A look at enduring restaurants (and one stalwart restaurateur) after the jump ...
But first: Top Comments appears nightly, as a round-up of the best comments on Daily Kos. Surely ... you come across comments daily that are perceptive, apropos and .. well, perhaps even humorous. But they are more meaningful if they're well-known ... which is where you come in (especially in diaries/stories receiving little attention).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Send your nominations to TopComments at gmail dot com by 9:30 PM Eastern Time nightly, or by our KosMail message board. Please indicate (a) why you liked the comment, and (b) your Dkos user name (to properly credit you) as well as a link to the comment itself.
Recently, a Boston Globe front-page story dealt with the issue of venerable restaurants closing their doors. After 50 years, the Top-of-the-Hub restaurant (on the 52nd floor of the Prudential Building in Boston’s Back Bay) announced its closing this coming April and the essayist noted the loss of jobs, etc. Going on to note the loss (in the not-too-distant past) of places such as Locke-Ober (1875-2012) where movers and shakers dined, to Jacob Wirth (1868-2018) a middle-class German restaurant to Durgin-Park (1827-2019) serving old-time plebeian dinners … as well as others (from upscale to downscale) …. the theme was that sometimes this is not bad. Often, those lamenting their loss admitted they had not visited there in many years (which I recall led to the loss of venerable music shops on NYC’s West 48th Street) and that the space could be put to better use. She concluded by saying it’s OK to rage against loss. “But don’t rage indiscriminately, rage precisely.”
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, and all of the above registers on an intellectual level as the author noted: if you value old dining spots, patronize them while you can. On a visceral level, though … I am torn to have to lose old favorite haunts.
Recently an old favorite place in New Hampshire (Peter Christian’s) — which had survived new ownership in the past (after the death of its founder) and at least one short-term closure — had a renovation project that left it …. well, not the same. Gone was the very woody bar, beer served in Mason jars, and an old-time menu with just enough upscaleness (such as an eclectic wine list) to be your regular haunt. Now it had ... ferns, fine crystal beer glasses, a chrome bar and a menu that was just too different (fusion and beyond). And this does not even deal with my old favorite places that simply are now shuttered … quite a few have.
Of course, the reasons for closures are many, and may not involve declining sales at all. A NY Times story on Chinese restaurants noted the decline in their share over the past several years. There are several reasons, not due to poor ratings but: rising rents, delivery apps, tightening regulations on immigration, new accounting rules for cash businesses … yet also because the (often) immigrants’ owners sons and daughters have gone into other lines of work. At the same time, the share of Indian, Korean and Vietnamese restaurants are increasing due to changing immigration patterns. The essay concluded with one seventy-six year-old who still works eighty hours/week (after emigrating from southern China in 1974) who said of his two professional daughters, “I hoped they would have a better life than me ...… and they do”.
That’s why I am heartened to see old places that have-it-both-ways: not frozen in time (menu changes to reflect the times) and yet still a place that hearkens back to the way you remember it. To continue the Boston aspect, the Union Oyster House has been serving since 1826 and is considered the oldest restaurant in the US that has been continuously operating since being opened.
41 Union Street, Boston
Years ago, I recall a magazine article declaring that — if all of the German restaurants in America closed, one-by-one — The Berghoff in Chicago would “turn out the lights”. I paid a visit there when Netroots Nation was held in 2007 — and told an Illinois native co-worker (upon my return home) that I was served by a waiter who could not have been more attentive and helpful … yet was quite old and looked as if a puff of wind could knock him over. “Yes, you were indeed at the Berghoff” she told me with a smile.
Then, news came that the Berghoff had indeed closed (with a remnant pub at O’Hare Airport) as the family were unsure their children would continue the restaurant when they retired — and they did not trust selling it to an outsider. After a while, it did re-open (under some mysterious circumstances, such as with massive layoffs) and I’d like to hear from any native Chicagoans what their understanding was?
17 West Adams Street, Chicago
And now I’d like to focus on a restaurateur about to enter his ninth decade.
The day after this past Christmas, I was in Manhattan to visit an old high school friend for lunch … who had to cancel due to having the flu. Where to go, then?
Then it dawned on me to visit a place I last went to thirty years earlier …. and sure enough, Neary’s Pub (East 57th near 1st Avenue) was open. I recall reading a newspaper food critic essay in the 1970’s, where a reviewer thought this place had the best french fries in NYC — whose proprietor assured her that he used fresh potatoes — and she wrote, “You’d be surprised how many upscale places use frozen”. Even after a thirty-year interval, the place looked familiar: red banquettes in the restaurant portion and an inviting bar (where I took a seat).
And then in walked Jimmy Neary … who strode up to to me and shook my hand as if I was a regular (as he does with all of his patrons) and we had a nice chat. Born in 1930 in Ireland, he emigrated to the US in 1954 and has been here ever since. At 5’ 3”, he is always wearing a nice suit, still has an Irish lilt to his voice after all of these years and comes in every day. Since his restaurant opened on St Patrick’s Day in 1967, it has been closed only on each Christmas Day (plus the two days following the death of his wife, a few years ago). In the early years (when business was sluggish and his future was uncertain) he heard his patrons buzzing, because:
Sitting in the corner of the bar was none other than John Glenn. I was awe struck. And I remember saying to myself, ‘Even if the restaurant does not last another week, I still had the first American to orbit the earth to eat here.”
A young Jimmy Neary (in 1967)
As a NY Times profile noted, “If you think you see him sitting down, that’s not Jimmy”. For in addition to acting as a greeter, he will sometimes bus tables and even bring food out when needed — and you’d be forgiven for forgetting how old he is. He says, “Everybody’s smiling. They might be a sourpuss when they come in, but they won’t be when we get done talking to them.” He notes that closing-up each night is easier than it used to be (as nearly all of his business is via credit cards, rather than cash).
And the familiarity I saw is not accidental — he has a loyal clientele, and while it is not uncommon for some Manhattanites (in small apartments) to dine out daily, he has some who go there seven days/week. They all cite the stability — while Neary’s does have some nightly specials, the menu of extensive surf and turf (plus his signature lamb chops) rarely changes and he has had only three head chefs over its fifty-three year history.
Among his regulars are Kathy Lee Gifford, former Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, Mike Bloomberg (who even flew him to his ancestral birthplace in County Sligo on his private plane) and the recently-deceased author Mary Higgins Clark, who cited him in twenty-one of her books (though Neary claims not to have read a single one). In prior years, Ted Kennedy and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were also guests, yet Jimmy says his usual patrons are ordinary New Yorkers. His daughter Una is a partner at Goldman Sachs yet can work at the bar on weekends when need be.
A major reason why he has been successful: besides the love he puts into his establishment, he was able to obtain a loan in 1986 (from the Bank of Ireland’s president) to buy his restaurant space (at a time when NYC real estate prices were at a low point). As a result, his entrée prices (with potato or vegetable) are around $28 — low for an Upper East Side restaurant. Jimmy Neary has seen fifteen competitors forced to close over the years not due to their food or service, but simply due to horrendous rent increases. I wish his place had tap beer and took reservations … yet I suppose one can’t have everything.
After emigrating in 1954 and working as a barboy at P.J. Moriarty’s restaurant, Neary was drafted into the Army in 1956 for a two-year stint in Germany, saying something that seems wistful in the anti-immigrant sentiment of today:
What President Kennedy was to say four years later in his [January 20, 1961] inaugural speech- ‘Ask not what your country could do for you, but ask what you could do for your country’ — is exactly how I felt back then. America had welcomed me as a young immigrant, so I saw my time of service in the military as my way of showing my appreciation, loyalty, honor and respect to this wonderful nation”.
And just last year, he had one of his proudest moments when one of his servers Mary O’Connor (herself an immigrant and a forty-three year veteran of working at Neary’s) volunteered to become a kidney donor and just before a 58 year-old father of three (Dan Ferguson) was to receive it: a final test determined her kidney was too small to correctly fit into his body. They did find a perfect match with yet another man, who no longer needed dialysis. Yet Dan Ferguson was able (after being placed back on the waiting list) to receive a perfect match from someone else. And upon hearing of Mary O’Connor’s story on TV: the wife of the man whose liver she did successfully donate to decided to become a kidney donor herself ... and in October 2019, she was able to donate a kidney to a third recipient.
“I am very proud that my dear friend Mary directly and indirectly helped heal three very sick people”, Jimmy Neary stated. “It just proves that one act of kindness can beget another. And the winner will always be the human race.”
Jimmy Neary as you will see him today
Even if you never venture to the Union Oyster House, the Berghoff or Neary’s Pub — perhaps you have a venerable old restaurant or two that still endures .. or perhaps had to give-up-the-ghost after a long run? Please mention them in the comment section so that others can be made aware. After all, while change is the only constant thing in the restaurant business — and as an accountant I know quite well when liquidity can overtake a storied history — the sentimental old fool in me wishes some places will endure, long after I’m gone.
Now, on to Top Comments:
From Cecilia S:
In the front-page story about a truly awful Tennessee Republican objecting to including tampons (in a three-day tax holiday) because women might buy too many (!) …. in reply to rugbymom's logical--and funny--speculation that these guys must think tampons are addictive, Boise Blue left this brilliant piece of satire on what this addiction looks like.
And from Ed Tracey, your faithful correspondent this evening ........
In the diary by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing about the retort that Mike Bloomberg made to the Trumpster’s snickering Tweets — both Seraph4377 and then Ellid provide the back-story why NYC’s truly elite avoid the Trump family, and how the Boston-born Bloomberg was able to ingratiate himself far better than the egotistical native son ever could.
TOP PHOTOS
February 12th, 2020
Next - enjoy jotter's wonderful *PictureQuilt™* below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo.
(NOTE: Any missing images in the Quilt were removed because (a) they were from an unapproved source that somehow snuck through in the comments, or (b) it was an image from the DailyKos Image Library which didn't have permissions set to allow others to use it.)
|
And lastly: yesterday's Top Mojo - mega-mojo to the intrepid mik ...... who rescued this feature from oblivion:
