Remember me
I arrived in New York City from Madison, Wisconsin, on June 10, 1977, driving a U-Haul truck containing all my worldly possessions. My girlfriend, Gretchen, had preceded me by several months and rented a third-floor, $150-per-month apartment in a block of nine crumbling tenements on East 14th Street between Avenues B and C, right across the street from Stuyvesant Town. In those days the East Village looked much like the South Bronx, with empty lots where burned-out apartment buildings once stood. When I arrived, just as the sun was setting, I found Gretchen and some of her new friends in one such lot sitting on dirt mounds before a roaring fire, roasting hot dogs on sticks.
I soon set about exploring on foot, and discovered that the intersection of St. Marks and Second Avenue constituted a downtown for my new neighborhood. (I was still thinking like a Midwesterner.) Things seemed to be happening there, and the mix of hippies, working-class tradespeople, Beats, junkies passed out on the sidewalk, and—newest of the new—punks, safety pins piercing their cheeks, made a beguiling spectacle.
Nearby were storefronts selling discontinued fabric by the bolt, craft stores flogging bowls made from tree stumps, used record stores, and best of all, junk shops so cluttered you had to gyrate your way around the teetering piles of dusty merchandise just to take a look. There I discovered Haitian records pressed in Brooklyn, a bottle opener shaped like a whale that I christened Moby Dick, hats worn by old men who, judging from the stains, had apparently died in them, toaster ovens once owned by the college students who crowded into the lowest class of apartments, and enough used gadgets and utensils to fill my new kitchen, including a cherry pitter and a juice squeezer operated by a giant lever.
At the end of that first week I’d ventured far enough south to discover Katz’s Delicatessen, already almost a century old. I did a double take when I saw it. A neon sign in the window urged you to send a salami to your boy in the army. I couldn’t tell which war they were referring to.
The place had an air of decrepitude. It was filled with proletarian customers, mostly male and much older than me, and I was initially too timid to enter. But the next day I returned and ventured inside, the glorious smell of brined and steamed meat filling my nostrils. I congratulated my new city on harboring an institution so old and picturesque. At the time there were no crowds washing in and out, no long lines, and no celebrity photos on the walls. The purely utilitarian quality of the premises reminded me of the Parisian bouillons I’d read about in grad school back in Wisconsin—refectories that unceremoniously served cheap meals to working men in a hulking premises. Soon I realized that the place’s raison d’être was not salami but pastrami. Once I tasted that cured and lightly smoked meat, in its pink magnificence, I was hooked. I almost preferred it to Texas barbecue.
Edmund Vincent Gillon/Museum of the City of New York/Getty Images
Katz’s Delicatessen, New York City, circa 1975
I found myself hanging with a crowd of amateur musicians, and soon I joined a band and started going to punk rock clubs. Maybe due to their suburban upbringings, my friends were all into franchise fast food, which was in short supply in the East Village, and indeed throughout the city. They thought nothing of eating Big Macs, Whoppers, and Subway sandwiches for every meal. There was only one McDonald’s in the East Village, at 6th Street and First Avenue, but by the mid-1990s there would be another on the ground floor of a building at 14th and First Avenue owned by the painter Larry Rivers, who had his loft on the second floor. He was roundly reviled by some for renting to McDonald’s. You could see his paintings, which often had a Civil War theme, through the big picture windows above the hamburger restaurant.
Having been a hippie back in Wisconsin, for whom franchise fast food was anathema, I demurred. But the kitchen at our East 14th Street tenement was so rudimentary—with only two tiny functional burners on the stove, a refrigerator that made grinding noises and barely chilled the food, almost no counter space, no place to sit and eat, and the bathtub taking up much of the kitchen—that we didn’t often take our meals there. Besides, keeping cooking staples at home attracted rodents. So Gretchen and I started seeking out what were then called ethnic food joints—far tastier than McDonald’s, and often cheaper. It was easy for us to fall into the New York habit of eating out.
The East Village’s best-known restaurant was the Kiev, a Ukrainian diner just off Second Avenue notable for its cheap prices, its serpentine layout across the ground floors of several tenements, and the fact that it stayed open twenty-four hours. In the years of its existence from 1978 to 2000, innumerable plates of cheese or meat pierogi swimming in butter and onions were consumed there. Further up Second Avenue was the older Veselka, which we eschewed because it wasn’t as good or as hip, and because the food was a dollar or two more expensive, in the days when small sums mattered.
The Kiev’s hours were an exception to the local rule. It astonishes people to hear that, when we arrived in the East Village in 1977, there were few restaurants open there past 6 PM. Many of the places only did breakfast and lunch, catering to the neighborhood’s laborers and shopkeepers. Nevertheless some were quite excellent.
Among these was Vinny’s, a Sicilian sandwich shop that had started out in 1914 between 11th and 12th Streets on First Avenue, but later moved down the avenue to the block between 7th and St. Marks. I later figured out it was the kind of Palermo snack shop known as a focacceria; indeed, one name the old place went under was La Focacceria. Inside it was all beehive tiles and chipped white enamel fixtures.
What drew me in was the old man in an apron who stood directly in the front window behind a flat-top griddle bubbling with grease. He was alternately frying pieces of cheese and thin slices of what looked like liver, but was really spleen. He would then take both and put them on a small round roll smeared with fresh ricotta, glowing white like new-fallen snow.
The sandwich was called a vastedda. I fell in love with it, maybe because the spleen had a slightly skanky edge and tasted of blood—a harbinger of my future association with the Organ Meat Society as the new century dawned. When the place moved down the avenue in the 1990s it became more of a café, selling plainish but pretty good pastas, as well as continuing with small Sicilian sandwiches. Now I have to get my vasteddi at Joe’s of Avenue U in Gravesend, Brooklyn, where the spleen is a little less tender and, unfortunately, prepared out of sight.
La Focacceria closed around 5 PM, or when the spleen ran out, whichever came first. Across the street from the original location was Five Roses, a pizzeria named after the owner’s daughter. Over the next decades we watched her get older and more careworn behind the counter in her red-checked apron. When we first started going in the late 1970s Five Roses closed at the end of the afternoon, its glass cases depleted of pies and slices. Eventually Polish owners took it over; it shuttered in 2008, after forty-four years in business.
Within the immediate vicinity was Veniero’s, the old-school Italian pastry shop established in the late nineteenth century. But although we admired its gleaming glass cases, imported from Naples long ago, and its signed photo of Frank Sinatra, we preferred its much smaller competitor De Robertis. Located on the walk-down, semi-basement level of a building right on First Avenue, De Robertis had none of the glitz of Veniero’s. The pastries were not as good, either. Yet to us it seemed more authentic, since it also attracted the aging Italians who still inhabited this corner of the East Village and dropped by for espresso every morning.
As it turned out, the mob families that controlled the neighborhood, whose members included Lucky Luciano and Joseph Bonanno, also made those blocks their home. In 1989 the cops raided the back room of De Robertis, out of which “Handsome Jack” Giordano had been running his rackets. Right next door was a restaurant called Lanza’s, founded in 1904 (now the Staten Island pizzeria Joe & Pat’s). A lone bald man with white tufts of hair sticking out on either side over his ears was often seen sitting on a barstool in the front window. He made me and my friends afraid to eat there, though we could only imagine the red-sauced delights contained therein. We didn’t realize until he was gunned down in Brooklyn in the summer of 1979 that the guy was Carmine Galante.
Along one block of East 6th Street was a string of Indian restaurants run by Bangladeshi immigrants, who at the time must have been confident the bohemian public wasn’t quite ready for Bengali food. I counted twenty-two of these places, mainly on the south side of the block, spilling around the corners onto First and Second Avenues. The food was rumored to come from a common kitchen, the curries distributed by large underground pipes. Some of these restaurants had quizzical names we giggled at, like Anar Bagh and Purbo Rag, which eventually became Anglicized. Probably the most famous of the spots was Mitali, which spawned a second branch in the West Village. Today only a couple remain.
Sometime during the 1980s, as if by magic, the tandoori oven appeared. Now red-glowing chicken was all the rage, and the restaurants on East 6th became wildly competitive as the decade wore on. Touts were positioned outside waving menus, sometimes in suits and ties, buttonholing bewildered customers. They would grab your sleeve, sometimes several at once, as they delivered their spiel. Other establishments on the block built a shelf in their front window and installed a turbaned sitar player there, who would sit cross-legged on an ornate rug, maybe with a tabla accompaniment. Conflicting ragas wafted down the street, sometimes issuing from three or four places simultaneously.
The food was mainly curries of chicken or lamb, made long ahead of time and rather bland. Still, there was an electricity to the scene, and it introduced Indian food to many. Part of the appeal was the value. An entire meal usually cost less than $10, sometimes as little as $5, and included a mulligatawny soup, a plate of leaden vegetable fritters, a samosa, basmati rice in which every tenth grain was colored orange, a naan hot from the oven, a main course, and a dessert, usually a scoop of mango ice cream but sometimes a soupy rice pudding. The chicken curries were good but the lamb often tough as nails.
Robert Sietsema
The trio of Indian restaurants on First Avenue between 5th and 6th Streets, 2016
A cluster of Indian restaurants became famous around the corner on First Avenue, two on an iron balcony and a third directly below. They had decorated themselves, inside and out, with thousands of tiny flickering Christmas lights. This dazzling display became one of the lures, especially for dating couples who had a screwy idea of what counted as romantic, or for those who’d smoked lots of pot and wanted to enjoy the light show. Crowds massed outside, especially on weekend evenings when the bridge-and-tunnel crowd arrived. Milon and Panna II, the upstairs pair, persisted well into this century, with Panna II still open today. The food is every bit as blah.
Our favorite restaurants, hands-down, were the closet-sized Polish cafés. Not a single one is still kicking, unless you count Little Poland on 12th Street and Second Avenue. The flagship of the fleet was once Christine’s at 13th and First. Its specialty was French toast made with challah: great puffy rafts of egg-dipped bread swimming in syrup and a mind-boggling quantity of melted butter. Whenever my friends and I found ourselves unemployed, we ate this meal around 11 AM in the morning. You’d always run into someone you knew doing the same. The French toast was around $5, with bacon, breakfast sausage, or kielbasa.
The use of challah for everything, including sandwiches, may have reflected the influence of B&H Dairy, a Jewish restaurant founded in 1938, when Second Avenue was known as the Yiddish Broadway, with Molly Picon and Zero Mostel its most famous stars. Its forte was vegetarian soups, priced at $4 or so and accompanied by great slabs of haphazardly buttered challah. One afternoon in the mid-1990s, after I had started working as the food critic for the Village Voice, I looked around the room during an editorial meeting and saw that nearly everyone was loudly slurping a B&H soup: lentil, vegetable, sweet-and-sour cabbage, or hot borscht.
B&H still exists, now with married Egyptian and Polish co-owners. Step into it today and you’ll get some idea of the typical layout of these Polish places. The focus was a steam table—not the more familiar long kind but a vertical set of five or six stacked drawers in a metal cabinet. Steam escaped from the interstices and formed a cloud overhead.
The Polish café Gretchen and I liked the best was called Polonia, near 6th Street on First Avenue. It was a dark narrow space slightly below street level, without much of a sign. The only seating was at a counter that held maybe a dozen diners, who faced the food prep area. At other Polish places the menu might be handwritten on the wall; at Polonia you were expected to know what it was.
So you’d ask for the beef goulash—the most common order, though a half-chicken, pork schnitzel, or a dozen pierogi were also reliably delicious. The hostess, her hair in a bun, would grab a big spoon off the rack, pull open one of the drawers, and ladle out two or three spoonfuls of the reddish-brown stew onto your plate. She’d open another drawer and grab some canned green beans. A third drawer would then be opened, and using an ice cream scoop she’d deposit not one but two large portions of mashed spuds onto the plate. Curiously, these potatoes had no butter or milk or even salt in them to make them good on their own; they totally depended on the brown gravy to bring them to life. I remember paying $4 for such a meal. But that was a long time ago.
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