to the hotel – a hard day’s shopping lay ahead.
The following day, the girls were after clothes, so I headed up to the Flatiron district, where I’d heard a new branch of Eataly had opened. Pioneered in Turin some 5 years ago, with branches as far afield as Tokyo and now New York, Eataly is a wonderful celebration of all things Italian to do with food. Supermarket, deli, café, restaurant, wine bar and much more come together in riotous chaos in this vast emporium on 5th Avenue. On entering the store your senses are assailed by the sights, sounds and smells of serious food at work. The concept, though confusing at first, is really very simple: the store is split into departments – salume, cheese (they make their own mozzarella every day) , fish, pasta ,oil, wine, beer, bread and so on - and attached to each department is a place where you can sit, or stand, and order from a menu showcasing all the best that the respective department has to offer. Of course, if you want a full meal this means you have to up sticks and change restaurants for each course but hey – in Italy lunch can take 4 hours, so why not here? After foccaccia at the bakery with its roaring wood-fired oven, a plate of meats at the salumeria and an oozing Gorgonzola dolce at the cheese counter, I finish up with a double macchiato at the espresso bar – odd to think that, for all the lazy informality of the Italian lunch, coffee is always taken on the run. With this in mind, the coffee bar is sited near the door and whilst I stood nursing my perfect little coffee, a stream of sharp-suited Italians (expatriates?) came in, downed espressos in a gulp and disappeared again. This type of coffee culture has never really caught on in England, as more than one ill-considered coffee bar has found out to its cost…
Coming out, I realized I’d been in there for 2 ½ hours, so I anxiously texted my daughter to find out where she was. I shouldn’t have worried – she was in the nearest Starbucks. Why, with all that New York has to offer, was she in Starbucks of all places, with its huge mugs of tasteless coffee and identikit furnishings? “Because I knew exactly what it would be like” she told me and I suppose that’s one of the reasons for the success of the chain (and indeed any similar business) – people are comforted by the familiar, feeling safe knowing exactly what they’ll encounter before crossing the threshold – it’s just a pity their expectations are so low..
We were back in a Danny Meyer establishment for dinner. This time, it was Blue Smoke, his barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, a noisy but relaxed establishment which celebrates the food of the deep South. There is much controversy about what constitutes an authentic ‘cue, but after mistakenly ordering a mixed plate, I ended up with a whole smoked chicken breast, a full rack of hickory-smoked ribs and a vast heap of pulled pork – slow-cooked till meltingly tender, then literally pulled off the bone and shredded, together with a metal bucket of fries – I really didn’t care. It was as much as I could do to heave myself off the banquette and stagger to the door.
Peasant, in little Italy, was an entirely different proposition. The unprepossessing entrance belies the cavernous semi-industrial space within, all bare red-brick walls and high ceiling. The lighting is low and the open kitchen, stretching all across the far end is a focal point with its bank of roaring wood-fired ovens, small army of sweating chefs toiling to feed the cavernous maw of the baying mob before them. Make no mistake, it is crowded and very noisy here. At the bar, we were squashed like sardines and the restaurant is one of those places where tables are so close together they have to be pulled out to allow you to sit. The menu is traditional Italian and everything arrives with that slightly smoky, piping heat that only a wood-fired oven can deliver. Here I must confess a connection with the place, as one of our long-serving staff has worked here in her distant murky past. Having pulled a few strings on our behalf, we found ourselves treated to what appeared to be the entire menu, plus specials, in miniature, dish after dish being presented for our enjoyment – each one a masterpiece of simple Italian in-your-face understatement. This might sound like an oxymoron, but like all the best food each dish consists of only two or three top-quality ingredients, purchased at their best, bursting with flavour and totally un-messed about with: think burrata with cherry tomatoes and basil, razor clams with lemon and pangrattatta, octopus with chilli and tomato – all are delivered with the minimum of fanfare and deliver the maximum of flavour. I was able to meet the owner, Frank de Carlo, briefly after our meal. With his grey-flecked beard and lazy drawl, he both looked and sounded like Donald Sutherland in “Mash “. Leaning over the pass to shake his hand, I shouted my thanks over the din. “So, you’re friends with Camilla, eh?” he shouted back. “Yes, she works for me now” I replied. “Good girl”, he reminisced with a wistful look in his eye. Then the next check was called and he was back to his stove. We were already forgotten, our table already cleared and reseated. I looked back over my shoulder as we left – the dark space, roaring fires, rushing staff, shouting customers – it all brought to mind Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Eternal Damnation. I shook my head to clear the vision and we returned to the relative quiet of Manhatttan.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the food scene in the US is as, if not more vibrant than it is here; to a certain extent that’s true, but once you leave the major cities and head out onto the highway you soon find that this is not the case. The relentless march of corporate America has ensured that every road is an endless stripmall of Subway, Burger Kings, Dunkin’ Donuts and a host of other large corporate franchises mostly (as yet) unknown in this country. The “Mom and Pop” diner with its jukebox, soda fountain and good home cooking has all but disappeared – either squeezed out of existence by its corporate neighbours or forced to stoop so low to compete that it has outdone even them in its unpleasantness. Coffee is universally appalling. You almost yearn for a Starbucks Latte after trying what’s on offer. “Best Coffee on the Interstate” trumpets the Route 81 truck stop but its gleaming Bunn-o-Matic stainless steel and fire-engine red enamel Self Service Beverage Center belies the dismal reality – a bank of jugs of thin brown liquid stewing since God knows when – or even earlier, who knows? – and offered in vast beakers of up to 1 ½ pints, as if somehow sheer quantity would make up for its unspeakable awfulness.
Dean and Deluca is a Mecca for foodies in New York. With its cavernous interior and industrial shelving groaning under the weight of produce you could easily spend several hours (as I did) wandering the aisles idly inspecting such wonders as gunpowder mustard and hominy grits. Established in 1985, Dean and Deluca hasn’t fallen into the trap that so many so-called delis in the UK have, starting with noble intentions of purveying the very best the world has to offer and then realizing there’s more money in serving it and turning into a thinly –disguised café or restaurant with the rump deli shoved in a corner, now little more than a glorified gift shop. In Dean and Deluca, you really can (if you can afford it) do your weekly shop and what’s on offer is very good indeed. Their own-branded products are beautifully packaged, counters run the full length of the store offering a bewildering range of fresh produce whilst at the front a vast ziggurat of fruit and vegetables is testament to the fact that small growers are alive and kicking. There is even a man employed to spray a fine mist of water all over them to give them that glistening dew-fresh look. The prepared food counter is a good thirty feet long and behind it an army of uniformed staff toil ceaselessly to serve the queues of people waiting for salmon en croute, confit of duck, pates, terrines and salads to grace their dinner tables. Sandwiches, while hardly cheap at $10 a pop, more than make up for this in the quality and flavour of what’s in them and of course come beautifully wrapped in Dean and Deluca’s signature expensive white paper. Three sandwiches, freshly squeezed orange juice and some dense moist cookies later and sitting a short stroll away in Washington Square and we really were enjoying a slice of the big apple.
And so on to “5 Napkin”, odd sounding place recommended by, of all people, an investment banker. The name derives from the fact that you need all of five napkins to clean yourself up after one of their meals… This is a small chain of burger bars in some of the hippest areas in town – the one we visited being in Hell’s Kitchen. The menu is pretty long, but what you go for is the burgers – thick, juicy patties in a proper toasted bun with all the trimmings – actually looking on the plate like the thoroughly deceptive picture on a McDonald’s billboard. Sides were good, too – a big bucket of sweet potato fries and some “tater tots” – balls of mash flavoured with blue cheese and deep-fried in breadcrumbs. An excellent mixed leaf salad helped convince us we were eating healthily. Like all good restaurants in New York, the place was rammed, with a constant queue and a table turnaround fast as any I’ve seen: a quick wipe from a bus-boy, new cutlery laid by a server and the Maitre d’ was bringing the next party over – the whole routine taking no more than five seconds. It reminded me of the scene in Live and Let Die where Roger Moore disappears into the floor and a new table is laid in an instant. Mind you, I wasn’t about to complain; the Maitre d’ in his sharp Italian suit was a dead ringer for Fat Tony from the Simpsons, right down to the dead panda eyes and the Fuggedaboutit accent. Looking up at the ceiling of this former meatpacking warehouse where the chain-driven rails of hefty meat hooks wound their way round and back to the kitchen and it didn’t take much imagination to see a complaining punter hoisted up and sent on his way to the mincer with the same slick precision – Badaboom badabing.
Our last day was spent shopping, the girls for clothes, whilst I was thinking more of my stomach. I left them downtown and headed off to Chelsea Market, another converted industrial space given over to all things food-related. Bakeries, wine merchants, cake shops, kitchen paraphernalia, ice cream stores, supermarket, you name it – all is here under one cavernous roof and, just in case you might tire of the shopping, a wealth of small independent eating places are dotted here and there – milk bars, wine bars, juice bars, sandwich bars – eat your way from shop to shop. I had the best pastrami sandwich I’ve ever eaten here – layers of salt beef cut from a freshly cooked brisket positively oozing with flavour, thick cut pickles, sauerkraut and emmental on a toasted rye bun slathered with mayonnaise – the sort of sandwich you can’t eat without making a mess and then spend a good five minutes picking up the bits – all washed down with a pint or two of Stoatgobbler – one of a network of microbreweries which have been popping up all over the more enlightened states – surviving and thriving in spite of the megabrewers, because thankfully there are enough people who prefer the individual to the bland and corporate.
With an hour left to spare I made a final dash into the Whole Foods Market to see if I could pick up a few snacks for the ‘plane. Now here’s a thing – a supermarket selling the very best of responsibly-sourced, ethical, organic and downright wholesome foodstuffs where you can fill your trolley at a not unreasonable price and go home safe in the knowledge that you’ve got everything you need and don’t have to go to a “normal” supermarket to buy all the things they didn’t have – something Fresh and Wild never seemed to latch onto and which certainly contributed to their downfall. I came out with some healthy-looking, very delicious, but probably extremely fattening cookies (and a bag of apples to ease my conscience).
Strangely enough, the aeroplane seat seemed even smaller than six days before…