"Oh I have discovered the most divine little restaurant in East Village--and it was cheap! It's called Amato. Go there before the masses find it and ruin it" --Typical New Yorker
I too have caught myself many times saying something pretty similar to the statement above. I guess when you live in New York city, in addition to the weather, traffic and models, you have the infinitely dense, diverse, and elusive fauna of restaurants to talk about. There's part gloating, part sharing and part shameless need to talk constantly in all this. Gloating because you were there first, you discovered it, before you came this restaurant was buried under rubble and the waiters were sitting around wondering why there were no customers. Sharing because New York people are not all bad, unlike the way I make them sound here, they too have a good bone or two in them and they like to share little secrets of living well in the city --not with just anyone tough these little factoids are only to be shared with the cool and the savvy.
David, my partner whose southern upbringing has been lost on him except for his excellent manners and amazing wit, is hopelessly addicted to Turkish food ever since he met me. In addition to this addiction, he also dislikes several other cuisines of the world; specifically Chinese, Japanese, Indian. He does not eat fish, and avoids anything with rice. I can brave just about everything with the exception of Italian restaurants in NYC -- too much mafia behavior, it ruins my appetite. I single Italian restaurants out because several times I have eaten at Italian restaurants in NYC only to find the food ordinary and the bill higher than it should be. The hefty bill also is compounded by the fact that most Italian restaurants in NYC will not accept MasterCard or Visa, they only accept American Express and what else... cash. Silly and pretentious.
As you can imagine, between David and I we cut about more than half the list of available restaurants. The remaining restaurants are usually either really busy or surrounded by traffic that turns a taxi cab ride to for lunch an insane crusade of two across Manhattan. Naturally, we end up eating most of our lunches in East Village.
Several restaurants we frequent are The Cloister Cafe, Telephone Bar, St. Marx Cafe, Veselka, Lemon Leaf, Shangri La, and several street corner pizza joint on 1st and 3rd Avenues. Missing from this list is the 2nd Avenue Deli, a prominent historical staple of the East Village scene. Oh we have eaten there, just not more than once.
It was an overcast day in Manhattan, not cold but there was a lukewarm breeze in the air. Both David and I were starving. to make matters worse we were in one of our let's try something new moods. It seemed like in a city full of restaurants we were suddenly unable to find one to eat lunch at. It was 2pm already and I was starting to switch from just grouchy from hunger to down right unpleasant. David was no better, whenever he is hungry he just gets quieter and quieter and quieter until it feels like I am escorting a mute person.
We were running late so the lunch crowd had already left. Many days I have walked past this restaurant and silently giggled at the masses of people piled in waiting for a table for 45 minutes. I had a strange understanding of these people today, perhaps they too were stranded in their search for a restaurant and the 2nd Avenue Deli was right there looking at them in the face and asking no questions.
We were promptly seated at one of the booths that had been just cleaned up. The table was still shiny from the rag with long curly streaks drying fast to reveal a dull tan colored formica table. The interior of the restaurant was paneled with a very dark red wood that at times made me feel like I was in a mountain lodge or perhaps a lost Frank Lloyd Wright building. Our drinks arrived, a diet coke and an ice tea. The coleslaw and pickles plate also arrived a few minutes later although we had not requested it. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against coleslaw, it was actually pretty tasty. What I don't like about coleslaw is not so much as what it tastes like as what it does to me once I eat it. There's the indigestion, followed by gas and perhaps the shame. It should be marked as a controlled substance.
The coleslaw tasted good, but the pickles were sad. They were sad like kids pulled out of bed way too early. They were neither cucumbers nor pickles; They were a little bit of each and neither at the same time. They were soft and not crunch. They only promised more indigestion and perhaps even a wonderful episode of IBS and I did not even want to think about that.
Then finally like a diva our waitress took stage and came by our table to take our order. She was a 5'7" tall lady in her late fifties with a big cheap blonde wig that was topped by a white hat not dissimilar from those worn by nurses in old war movies. Her makeup was heavy like a wooden puppets and I could swear it was flaking. To make matters worse she was in some sort of a French maid outfit; while the this dress code might be provocative and sexually titilating on perhaps a 20 year old girl, at her age she looked like a French and Saunders episode that found a way to break out of the TV screen.
As we began ordering my mind had completely stopped and I merely emitting a waxing and waning glow like the Apple Macintosh laptops do when they're asleep. So in the middle of my low blood sugar crisis, I listened on as I mouthed the words "I'll have a 2ndAvenue Burger with American Cheese." Before I had a chance to look up, I knew I had said something wrong. I did not have to wait long, the waitress was quick to correct me with a capital C.
She literally shouted at me saying "THIS is a kosher restaurant! You can not mix meat with cheese. You should know that." With no further ado, she turned around, her short black skirt taking flight from the abrupt move and proceeded into the kitchen. David and I were left behind staring each other like kids that just spilled something at the dinner table. On one hand what had happened was so wrong, on the other hand we were so hungry that we did not have the power to pick a fight. And even if we did, we would be back on the street looking for another restaurant again --and you know we would be searching for another hour before we settled down again.
The food arrived and I still had not recovered from the abuse. Like a victim of abusive parents, I sat at the table and quietly ate my bland, boring, and greasy burger. David was also laying pretty low. I think we had made a silent agreement not to talk about the incident until we got out of there.
We must have left her the smallest tip we have left in our 2 years of dining in New York City. We walked back home slowly on 2nd Avenue replaying the incident in our heads -- trying to weight how wrong it was of me to say what I did and how wrong of her was it to snap like that. Perhaps we were thin skinned, perhaps we were not ready for this city with all its rules and regulations and hidden gotchas around every corner. Perhaps we were too tired and hungry and despite my stupidity someone could have been more gracious.
After this incident 2nd Avenue Deli has become for me a monument to the over-rated nature of kosher food: double the price, half the service, and rules and regulations that make less than zero sense. I mean what's the point of washing lettuce a specific number of times when you know you're washing it with the water that comes out of NYC main?
