For the better part of two decades I have lunched alone in Manhattan restaurants several times each week. Although my work requires me to break bread with a continuous stream of fascinating (and self-fascinated) personalities, I still prefer, if given the choice, to eat by myself. It’s not that I fancy my own company so much as I enjoy the company of complete strangers. I like the communal anonymity of watching people as they go about their lives, and a restaurant is a good place to do this. The best table in any restaurant, so far as I’m concerned, is in a corner next to a window. From that spot I can be entertained by the infinite variety of the street or the enclosed drama of the restaurant itself. There’s always a lot to see.
I was introduced to the pleasures of eating alone at the VG Bar/Restaurant at the northwest corner of Broadway and Bleecker in the late 1980s, where the enormous plate-glass windows were so close to the sidewalk that I felt as if I had my own box seat on the live theater that was the city. Across the street and down a few steps from my office, the VG was a simple place, stripped down to the bare brick, with narrow aisles of wobbly tables and wooden ladder-back chairs. It helped that I was—and remain—not fussy about what I eat. With a burger or a tuna melt steaming on a plate in front of me, I happily watched three-card monte games, fire engines racing down Broadway, homeless people shuffling toward their doom, minor car accidents at the light, an infinity of leggy young models on their way to photo shoots in the neighborhood, loud packs of teenagers up to no good whatsoever, the occasional duo of fat-necked mob bill collectors calling on the businesses where payment was late, and the hunched widows of NYU professors who lived in the neighborhood and in winter appeared outside for a few hours of sunlight in the midday warmth.
I ate at the VG in every month, in every kind of weather. Rain, especially the kind of slashing cold rain that hits New York City in late fall, improved the voyeuristic fishbowl effect. Here I was, warm and dry, but a few inches beyond my nose, nature flung itself downward, blowing umbrellas inside out as the taxis sprayed puddles onto the sidewalk. And during several of the huge blizzards that hit the city in those years, I made my way through the falling, piled snow, eyeglasses wet with it, and watched as the traffic slushed its way slowly along, the cornices and pediments of the building façades piled with white. You could hear the wind howl as it tried to turn the corner at Broadway, and the plate-glass windows would be cold to the touch. The VG had a very moist German chocolate cake that was particularly delicious to eat when the weather outside was foul. Don’t ask me why, it just was.
Turning my eyes toward the inside of the VG, which allowed smoking back then, an atmospheric element I enjoyed, I could see the midday alcoholics already at the bar, the young waitresses clawing out a living in the city, having just arrived from Seattle or Denver or Des Moines in hopes of discovering the version of themselves that they’d always dreamed about. The waitresses cycled through quickly, the very pretty ones finding better jobs or rich boyfriends within days of arriving, and the less beguiling settling in for a few months, or more. The most permanent employees were the Mexican busboys and cooks, although the VG had a couple of bartenders who had earned their stripes. The bar, a long, beautiful curved piece of mahogany, had been salvaged from some greater origin—a swanky hotel or midtown restaurant, or even an ocean liner, for all I knew—and on the wall next to its last seat hung a Nynex pay phone; here, while leaning back against the wall, it was possible to simultaneously knock back a beer, smoke, and make a phone call. The staff paid no attention to the wall soiled by heads and hands, nor to the tiny phone numbers etched in pencil and pen around the phone. The proximity of alcohol to the telephone attracted a stream of marginal middle-aged men whose loud conversations announced their identities as struggling salesmen working lower Manhattan territories or gambling addicts calling in their afternoon racetrack or baseball bets, as well as an endless cast of struggling writers, painters, musicians, photographers, composers, playwrights, sculptors, and would-be movie directors working some desperate angle that might forestall the inevitable.
When the dollar was cheap, the restaurant was flooded with German or Japanese tourists who irritated the regulars with their fat shopping bags. After lunch, the heat and smoke and chatter of the VG virtually expelled me out into the street, caffeinated and sugared up, ready to return to work. And yet the place was addictive, and once I found out that the restaurant quieted down after lunch, I began to stay there and work next to the window for longer stretches of time, leaving word at my office where I could be found, if truly necessary. Of course, I did not want to be found, and in those days before cell phones, rarely was.
The VG is gone now, replaced by a succession of increasingly upscale dining establishments and I, too, have moved on, through a series of restaurants where I came to know the menu, the staff, and the clientele. For a little while I frequented Fanelli’s, an old establishment half a dozen blocks away, where the lunchers were older and more grizzled than those at the VG. I liked the patterned tin ceiling, the cup of chili, the old wood floor. The waitresses were pros—tough Manhattan chicks in their thirties and forties who had heard, seen, smoked, or ingested it all long ago. They seemed to like the guys in jean jackets with dirty hands—men who worked, not fops or frauds or delicate geniuses. But as SoHo boomed, Fanelli’s became difficult to get into. Its authenticity made it a cool place, and the guys in jean jackets went elsewhere, as did I.
For a time in the early nineties, I ate in the Noho Star, another corner restaurant one long block to the east of the VG. Once while dining alone, I looked up from my plate of shrimp linguini to witness ten New York City police officers run south on Lafayette. They sprinted with great urgency, their guns drawn and pointing down. They passed by the window in less than five seconds, and I turned back to see if any of the restaurant’s other patrons had noticed; they had not. In that same restaurant I spied over the years, and spied upon, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Sam Shepard, Gregory Hines, Wallace Shawn, and Lauren Hutton, among others. Dining alone, I noticed them all.
Now I work in midtown Manhattan. A few years ago, I found myself frequenting a not particularly distinguished Indian restaurant that I nonetheless returned to nearly every day. Within a week or two of my first visit the Indian waiters had pegged me as that rarest of patrons—the daily diner who never changes his order. I was an odd duck and that endeared me to them. Indeed, my familiarity with the restaurant and the staff became so complete that I was allowed to walk past parties of businesspeople waiting to be seated and proceed directly to what I came to think of as “my table,” a two-seater next to a giant carved marble Ganesh. I was even allowed to enter and exit through what was more or less an unmarked doorway. The act of ordering became nothing more than a quick nod at whichever waiter glanced at me first. In this way, a plate of food usually arrived at my place within a minute or two of my arrival. One of the waiters, who often pumped me for possible connections in the hotel supply industry, despite my protestations that I had none, made it his special duty to brew a particular version of Indian tea for me. It was not as good as I pretended it was, but he meant well, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
Although the midtown crowds are not nearly as interesting to watch as the downtown crowds, I was content in this restaurant. The food was hot and fast, and no one much cared if I dropped a pea or spilled a little curry sauce on the white tablecloth. Again, I began to work through and past lunch there, and it became known that if I could not be found in the office, chances were good that I was in the Indian restaurant nibbling on aloo matar gobhi amid the sitar music. I expected to eat there for the indefinite future, but not long ago one of the waiters in a black-and-white uniform came up to me during lunch and solemnly whispered that the restaurant would be closing the next day, due to a lack of patronage. He seemed anxious to break the news to me gently, perhaps worried that as I was a man of habits I might be undone by the forced change in my routine. I thanked him for the information and returned to the restaurant the next day, hours before it was to close. What was going to become of the place? I asked. It was being turned into an expensive steakhouse, I was told.
So it was, within a few months. Hoping to renew my affinity, I passed through the doors again and ate a good if expensive meal. The decor had been upgraded to a kind of forced luxuriousness. Not my thing. And the finely dressed waiters struck me as too hawkishly watchful; this was a place where you didn’t drop a pea on the floor. I left the restaurant knowing I wouldn’t return. The place itself had lost the casual indifference, the sloppy humanity, that had invited me to eat there every day.
Soon I was launched on my quest to find my next regular restaurant. I flirted with a two-story place festooned with shamrocks on the outside that I called “the Irish dump,” having developed a fondness for their tuna melt, but the joint had too many televisions on, placed inescapably in every corner. From there I visited a kosher place a few doors down, which had a great view of the street from the second-floor window, and the added attraction of Diamond District jewelry dealers coming in to eat clannishly together. Little did the restaurant owners know that I was auditioning them for a regular place in my life. But although the food was criminally inexpensive and served by kindly Israeli matrons who seemed genuinely interested in whether I liked what they set down before me, I found the kosher dishes to be impossibly bland, overcooked into a sad paste. It’s infrequent that I won’t like a meal, as long as it’s hot, but this stuff was—well, not great. So I moved on, somewhat disconsolately, through several of the panini and pizza joints on Forty-eighth Street, experimenting with yet another Indian restaurant a block west, also a second-floor joint where you climb a narrow, irregular stairwell. But this didn’t do it; neither did a cheap sushi place with a great window seat. I quite enjoy the well-known Café Un Deux Trois a few blocks to the south, which has elegant food, great windows, and a fantastic people scene inside, but it’s pricey if you’re going to eat there every day. And maybe a little too visible.
No, I’m looking for a joint. My version of the VG ten years later. The right combination of street view, grease, and ambience. A great place that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Not too expensive, either. With a decent burger, perhaps. It’s clear I’ll have to keep looking. Just last week I extended my search down Fifth Avenue, not discovering any place I liked. I’ll find it, though. My new lunch place has got to be around here somewhere, and when I see it, I’ll know.