Cafe Happiness: 2008

January 26, 2001

"To Engage With New York: The World of Cafes"

By RICHARD LOURIE

I live in New York because I am a writer. Of course, this is the center of publishing, and there's a great advantage to being a local call. And the city offers more scenes and subjects than any writer could ever put to use. But the real reason I live here is simpler: after five or six hours of silence and solitude, I want to step out my front door right into the drama of life. And no other city delivers that as New York does, with its electric air and adrenaline sidewalks, its mass and density the same as the world's.

A cafe is the ideal place to decompress. The experience can be a continuation of the solitude of writing with its glow of heightened perception that makes profiles coin-clear. Or depending on need and mood, the cafe can become an extension of my living room or an office in the home outside the home, a category for which the I.R.S. as yet has no deduction. For a certain type of guest, neither a dinner nor a lunch, and for certain kinds of literary business, there is simply no other place to meet than in a cafe.

Some bars will serve you espresso, some cafes have wine. But they are different entities entirely. Long and somehow submarine, bars are a way of slipping away from the world. But the hallmark of the cafe is the great glass windows with their clear view of the sidewalk and street. For the people in the cafe the passing world is their theater, while for those passing on the sidewalk the cafe is the theater. It's a switch you can sometimes feel when you catch the eye of a passer-by and are transformed from a spectator into a player on a stage.

Since I work at home and avoid lunch dates -- between the time you start getting dressed and catch a cab back, the day is gone -- I usually emerge somewhere just after 3. Except around the flare of publication, a writer has pathetically, gloriously little business: bank, post office, Xerox, a run for supplies.

Though I visit cafes at any hour after the day's writing is done, not even fearing the midnight espresso, I tend to frequent them between the hours of 3 and 6. It's a nicely mixed time, an oasis of tranquillity, Manhattan's greatest luxury, that changes into a bazaar as the work day breaks, and millions are released to seek the evening's excitements.

And on days when I have no appointment and not even a stamp's worth of business, I also possess the prickly luxury of free choice. Should I simply go to my regular cafe, the Dante, where the merest hint of a nod is enough for the waitress to bring me a single espresso, or is it time for something else?

Leaving my building at the far west end of Canal Street, I am immediately propelled by the Holland Tunnel Horn Concerto onto Greenwich Street and walk past a new architectural gem, Peter Himmelstein's building for PMcD Design; a rare cookbook store; a cluster of Iberian restaurants -- Basque, Portuguese, Spanish -- onto Spring Street. This enclave -- formed by Canal Street, the Hudson River, and Sixth Avenue with no easily discernible upper limit -- had enough community spirit to win back a park on Canal Street for which the city had other plans, but still lacks one essential element of a community, the place where everyone stops by, a cafe. And so I proceed to the intersection of Spring and Hudson Streets, a point of choice.

I can go left and take an energizing walk up to Caffè Sha Sha, which has good soups and a real fireplace and no chance of the music being offensive. It also has a back garden, lively and refreshing in good weather. But for me it is primarily a sidewalk cafe, a place where I like to read books and look from the page to the gaudy democracy of a West Village sidewalk.

The Sha Sha never has more than four outdoor tables, and there is always the pleasure of victory in simply securing one. The paired tables on either side of the door create an easy intimacy, conversations can be struck up easily and just as easily let lapse. The Sha Sha seems to attract foreigners, slightly lost, needing a break and a check of the map, a situation familiar to any traveler. For a change, I'm the local. Sure, I can tell you where Renwick Street is.

Having resisted the temptation offered by Hudson Street, I walk on to Varick, as Seventh is called down here, which I could take to my favorite street in Lower Manhattan, Carmine. It has vintage-record stores, spaghetti restaurants, Central Asian cobblers, the ''Unoppressive Nonimperialist Bargain Books'' remainder shop and the Church of Our Lady of Pompei, one of the city's many beautiful churches that we would exclaim at if only they were in Europe.

But the sole cafe on Carmine Street is Grey Dog's Coffee, whose atmosphere is too unrelentingly downtown young: hip wholesome. If I'm in the neighborhood and feel like a bracing stew or a quick espresso, I'm glad to stop by, but it cannot qualify as a prime destination.

Still, just a block and a half off Carmine on Bedford is the latest branch of Le Gamin Cafe, which started on Macdougal between Houston and Prince Streets, and now has four affiliates in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, and has even spread to Boston. In all of them the espresso is vivid and bitter, the au lait dreamily milky.

The new Gamin has a Gallic smack: the accent of the waitresses, the sophisticated music, the aroma of heated butter and smoke. It draws a French clientele. The language is usually being spoken at a few tables and, even when it is not, seems to be.

New York has none of the grand operatic cafes of Paris; nearly all of Lower Manhattan's cafes are on the small, intimate side. But what New York has over Paris, what America has over Europe, is a sort of jazzy individualism.

Here every cafe has its own identity. This is also still true of many cafes in Paris, but a good deal of them can also seem perfunctory, a social amenity like a post office. Here real estate prices and the city's culture of success mean a place has to make its mark, and fast.

I am now free to advance to Sixth Avenue, having decided that I prefer Le Gamin for the late evening, the place to go with people after a play or movie. But at the corner of Sixth and Spring the choices multiply. I am drawn in three directions: south, east, north.

Though New York's magnetic fields make you reluctant to walk south when you've been heading north, I am still pulled by the Palacinka, whose dark leather banquette and dark brown bar give it a Central European feel, the music sliding seamlessly from classic to bebop. SoHo fashion models with perfect skin, hair and clothes -- magazine pages come to life -- sip minimal beverages. Unlike the cafes that induce solitude, Palacinka, especially with its side-by-side seating at its one banquette, is essentially sociable, a place for a one on one.

Or I could proceed straight on into SoHo; there's always Café Tina and Borgia II. But I like SoHo less since the art scene was usurped by furniture and fashion, sparkly $80 sneakers for sale in the window of what once was the Spring Street Book Store. This shift is not only dispiriting but inconvenient.

Whereas before I could simply stroll over to the art capital of the world, I now have to break the sonic barrier of 14th Street to reach the galleries in Chelsea, where I fortify myself for the return trip either at the local branch of Le Gamin or at the Wild Lily Tea Room, Zening out on exquisite teas, sipped as slowly as the lone orange carp swims in the oval pool.

In the end, I am drawn upward, north, along Sixth Avenue toward the one-block stretch of Macdougal that is south of Houston, cut off like some remnant of a country reconfigured after war. The original Gamin, once a haunt, still tugs but like its confrere on Bedford Street, it's better late, when you want a last hit of night and city.

I'm also fond of its neighbor, Twelve Chairs, named after a Russian novel about a genial con man that was made into a movie by Mel Brooks. The next table could easily be speaking Hebrew or Russian or even Azerbaijani, and the borscht tastes not only good but real. You feel like you're in a foreign place, which would have pleased the Englishman who said he didn't mind traveling anywhere as long as he could be home for dinner.

Crossing Houston Street, I have a revelation that is both disconcerting and exciting. All the decision making had no meaning; in reality I had been heading to the Dante. And yet, though I am there three or four times a week, I am still happy to know that in a few minutes I will again be in that golden brown interior burnished by decades, the cafe founded when World War I was just getting started.

With luck I will sit at my favorite table, surrounded by oversize sepia photographs of old Florence and a reproduction of a painting of Dante himself crossing a bridge and for the first time seeing his great love, Beatrice. And from that table I will watch the flawless choreography of the waitresses, their eyes sweeping the room, taking in every cup and plate. They dress in white blouses and black pants and move with the happy freedom of those at ease in their bodies.

For some obscure reason, many of them are from Malta, and a small Maltese cross will flash at the throat of the waitress as she bends to place my espresso in front of me. Maybe she'll be in the mood for a three-sentence flirtation, maybe her face will be clouded.

Nor do I have any idea who will be there today: four Turkish men in black leather jackets, close-cropped black hair, a sports newspaper sticking out of their rear pants pockets; an adventurous European woman, open to contact as people are when they travel; old Italian ladies from the neighborhood settling the accounts of a lifetime. But what I like best about New York and its cafes is that I am always surrounded by people I can't identify, and that makes the city and its cafes mysterious, sexy, chancy.

What a pleasure, what a pleasure to enter the Dante once again and to signal the waitress with the merest of nods: the usual.

Some Favorites

Manhattan from Canal Street north to Chelsea offers some charming redoubts of cafe life. A sampling:

CAFE BORGIA II, 161 Prince Street, SoHo, (212) 677-1850.

CAFÉ TINA, 184 Prince Street, SoHo, (212) 925-9387.

CAFFE DANTE, 79-81 Macdougal Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 982-5275.

CAFFÈ SHA SHA, 510 Hudson Street, near West 10th Street, West Village, (212) 242-3021.

LE GAMIN CAFE, 50 Macdougal Street, SoHo, (212) 254-4678; Ninth Avenue at 21st Street, Chelsea, (212) 243-8864; 27 Bedford Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 243-2846; 536 East Fifth Street, East Village, (212) 254-8409; and 5 Front Street, Brooklyn Heights, (718) 246-0170.

GREY DOG'S COFFEE, 33 Carmine Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 462-0041.

PALACINKA, 28 Grand Street, SoHo, (212) 625-0362.

TWELVE CHAIRS, 56 Macdougal Street, SoHo, (212) 254-8640.

WILD LILY TEA ROOM, 511A West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 691-2258.

Richard Lourie is writing a biography of Andrei D. Sakharov.

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

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