[Pigging by Wilfrid: August 31, 2009]
There's the McNally magic again. Open a new place, and unless you're a celebrity or a friend of the house, you're left with your nose pressed to the window, watching the fun from afar.
One thing to note before proceeding, is that the pubby atmosphere is maintained in part by little chandeliers which shed a sort of dim, golden glow on the proceedings. Hence the photographs.
It is never wise to guess the origin of place names. The tangle of streets sometimes known as the Minettas - Minetta Lane, Street, Place and Court - owed their conjoint cognomen, I had rashly assumed, to some Italian dignitary or historical figure or political hack. I knew a blue-collar Italian community had formed the main population of this backwater of Greenwich Village during the first part of the twentieth century, and so my mind was settled.
Nonsense, of course. The name comes from Minetta Water - Manatta Water as it had been known to native Americans - a trivial stream which made its way through the swampy basin on which Greenwich Village had been built. And in the nineteenth century, the Minettas had been home to African American families, part of a so-called "Little Africa" which stretched downtown into Soho. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the make-up of the neighborhood had changed, Italian families filling the back-streets, bohemian artists and radicals the lofty attics, of the streets around the dried up waterway.
According to the website history, a restaurant known today as the Minetta Tavern opened in 1937. Some books refer to a business called Minetta's Restaurant, and I have even seen it described as a speakeasy where John Dos Passos and the inevitable Ernest Hemingway drank behind closed doors. Since prohibition was over by 1933, these details are a little hazy. Amusingly, many sources on the internet will tell you it was run by - and named after - Minette Buddecke, the mother of actress Hope Lange. This appears to be based on a comment by Scott Donaldson in his recent biography of John Cheever - but if anything, it seems likely that she opened a restaurant called Minette's, located - unlike the Tavern - on Washington Square.
In any case, Minetta Tavern itself was well established by 1942, when New Yorker Joseph Mitchell set about profiling Joe Gould, "Professor Seagull," an eccentric would-be poet and tramp who was well enough known in the Tavern to use it as his mailing address. Despite his habit of disrupting the peace with piercingly disruptive seagull impersonations, the Tavern liked him well enough to hang his caricature on the wall - part of a collection of hundreds of cartoons of celebrities and local characters.
The first beat writers - the "Ur-beats" as Kerouac's biographer Ann Charters calls them - also discovered the Minetta around this time. Lucien Carr drank there with the man he was to murder, David Kammerer. Gregory Corso was in a nasty fight here over his girlfriend of the time, artist Marisol Escobar. It was part of a regular circuit for Kerouac, Corso and Allen Ginsberg, along with the nearby Washington Square Restaurant (then the Pony Stable Inn), the San Remo and the Kettle of Fish.
By the 1950s, underground chronicler Ronald Sukenick wrote, "Minetta's was where you were if you weren't in the San Remo." The San Remo is now, tragically, something called Ritz Asia. It was a real joint back then, Sukenick recalls, sawdust on the floor and simple Italian food on the menu - eggplant parmesan for seventy five cents. By the time I first stuck my head through the door, around twenty years ago, the place was severely cleaned up.
It consisted then, as it does now, of a small bar-room of slightly awkward shape. The bar is fairly short, and customers tend to find standing room in an empty spot around the corner from the door. Further back, through an open doorway, is the dining room, a dingy space cheered up somewhat by a mural of Village life. Food was still Italian, still simple, and still relatively inexpensive. Primarily it might have been considered a red-sauce dive, although it attempted steaks and potatoes, fish too. For the most part, I drank there, usually standing up.
A few years later, one of the busboys, a native of Montenegro named Taka Becovic, bought the place and set about diligently preserving it. The gallery of caricatures was sacrosanct, bar-tenders and waiters tended to be white jacketed veterans, the radio was set to jazz, and there was no fancying up the menu. It was a wonderful oasis on a Sunday afternoon, sipping cold beer and listening to Frank Sinatra while wondering whether to risk a plate of linguini.
And then Keith McNally bought the place - and along with it, the headache of being begged and threatened with the burden of preserving a legend. Balthazar and Pastis, The Odeon and Lucky Strike and Schiller's - McNally's gift has been for conjuring dining scenes ex nihilo. A fellow restaurateur once told me that McNally "...has opened restaurants where people didn't want to be. That's the true test of [a restaurateur's] power: being able to change a community."
With the Minetta Tavern, though, McNally's challenge was to adapt a beloved institution set slap in the center of a long-established, and actually increasingly tawdry and unfashionable, night-life quarter. Surrounded by mediocre music lounges with cover charges, comedy clubs, bars filled with NYU students, and average tourist restaurants, Minetta's offered McNally no clean slate. But of course, once it opened back in March, the regiments of the famous and fashionable arrived in force. McNally is a magnet. And the rest of us, reluctant to bargain weeks in advance for a 5.30 seating, had to bide our time - knowing the Italian menu was gone, but hearing reassuring news that everything else had stayed much the same.
I've returned twice recently, both walk-in meals at somewhat inconvenient times. The dinner menu is simple, the supper menu (after midnight) an edited version of it - essentially it deletes the steaks and chops with the exception of the small "Tavern steak." Nine appetizers, nine entrées, and then a short list of grilled meats, notably a côte de boeuf for two priced close to a hundred bucks. The steaks are specially aged by none other than Pat La Frieda and levered the restaurant to a three star New York Times rating ("Stay for the steak").
The beef has been so widely discussed in the heartbeat or two since the place opened, that I decided to delve elsewhere and assess the reinforcements. Also, to be honest, arranging to dine with someone who might share the massive côte at an awkward hour proved impracticable. From the appetizers, I recommend the oxtail and foie gras terrine, one of several dishes which struck me as very fairly priced - $14.
This is a successful marriage of two textures, the firm, densely packed oxtail encasing a generous crescent of smooth foie. The dressing is billed as poached leeks, but struck me more as a sort of leek vinaigrette - quite appropriate. Oxtail could often use a touch more seasoning, and this did, but it was a well constructed dish. The small brittle croutons which arrive with this, and with the tartare tasting, are little help in conveying meat to face, as they shatter at first bite.
Despite the expected, and to me quite tolerable, huddle of models and would-be models in the doorway and around the bar, and the vague expectation of finding Gwyneth Paltrow or Graydon Carter in the back room, the mood is friendly and democratic. Happily, the greeters seem pleased to see you and keen to find you a seat. At the same time, service took some weird paths, varying between pleasantly naive and a bit too rock 'n' roll for a restaurant with aspirations (you will not find the level of joshing camaraderie at Craft or Blue Hill, for example, nor I think are you likely to see off-duty staff drinking around the bar).
When I enquired after the Tavern steak, instead of telling me it was a flatiron, or a paleron, my interlocutor pointed to his shoulder and said it came from somewhere around there. A waiter on my first visit stopped way to many times to ask me how I was doing; he presented the cheese selection with an announcement along the lines of "cheddar, goat, blue." On another visit, I kept expecting the bar-tender to call me "Bro'."
The Tavern steak is a good buy, though. It's not huge, but it's flavorful, cooked to order, and comes with excellent fries for $21. On top, a disc of something which reminded me overwhelmingly of the herbed cream cheese Boursin. In fact, I took several bites trying to decide if that's what it was until I finally said to myself, "You are eating butter." Same flavor profile, anyway.
And then there's the matter of the faggots. Okay, not really, because faggots usefully have some liver blended into the ground meat filling. These were crépinettes from the entrée menu, pork roughly ground with some nice nuggets of fat, wrapped in caul, and served with a sticky reduction. An unusually thoughtful garnish too: a warm salad of various beans, helped out with fresh herbs and some delicious, sweetly pickled chanterelles which I started picking out one by one to enjoy fully.
The meat component here was truly hearty, and no side dish was necessary, but I wanted to see how they coped with potatoes. Having enjoyed the fries, I rejected the pommes Aligot as more suitable for a snowy day in winter, declined the "punched" potatoes, which I'd expect to be smashed in their skins, and opted for classic pommes Anna.
I should mention that I found the wine list unremarkable, and in fact struggled to find a red by the glass I actually liked. I didn't try the cocktails.
Back to the history. Those Minetta Tavern caricatures and photographs are an adored part of my own personal New York - and you know what? McNally may have taken them down to tart the joint up, but he not only put them back - he put them back, as best I can tell, in exactly the same places. Jimmy Braddock, Joe Gould, Jayne Mansfield regarded with horror by Sophia Loren. All still there. Good food and service too (although not remotely three star; farewell Frank Bruni).
and a different day, when
Joey the Horse, Bleecker Pete
And the mayor of the Minettas
Skittled the bar, when
hope sprang for a short beer
and men in serge suits, knitted ties
and radio hats slipped together
into the good old go around.
