Taste: My Life through Food(19)

But now, like so many wonderful old New York City eateries and bars, the Carnegie Deli is no more. (Okay, to be fair, the reason for the disappearance of the Carnegie is not because the rent was raised or the building was razed. It’s because the second-generation owner decided that she had had enough, which is of course her prerogative, but still a terrible loss for all of us.)

However, as I said before, the gentrification of New York has caused many businesses to close that had no desire to do so, as well as the destruction of too many buildings and places of cultural significance to count. (A prime example being the old Penn Station, which was brutally razed after its magnificence graced the city for a mere sixty years.) I don’t know why, but we Americans feel little obligation to preserve what once was because we choose to see it as less than what is or what could be. Like children and adolescents, we have not yet learned that the present isn’t the only thing. Obviously change is good, but there is absolutely no need for us to obliterate the past while creating the future. They can and should live side by side. Wonderful places, some of them very old, like Lüchow’s, Gage & Tollner,I and the Oyster Bar at the Plaza Hotel, and newer ones, like Elaine’s, Kiev, and Florent, are now gone. The main reason for their demise is almost always financial. Either the rent is raised, the economy has slumped, the owner would shortsightedly not allow the staff to unionize, or they quite simply went out of vogue. The times and tastes changed but their menus and décor didn’t. Had they been able to hang on for a while longer, it is more than likely a new generation would have rediscovered their classic dishes and old-world charm and brought them back to life. Of course there are still a number of old restaurants left around the city, like Delmonico’s, Peter Luger, Fraunces Tavern, the Old Homestead, and Barbetta, yet considering the physical scope of the city and the fact that there are over 8 million inhabitants, it is a paltry sum. Paris, with 2.2 million people, has dozens.

Who would any of us be if our grandparents and parents had not cherished their familial history and passed it on with reverence in the form of articles of clothing, furniture, china, cutlery, books, photos, artwork, diaries, and so on? These mementos don’t have to be of great monetary value, only of emotional value. I have pots and pans that were my mother’s that I will never part with, not only because “nobody makes them like that anymore” but also because they remind me of her and the extraordinary meals she made for our family. Losing a beloved family heirloom is a very real personal loss; they’re things that cannot ever be replaced or re-created. But perhaps the most precious heirlooms are family recipes. Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time. Yet unlike a lost physical heirloom, recipes are a part of our history that can be re-created over and over again. The only way they can be lost is if we choose to lose them. I know that progress is good for business and business is business, but the careless expurgation of famous eateries and their classic dishes made from historic recipes that helped shape a city is an enormous loss for any culture no matter how you slice it. And if you slice as much of it as a good Jewish deli, particularly as much as the Carnegie once did, then that is a staggering loss indeed.



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Now let’s take a stroll back to the Upper West Side. As we wind our way northward nowadays, we will find that the culinary landscape is quite different from the one I encountered when I first moved there almost forty years ago. Columbus Circle is now home to a monstrous edifice that houses the Mandarin Oriental, a jazz concert hall, offices, and apartments as well as an upscale mall and quite a few restaurants. If you have a lot of dough, you can eat at any of them, but only if you’ve recently robbed a bank will you be able to dine at Per Se, where dinner starts at $355 for a nine-course tasting menu without wine. That’s, as I said, without wine. Wine is not included. There is no wine pairing with your tasting menu for $325. Although, if you’d like to save some money and bring your own wine, there is a $150 corkage fee per bottle. Just beware that a sales tax of 8.875 percent is also not included. Nor is the wine, as I think I have mentioned. A bargain if ever there was one. I have never eaten there but I hear it’s great.

Still heading northward, we pass Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s eponymous restaurant in the Trump International Hotel. His restaurant is as wonderful as his landlord is demonic. As we continue up Broadway we see that many rather good but very pricey restaurants have opened in the last two decades alongside chain stores such as the Gap, Brooks Brothers, Pottery Barn, and one hundred and seventeen Starbucks. Finally, reaching Seventy-Eighth Street, we come to a fifty-year-old gem of an eatery called La Caridad.

La Caridad is one of the last remaining Cuban-Chinese restaurants in Manhattan. Founded in the late sixties by Rafael Lee, a Chinese immigrant who first went to Cuba and then came to the United States, and now run by his son, it is still serving that strange and wonderful mix of Cuban and Chinese dishes at very reasonable prices. If you are not a New Yorker you may well be asking yourself, “What, why, and how Cuban-Chinese?” The answer is that many Chinese immigrated to Cuba during the mid-1800s to find work building the railroads, and again at the turn of the century and later when Chairman Mao came to power. At the beginning of the Cuban Revolution many Cuban-Chinese fled communism yet again and came to New York. It was here that they opened restaurants serving dishes reflective of their dual ancestry.