A Tale of Two Restaurants

Daniel, the owner chef of DABA, a high-end restaurant in Hudson, is rushing through the aisles of a Los Angeles supermarket, peeling off boxes and produce, for his third round in the horrifying chef challenge show, Guy Fieri's Grocery Games.  His opponent is another chef, an attractive young woman who lives in California.  Daniel has made it to the third and final elimination round; the current barrier is to choose only one item from each aisle.  Daniel is making a parfait and the young woman some kind of fabulous chocolate thing.  The prize is $20,000, which the winner of this round still has to earn through a final humiliating run around the supermarket. I'm a Food Network junkie (just binged on six "Beat Bobby Flay" episodes), but I've managed to avoid Grossery Games. We are watching it now just to see Daniel. 

DABA is our favorite restaurant in Hudson, our weekly hangout, and one more reason why leaving New York has been relatively pain free.   Daniel, a bear of a young man, with a smile that manages to be both cherubic and sly, is a serious chef and great host.  Often out front, he not only makes the round of his regular customers but during busy times also serves and tends bar.  Stumbling into DABA last winter off of the bulky snowdrifts buttressing the streets and out of the miserable temperatures was like coming into a welcoming alter-home.

DABA has all the attributes that Michael and I have sought out when I have wanted to escape my own kitchen both in New York and here in Hudson:

• A bar substantial enough to be populated by Chaucerian regulars and staff who provide good stories and useful local gossip. 
• Beautifully cooked meals, with a menu that ranges from high-end items when we are flush to a low-priced selection of bar-type food when we feel broke.  
• A quiet subtle atmosphere with warm lighting and no blast of music or monster TV muscling the bar space. 
• And an owner who occasionally hangs out with the customers.

The only other time we've had comparable hang-out experiences was in the nineties at Cal's, a bar-restaurant on 21^st between 5^th and 6^th.  I still miss it.  The owner, Kahlil (Cal) Ayoubi, was the grandson of a Syrian President, whose family was exiled first to Beirut and then to Paris.  Cal took his part of the family money and moved to New York, where he first owned a restaurant in Soho and then in our neighborhood. It was a large space, with a very long dark shiny bar, subdued warm lighting, and candle-lit tables spaced reasonably apart throughout the room.  We were regulars there for about eight years and many of the customers and staff we met remain our friends today.  Like DABA, Cal's also had the price-range spread, with both good high-end food and an award-winning hamburger.

Cal was often out front, holding a glass of clear something, sitting at the bar and describing his alcohol-induced impotence and the degree to which his cirrhotic liver was killing him.  (He provided his doctor with free meals.)  He flirted hopelessly with pretty women and defended his staff over his customers, occasionally permanently ejecting those who were particularly rude to one of his waitresses or bartenders. Given all this, Cal still retained a profoundly heroic, non-American cynicism that could have rebuilt Casablanca's Rick's Place.  And at the deep end of his despair was a dark belief in his failure as an artist.  I loved Cal's work, which might be described as cheerful German expressionism (is that possible?).  His paintings enlivened the walls of the restaurant and to this day I regret not buying one of a small white cottage dancing in space among cheerful child-colored apple trees. (My desire for that painting appears now to be prescient, as we begin planning our house, which will also be dancing in space in the hollow of our apple orchard ghost.)  

Unfortunately, Andreas, Cal's young talented chef, who roller skated to work and dazzled young women, quit after a few years and moved to Long Island. Cal didn't replace him with anyone equally skilled but relied instead on the kitchen staff who had learned the menu.  Their food was ok but not fabulous enough to get the two stars Cal had earned earlier. And finally, as with everything in our neighborhood, the skyrocketing rents knocked him out of 21^st Street.  Cal opened a small restaurant on the upper east side, but it lacked the bar and our neighbors.  We went there a couple of times but it was too far away and we need a Cheers.

DABA is Cal's spiritual heir, and the food is better.  When DABA first opened, the menu heavily reflected Daniel's Scandinavian background.  My first meal there included elk and a three-herring appetizer that transformed my whole view of oily fish.  Eventually, the elk went away, but the Swedish meatballs are still available, dense and flavorful, balanced on a swipe of pureed potatoes and set off by a slash of bright lingonberry and a dish of thinly sliced cucumber pickles.  The filet and scallops are meltingly cooked, with the latter accompanied by curried spring rolls that would make a great dish by itself.  On some nights if you're very, very lucky and you get there early, you might get the special fish tacos.  

Suddenly the bell goes off.  Daniel and his opponent are grasping and hugging various food objects as they rush to their cooking stations.  The female chef is in despair: she forgot to pick up chocolate, the key ingredient in her dessert.  As with all these chef competition shows, each contestant has a background story intended to appeal to the audience.  Her husband has lost his job and they are on Medicaid and food stamps.  She could really use the $20,000 prize.  Daniel's wife had just delivered their third child back in Hudson the day before the competition. She went into labor as Daniel was driving to the airport to fly to LA.   He could use the 20K, but his tale (he and his adorable wife have two other adorable children and live above the restaurant that he owns and they'd like to find a bigger place) lacks the woe of his opposition.  Now, Guy announces that Daniel had won an advantage when he responded correctly to some inane quiz question: he can choose any food product he wants from any aisle.  Dan pauses and, unlike any Food Network contestant I've ever seen under this pressure, he becomes calm and thoughtful.  He shrugs and turns to his opponent.  "I've got all the stuff I need.  Go ahead and get the chocolate."  An enormous virtual crowd roars silently across the TV universe.  The woman wins the contest but Daniel becomes the first Food Network hero ever! 

Like Cal's, DABA will not be our source of warmth, comradeship, and culinary happiness forever. But I know that, unlike Cal, Daniel is young and eager for a more expansive venue for himself and his family.  So someday I expect to see him impressing us in the Iron Chef Stadium or moderating some show where chefs compete by cooking with utensils made out of bark with ingredients they have to find in a field.

As for Cal, I just Googled Khalil Ayoubi and found a show of his paintings in Beirut from last November.  One of them was of a house lodged in green space within a grove of child-painted trees. I emailed the gallery owner and asked if it was still for sale.

The County Fair and the Thrill Continues

When I was kid, growing upstate in the middle of the woods, going to our county fair in Schaghticoke, New York was my annual vision of the World.  My mother would give my sister, brother, and me a dollar each and send us off to ramble about the fairgrounds by ourselves. (Mothers did that then.) Here, I believed, was what a city must be like, full of excited people, crazy technological miracles, color, movement, music, and shady men with scary eyes and false seductive voices urging us on rides and to play unwinnable games.  (This early infatuation was, in fact, a pretty accurate preview of my future experience of NYC.)  One year, I think I was about eight, I spent what seemed like hours talking to a mechanical farmer, entranced by the magical feat of conversing directly with this robotic creature.  Best day of my life up to that point. 

I still love the county fair, but with the irony that time presents us with, it now literally means country to me -- not city.  When we first started coming upstate on the weekends, we went to the very extensive and grand Duchess County Fair.  But now we favor its much smaller Columbia County neighbor, which smells like grease, hay, and a hint of cow manure no matter where you are on its grounds.

After arriving this year, we first aim for the animals: floppy-eared bunnies, humps of warm thoughtful cows, sheep staring vacant-eyed at nothing, and cages of chickens -- feathered bimbos gloriously clothed and rackety with silly chatter.  I'm especially searching for the goats, who, unfortunately, never warrant their own section at the Columbia Fair.  Now, I can't find them at all.  A couple of young slow sheep men point vaguely in the direction of the back end of their large area.  There, we find only three young kids huddled together in one pen.  Where were the goats this year?  I find this disconcerting. Our family had in fact raised some goats for a few years and we loved their goofy looks and cagey intelligence.  If I had retired when I was younger, I would have taken on a few.

Michael and I next check out the winning vegetables, studying with scorn the blue ribbon won by the flaccid Anaheim peppers withering in their baskets, and I remind myself to enter my far superior Big Jim chilies next year.

We skip the awful games along the runway, with the hanging corpses of large unattainable panda bears and stuffed Looney Toon characters and where small children aim semi-automatics at cute metal animal heads.

We are hungry now and ready for the terrible irresistible fair food, which has, like the world, evolved since the corn dogs and cotton candy of my youth.  Ethnicity bellows from each stand, democratically displaying foods with equally uncertain bacterial counts. Michael buys lamb souvlaki, and I pick up a taco, an unfortunate choice of bland chicken chunks drippy with bright yellow cheese food suffocating in a thick flour tortilla.  Ugh.  I throw it away and eat instead a Polish sausage with sauerkraut and mustard, which is fine but tastes suspiciously like a big hot dog.  We are eating at a battered wooden picnic table, and I stare longingly at a meatball sandwich and a blooming onion, that miracle of deep frying, with horse radish ranch dressing pooled lavishly in the center of golden oily petals, being enjoyed by an appropriately overweight couple across from us.

After lunch we head for our main objective.  This year, the Columbia State Fair has a special focus.  The mechanical marvels we seek out now are not ungainly talking metal farmers but shiny green John Deere tractors, which growl about heavy lifting, snow plowing, and the transformation of our land.  It is not clear yet whether we'll need a Mama tractor in the 2 series or a smaller version.  We'll have to pay an excavator to rough out a road and the building site in order to determine the horsepower we'll need.  But before we head home, today I sit happily in the clam shell of a 2032, and poke at the handles, envisioning the fields of wildflowers and native trees and fat shiny blue-ribbon winning vegetables that our property will produce with the help of our steel-clad pal.  

And while the fair of my childhood gave me my view of the future, so now we beat on, tractors against the furrows, back ceaselessly into my past.

Joining the Roosevelt Ghosts of 129-131 Fifth

The buyer has signed the contract for our apartment, and our family will soon become one more set of ghosts to inhabit the spaces of 129-131 Fifth Avenue.  Within two weeks of it being on the market, our place had over 50 visits and 11 offers.  We accepted that of a young single woman, a lawyer, who "loved it immediately" and is already planning to redo the kitchen (a wise first decision).  She will soon own a wonderful apartment in a wonderful building, a modest gem of Manhattan history.  

The address of the original site that later launched our building was 4 East 20th Street, and the first known ghost in that space belonged to Teddy Roosevelt's uncle, Silas Weir Roosevelt, who, with three of his brothers -- Teddy's father, Robert, and James -- owned homes on the south side of 20^th Street between Fifth and Park.  They were all sons of Cornelius Roosevelt, one of the founders of Chemical Bank (now Chase) and the fifth richest man in New York City. (Teddy himself was born a block and a half from our building, and his birthplace was reconstructed and memorialized in the mid-20^th century as an appealing little museum.)  

Silas, the owner of our space, was a Commissioner of the Public Schools and a lawyer.  He had a wife and children and seemed to be well liked by his peers.  He was also an amateur poet, whose verses, although conventionally Victorian, showed a warm and sensitive nature.  Sadly, Silas only lived to be 47, dying in 1870, I assume in some dark room on our mutual site, after what was described as a protracted, painful, and "tedious" illness.

Since the late 1860s, the neighborhood around the Roosevelts' homes had been transforming into Ladies Mile, the hot Manhattan shopping center of its time. In 1870, the year Silas died, Lord & Taylor claimed the corner of Broadway and 20^th with a five story cast iron building and one of the earliest steam elevators.  Two years later, Teddy's father, unhappy with the commercialization of the area, particularly at his doorstep, and perhaps affected by his brother's death, moved uptown.  The other brothers deserted 20^th Street soon afterward. However, although the family didn't want to live there any more, they were not opposed to taking financial advantage of the new environment.

In the late 1870s, the Roosevelt estate converted James Roosevelt's former home at 6 East 20^th and Silas' at 4 East 20^th street for commercial use.  The latter building (and, as a reminder, our future site) became the location for the New York Exchange for Women's Work.  This organization, founded to provide Civil War widows a living by selling on consignment "almost everything that is useful or beautiful that can be devised by the quick ingenuity of a woman's brain, from the darning of a stocking to the adornment of a plaque" lasted an unlikely 125 years.  (The Exchange only stayed on 20^th Street for a few years, however; it moved to Madison Avenue, where it continued to sell consigned hand-made items until high rents and a dearth of knitters forced its closure in 2003.)

In 1890, the Roosevelt estate replaced James' old house with a leased extension to Lord and Taylor's store.  Then 10 years later, in 1900, they unsentimentally knocked Silas' house down and replaced it with the Beaux Art structure that I know and love today.  This became a further addition to the ever-expanding Lord and Taylor and was linked to a building at 129 Fifth, allowing the store to stretch down 20^th Street and gain a Fifth Avenue entrance and address.

Shortly after the turn of the 20^th century, Lord and Taylor moved uptown, along with most of the other large department stores that had flourished between Fifth and Sixth. The splendid spaces of those "commercial palaces", as they had been described, were subsequently humbled with small industries and dusty wholesale showrooms, although with the basic bones of the structures preserved and ready for their 21^st century resurrections.

Our small Beaux Art wing of the Lord and Taylor palace, which faces 20^th Street, spent most of the twentieth century as a humdrum place for glass dealers and importers. At some point, it was severed from its long departed Lord and Taylor master by a parking lot.  This half of 129-131 Fifth has been described as "framed by piers, with the [neo -Greco] façade divided into three bays by slender columns resting on high bases and topped by imposts decorated with stylized paterae [which I Googled and found were ancient Roman shallow libation bowls].  These support lintels are decorated with incised ornament and simple projecting cornices.  At the second and third story levels spandrel panels are set beneath the windows; those on the second story are ornamented by recessed panels but have lost their sill moldings, those on the third story are decorated by raised panels." 

In 1979, 129-131 Fifth was converted to a coop, and in 1989, we purchased our apartment on that third floor. At the time, Michael and I were merging two families, and the previous owner had cleverly duplexed and designed the place so that we could squeeze our five kids, if needed, into its 1300 square feet. When we moved in, Willie, my younger son, was six and our other four kids, Geoff and Jill (mine) and Sarah and Jeremy (Michael's) were either 19 or 20.  Geoff, Jill, and Sarah generally used the apartment as a way station, but Jeremy and Will lived there for the duration.   Our daughters moved west, but for years, every Friday, Geoff, his wife Kim, and their three sons came in from Queens for family chaos night. The walls of those rooms were warmed by the art of my family and friends. I cooked for and we celebrated in the large downstairs living area our wedding, our tenth anniversary, dozens of holidays, and countless insignificant events that served as excuses to feed people we were fond of. Michael and I built businesses there, crouching in corners over our computers. These are the ghosts -- people, things, and events -- that are now drifting randomly within the newly painted walls and spruced up floors.  Leaving this apartment and walking out the door of that building for the last time will be very hard. 

Leaving the neighborhood, however, will not be.  History does not repeat itself but sometimes it seems that events may resonate over time in certain spaces, re-emerging in similar forms later on.  A version of Ladies Mile has now erupted like some plant that lay dormant for 100 years, emerging as a giant invasive weed, sending out its sprawling tendrils to produce high-priced toxic franchises across Broadway and Fifth Avenue, smothering out the native stores and attracting homogenous squeaking consumers, chewing and bagging up goods and spewing back cash. (Too overwrought?)

 Like Teddy Roosevelt's pragmatic family, we are both escaping this new commercialized version of our neighborhood and unsentimentally taking advantage of its opportunities, selling our apartment at a price way above the one we bought at.  So we'll build a new home in Hudson, where noisy birds replace noisy girls and scary dark woods replace scary dark streets.  

And maybe Silas' ghost even influenced our decision to move here, whispering his modest Victorian verses to us while we slept in the spaces where he spent is last sad years and where we spent are latest happy ones:

"For the Hudson runs like molten gold

His purple hills between;

And the hazy distance lies unrolled,

A fringe of sliver sheen,

Till earth and the horizon blend

In the faint hue of even,

As if the curse were at an end,

And the world mixed with heaven."

And of course, James Roosevelt's ghost may also be whispering from the house next door: "It's time to sell."

"Hello, I'm a Volunteer for Sean Eldridge. Do You Know Who He Is?"

One of the items on my retirement bucket list is working for the local Democrats, since, unlike in Manhattan, ones liberal vote counts in upstate New York.  So, with some futile hope that volunteering didn't involve calling people, my friend Ann and I went over to the newly opened office in Hudson, which had been set up for supporting Sean Eldridge, who's running for Congress, and other local Democratic candidates in the coming election. We were greeted by an enthusiastic young man in a large empty room, populated by hundreds of Sean posters and several long lonely tables, which reminded me of the Salvation Army Center before the lunch crowd comes in.

I was hoping for data entry and not the dreaded phone bank.  Sadly, there wasn't enough data yet to be entered.  First we needed to call people and register their responses so that we could accumulate the data that, with luck I could eventually enter.  He handed us four sheets of paper each with the names, ages, and numbers of 80 of my neighbors, whom I was about to drag from their dinners, chores, and TV shows to be annoyed, enraged, and potentially homicidal when they heard who I was.  With a sinking heart, I took the list.

I'm not a good spontaneous talker.  I become garbled.  My brain shuts down and loses any specific knowledge of nearly anything.  "Umm" becomes my preferred word choice.  Many, many years ago I ran as a delegate for the ill-fated McGovern Presidency in Bayonne, New Jersey, at the time an extremely conservative working class (can't we bring that term back?) neighborhood.  I'm ok with an audience but I suck in any one-on-one debate.   One of my tasks as a candidate was going door to door. It remains one of the most excruciating experiences of my life.  After facing and knocking on the seventh horrible door, a stern skinny woman answered.  I gave her my awkward, stammering, ignorant spiel and she retaliated with nasty fact after fact about his inadequacies and why the Democrats were killing the country.  I think I managed to throw in a couple of "buts" without any follow-up sentences, slumped off in complete humiliation, and staggered home, where I went to bed and pulled the covers over my head.

The Hudson campaign, nearly a half century later, is my next political adventure and I'm still no more competent in conducting these nightmare dialogues. Fortunately, this time I didn't have to confront Republicans or ask for money. The list comprised only registered Democrats and our main goal was to see if they even recognized Eldridge.  Most didn't.

At first I tried to talk through his bullet list of positions, but soon realized that I was droning the same liberal song we've been playing for years.  The issues cooked up by both the Democrats and Republicans have become verbal junk food.  No matter what party we're addicted to, we gobble down those tasteless words and return to the same fast-food Party day after day.  Women's choice, women's pay, minimum wage, universal health care, climate change, supportive government versus family values, jobs without government restrictions, low taxes, fundamental liberties without government interference, strong defense. Blahblahblah.  And no one wants to hear them anymore.  Even my fellow party members were unstirred by Sean's bullet list.

After three calling sessions, I realized the uselessness of offering anything about his ideas. Instead I now say the following:  "Sean is young.  He's a businessman who runs a venture capital firm that supports small businesses (I give examples).  He's rich and doesn't take any corporate money.  He has absolutely no Washington experience, and, gosh, don't we need a change?  And, by the way, he supports all the regular Democratic stuff. " Usually, I detect a burgeoning enthusiasm in my listeners. "Oh. He sounds pretty good."  I suspect that if I were calling Republicans with the same description for a candidate with similar credentials, only replacing "Democratic" with "Republican", I'd get similar upbeat responses.

So, we not only need a clean slate of candidates, we also need some shiny new issues.  Something to kick-start people's brains.  I've got some ideas. 

• The first is universal childcare from infancy through middle school.  Establishing well-run and well-funded centers will reduce the number of welfare and food stamp recipients, and so help offset the costs for these centers.  It will reduce abortion rates, since women can then actually choose to have kids. With women able to work with more security and consistency, the disparities between men and women's pay will improve. So will children's health and education. (So don't get me started on the 40-year failure of the feminist movement to support this issue, along with the kids and working class women whom it would help, in favor of an elitist and now-entrenched gender distortion that has shored up our consumerist, careerist, shallow, vapid, greedy culture.  Just don't get me started.)   
• My second position will solve all the problems in the Middle East. We should establish Kurdistan.  Buffering Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey with a big fat oil-rich region filled with feisty Kurds who don't chew on any particular crazy religious bones and who may actually like us could be helpful. (I haven't thought this through completely, however, and of course there's the nasty process of getting there.)
• My third issue will help equalize pay and reduce income disparity by reducing what men make to the level of what women make, which is generally more equitable (at least on the management level). 
• My fourth position will help address both educational and environmental problems.  We use local, state, and federal income taxes to pay for education and we get rid of regressive property taxes, except for one:  we tax the amount of lawn people own in order to encourage the growth of native meadows and gardens.  Two birds.
• Fifth and last, pay primary care docs far more money and dermatologists far, far less.  Healthcare problems solved.

I need some other issues and a name for my new party.  Meanwhile, it's back to the phone bank, and how Sean's inexperience in politics will save us all.