Three feet high is a privileged vantage from which to scope out a city’s food scene. In the New York of my childhood, restaurants were as beloved and comfortable as classrooms and probably more familiar than my own kitchen. My adoring parents, bless them, could boil water but weren’t sure what to do with it after that. I went directly from the breast to the restaurant. It’s probably apocryphal that a meal at our local Chinese spot wasn’t over until my parents turned me upside down to flush out the rice I’d stashed for later in the bib pocket of my OshKosh B’gosh overalls, but there’s no question I was there.
From London Terrace Towers, in pre-gallery Chelsea, my family moved to Nassau Street, just off City Hall, and eventually to pre-Tribeca Tribeca. There, our haunts were kid-friendly, if not for kids. Hamburger Harry’s, which arrived on Chambers Street in the early ’80s, had cobalt-blue walls and a pink ceiling, but I mostly remember the Deco all-caps styling of its name — pitched at an acute angle, like upward mobility itself, a necessity in a still-unfortified neighborhood the New York Times was euphemistically calling “renascent.” When Hamburger Harry’s opened a second location near Times Square, it shared a newspaper column dedicated to new restaurants with a seafood-focused import from Paris: Le Bernardin.
The rotating crescent moon hovering over Sixth Avenue like a beacon or a Bat-signal called me to Moondance Diner, where I’d pick the bacon bits out of a spinach salad, ignoring the raw mushrooms and most of the spinach. Only as an adult did I learn that Moondance’s pop-retro designs were the work of Alan Buchsbaum, a high priest of pomo architecture and interiors who had a hand in the original Film Forum on Watts Street (not to mention the homes of Bette Midler and Diane Keaton) and who died too young of aids-related illness in 1987. And it’s entirely possible my salad was served by Jonathan Larson, who spent ten years at Moondance waiting tables before the advent of Rent.
I was no prodigy — picky as your average kid, if not more so — and my parents were not the exposure-therapy types. I noshed the mixed-bag cuisine of New York. It could include just about anything from anywhere — Zutto, possibly Tribeca’s original sushi place, was down the block — but that was up to you. The bounty was there when you were ready. City kids grow up fast, unless they also grow up slow: raised to order what they wish rather than accept what they get, as long as their napkins find their way to their laps and tantrums are kept to a relative minimum. It took me years to tiptoe outward, to my chagrin. Loving a child, as my psychoanalytically inclined mother used to say around the house, may be “giving a hostage to fate,” but having a restaurant meal with one is making -yourself hostage to a toddler. At Hamburger Harry’s, I loved the famous footlong frankfurter but not the toothsome snap of its casing, so any meal there came with a commandment for my poor doting father. If the American Songbook’s highest evocation of indulgence is “Peel me a grape,” I could do one better: “Peel me a hot dog.” Skinning one down to its nubbled interior mash is a laughably unreasonable request, but then what choice did my dad have? Only one of us had his itchy finger on the trigger of a complete meltdown.
