Night Out at Gotham Bar & Grill
In the morning I woke next to a huge signed cookbook called Alfred Portale's 12 Seasons, a card saying "Gotham Bar & Grill, Adrian Gjonbalaj, Manager" and a diagram of a vagina with arrows pointing to various parts with notations such as "stainless steel labia majora," "raised copper clit" and "perforated steel labia minora." Another note said, in a scribbled handwriting, that there were vagina tables in a restaurant called NV, which had been designed by Paul Carroll.
Apparently I had been out to dinner the night before. When I went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee I saw that the refrigerator was stacked with seemingly dozens of takeout containers, filled with melted ice cream, tiny cookies, a large oozing piece of chocolate mousse cake, a steak, a salad and so forth.
My downfall had commenced on my way to a cocktail event at the Sky Club, located on the 56th floor of a building on 45th St. at Park Ave. It was one of those strange crispy gray spring days in Manhattan. On my way through Grand Central Terminal at rush hour everyone seemed so busy, a kind of symphony of scuttling commuters going in a thousand different directions, none of whom crashed into one another. And on the street was the smell of Upper East Side grilled foods; people on their way home from work were popping into bars for a drink, as if they were escaped inhabitants of John Cheever's stories. Everyone looked busy and grown-up, and in a hurry, as if they knew where they were going, and I suddenly had a flashback to 20 years ago when I first moved to the city and didn't know anyone and I thought everyone knew people and they all lived in fancy apartments in high-rises and I was alone in this place of rich and sophisticated people. And everything frightened me.
Only now it was 20 years later and I was on my way to a cocktail party for the YMCA in the Sky Club. Once this thought would have terrified me. I would have been shaking with excitement that I, T.J., alone, wrongly and badly dressed, pimpled, too scared to talk to anyone, was attending an event that was the epitome of glamour. Of course, then I never got to do such things. Now that I did, I was not only not nervous, I didn't even care. And in a way I missed that trembling, idiotic, excited self.
Nevertheless the Sky Club was very impressive, to be up on the 56th floor, with a lavish buffet of roast beef sliced to order and smoked salmon and grilled eggplant and steamed asparagus and shrimp and raw oysters, and a view of all of Manhattan spread like thick butter in a Gershwin rhapsody across the floor-to-ceiling windowpanes. When I heard that my friend wouldn't be at this event and probably not at dinner, either, I thought I would just make a feast here and go home, even though it had taken all my strength to leave my kid?she had somehow regressed, this week, and was once again sobbing that I was going to leave her with a babysitter, and even though I knew by the time the elevator at my apartment arrived she would have stopped crying and calmed down and started to have fun, my evening was totally wrecked by the trauma of abandoning the sobbing waif. So I was just as happy to quietly munch vast quantities of ratatouille and roast beef and head back to Brooklyn.
Then my friend did arrive, and since he had made the effort to get out of his bed (he had just had a minor operation), I couldn't really bail out and not go to the dinner at Gotham Bar & Grill. There were two beautiful twins, identical, who were going to accompany us as well, and another tall girl, very beautiful; the twins' husbands were going to meet us at the restaurant, and another man, whose birthday it was, was meeting us outside the lobby in a car. The twins were stunning: tall, slim, with shiny black hair. I had been quite friendly with one twin, years ago, and we had had many long and pleasant chats, and then one night I saw her and I said hello enthusiastically and she responded by ignoring me. It wasn't until six months later I found out the girl with whom I had been friends had a twin, and that it was the twin who had ignored me; even so, it took me a long time to forgive the girl, I never quite trusted her after that, even though it wasn't her fault.
The Gotham Bar & Grill has been around for 15 years but I had never eaten there. I liked the look of the place. A long room, with high ceilings and big puffy light fixtures, it was bright enough to see and there was no loud music playing and the noise level was low, even though the place was packed; obviously if you could see and hear, that meant the restaurant wasn't super-fashionable but the sort of place I could eat at, a restaurant for grownups and it looked like the kind of place you could bring your parents, if they wanted to take you out and feel they were getting to see a part of the city. Then the menus arrived and I realized there was no way I was going to eat, I had eaten already, what would I do with ricotta ravioli in braised oxtail broth, celery root and reggiano parmesan, 16 dollars, sweet prawn and baby artichoke risotto with prosciutto di Parma, lemon and chervil butter, $21, and warm asparagus soup with morel mushroom and white truffle custard, creme fraiche and chervil, $15.50. And these were only a few of the appetizers. These were all appetizers for hungry people, if you weren't hungry they simply couldn't or wouldn't appeal.
Years ago on a weekly or twice-weekly basis I used to go out with Andy Warhol and Paige Powell and we would have dinner (the blind-date club), and Andy and Paige didn't eat, and I would start drinking out of nervousness and by the time the food came at 9 or 10 o'clock or later, I was totally smashed and then it turned out that Andy and Paige had eaten before we went out. But for me it would never have occurred to me to eat first, because we were dining, after all, in some of New York's finest restaurants. The point for them, which I now understood, was if you were going to be around people in a restaurant having a conversation it wasn't possible to eat, the two activities were antithetical, like swimming and talking on the phone.
Now the champagne kept being poured and poured (my friend only drank very good-quality champagne) and even though I had already eaten I was getting sloshed. To be honest, looking at a copy of the menu now in the harsh glare of daylight, I don't know what appetizer I would have chosen had I been hungry. I don't think I would have wanted asparagus salad with baby beets, poached quail eggs and organic greens because quail eggs are very very sulfurous and remind me of an unfortunate experience in Macau. A wild striped bass carpaccio?I'm not going to go for a dried fish prepared like a meat, and the striped bass reminded me of a traumatic childhood dining experience in which my father, who fished, attempted to force me to eat wild striped bass he had caught, after he had removed its many parasites, aka worms, which most wild fish harbor. (If you want to catch your own wild fish, you can see for yourself.) I wouldn't try the seafood salad with scallops, squid and Japanese octopus because I have never been able to eat a scallop since college when a boyfriend decided to cook me dinner and made a dish with scallops that called for flour but he accidentally used sugar instead.
It was grownup food in here, food for the sort of people who I had once believed to occupy the city, who wore suits and lived in clean apartments filled with modern furniture and doormen. Among the main courses were grilled salmon, roast cod, seared yellowfin tuna, grilled saddle of rabbit, your organic free-range chicken, a squab, a rack of lamb. It was at this point, I believe, that I had consumed at least six glasses of very very good champagne and the conversation turned to the vagina tables, designed by one of the husbands of one of the beautiful twins.
"How can a table be like a vagina?" I asked, which is how I ended up with a diagram next to my bed in the morning. What I really wanted to ask is, why would anybody want a table like a vagina, but in order not to seem rude I added, "And how is a raven like a writing desk?"
Nobody seemed to know what I was talking about, though, and instead they explained that the tables also squirted. My self of 20 years ago would have thought she was out of her league. And perhaps, 20 years ago, the idea of a vagina table would have had some shock factor.
I decided to order the steak and take it home. I am an eater of leftovers, and a steak eater, because I am not very far evolved on the evolutionary scale. If I were far evolved on the scale I would be a vegetarian and it makes me sad to be unevolved but it's a character flaw I've grown used to. It used to be I would have a craving for steak once or twice a year, but now I feel steak is in jeopardy, shortly it will be unavailable altogether, too dangerous to eat, and I had better get as much as I can while it is still believed to be safe in this country. I would feel even worse about myself, feel that I am not only not spiritual but will probably get a terrible disease from eating meat, except that recently I read Richard Rhodes' book Deadly Feast, which describes all the diseases people and animals can get when they turn or are forced to turn cannibal: kuru, scrapie, mad cow, all various spongiform brain viruses?but then he explained that in the future, when hundreds of people every day will be going to euthanasia centers as they lose their minds, vegetarians will not be excluded as they will have been eating vegetables fertilized with animal products such as bone meal, blood and manure, which also are going to harbor the various brain-destroying viruses. I'm reducing his factual information, of course, into my own language.
Anyway, I took the steak home. It was great, sliced, in a sandwich. It wasn't too dry or lacking in marbling, which is what sometimes happens in a really fancy restaurant, and it wasn't greasy or tough or chewy.
At least I had my night out, in a grownup restaurant, the kind of place in which I had, 20 years ago, imagined myself eating, though at that time I hadn't foreseen that I wouldn't be hungry, and that, at my age, I would drink too much champagne and see twins.