New York, New York (Again, Again)

New York, New York (Again, Again)

Squibs & Blurbs

by Jerry Zimmerman

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—2/28/11—Here we go again. I love New York.

I’ve written before about how wonderful it is to be in New York and I’ve actually restrained myself from a repeat performance since but, what the hey, it’s been a while and it’s a big city!

Even though I live in Teaneck, only a short New Jersey hop from Gotham, business and a busy schedule have lately conspired to keep me from some of my favorite haunts in downtown.

But Valentine’s Day and a new love in my life revved up my motor and put me on a crash course for fun in the city. So many choices! So many old, special spots! So many new places to try! (Yes, I keep a list that I add to constantly. Friends’ recommendations and The New York Times reviews are great sources, though any place newly popular I just file away until it’s nicely aged and not completely jammed.)

Ah, the inhumanity of it all—having to choose. But I do, and we find ourselves in an old fav, a Lower East Side wine bar that has great wine, of course, delicious small food plates and, most importantly, the right room, the right space . . . the right vibe.

The Downtown New York City Vibe. Which means it doesn’t TRY to have a vibe, it simply IS that vibe, a sense of life built into its genes and emitted through the pores of the cooks, servers, owners, drinkers, diners and all the lovely, odd, intense, bemused, booted and generally black-clad neighbors, tourists and what-have-you’s tramping past the windows or loitering in the streets.

Unlike many other cities I’ve been to, the scene here is the Mother Lode; the Scene of all Scenes in that it is not meant to be a Scene. It is not built to be a Scene, it just can’t help itself; there are so many elements of Planet Earth here, all banged up against each other in the most attentive, energetic and yet implausibly natural and relaxed sort of way.

Sally and I are sitting in the corner by a window, in my mind the primo spot in the bar and the table I was mentally angling for when I left my house—and, thank you Lord, there it was waiting for us.

This small wine bar is neither gorgeous nor beautifully “designed” nor particularly famous; it just has the right stuff. The air is vibrant, the conversation is loud but not harsh, the furniture is worn and well-used, spartan but comfortable enough.

We are happy. We are together with no responsibilities for the night except to eat and drink and talk . . . here.

Our joy in being together is augmented by where we are. We are drinking tasty and lovely wine, sampling small portions of succulent food dishes, and we are caressed and prodded and entertained by our surroundings.

We have three servers during the night. They are all young, smart, and seem to be genuinely enjoying their time here, too. The first guy looks like a young cousin of Javier Bardem, dark, randomly bearded, good-looking and very knowledgeable in helping us with a wine selection—up to a point. When I ask about a wine grape I never heard of, he readily admits to not knowing it either and quickly gets a bottle for us to taste. It’s not a “difficult waiter” moment, but rather a relaxed personal conversation about what this new wine is like and why he just hadn’t been able to get to it yet.

Our second server is equally pleasant and helpful and has the added distinction of being dressed like a Northwest logger but is actually, and maybe not so surprisingly, a witty local gay man. Sally and I look at each other and simultaneously say, “Monty Python Lumberjack Skit”!  His demeanor while waiting on us makes us feel as though we’re at a small party at his apartment.

Our third server is a lovely and eager girl, friendly and cute, who seems to be getting a great kick out of the other two guys.

Our fellow bar-mates are all over the map—literally. Next to us are three 20-something girls from Italy, chattering in high-speed soprano Italian, sounding amazingly like an Alvin and the Chipmunks wine bar sound track. Behind them are two girls obviously on a date, an animated Chinese-American yakking away to her companion, a quiet African-American. Across from us on the other side are a young white man and woman, obviously a couple and, if not actually graduate students, then perfect visual icons for that genre.

Farther across the room is a table of businessmen of different ages and races, all raptly listening to a middle-aged Japanese man.

Really, I love New York.

Yesterday, I read a perfect little story in the “Metropolitan Diary” column of The Times, one of my favorite columns. A transplanted New York dad living in Paris is about to come home for a vacation. As an experiment, he gives his eight-year-old son a pair of eyeglasses with a fake mustache and bushy eyebrows and has him wear them around Paris for a couple of days. They go all over the city together with hardly a word being said to them.

Soon, they are in New York, and the father has his son wear the goofy glasses all over the city here. Everywhere they go, everyone has the same thing to say, even cabbies leaning out their windows: “Hey, Groucho!”

In New York, there are literally “all kinds.” And New Yorkers notice them all and are happy to have them here and to live with them and to work with them and to go to bars with them and even to wave to their funny sons running around in giant mustaches.

We’re all different, and that makes us all the same. New York is way too diverse to start singling out one kind or another and way too savvy not to celebrate them all.

Happily wandering the streets of the City, I feel free and comfortable to be who I am—probably because I know that all these New Yorkers around me appreciate that I have the same amazingly good sense (to be in New York) as they do.

Note from Weekly Hubris’s Editor: Love New York City’s inimitable cast of characters? Meet a few close-up in The New York Times’s little NYC portrait gallery: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html#