Thots on Food

Knappett is a surprise in a few ways: I had imagined he might be earnest and intense, a man with an immoderate fury towards people eating while wearing casual headgear. But he’s funny and unpretentious. He grew up around pubs — one his mum ran in Cambridgeshire and his uncle’s in Suffolk — and that’s still the food he craves. “People get shocked when they find out I like Heinz ketchup,” says Knappett, who has clippered brown hair and a beard, and has retained a soft East-Anglian burr. “What? Just because we cook fine food, they go all weird. I put ketchup on everything at home. And they’re like, ‘I bet you make your own?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t, because I'll never make it better.’ Just like every person on the planet has tried to make Coca-Cola. Just don’t! You'll never beat it! Fentimans cola. No.”

“Our beans on toast is a prime example,” says Kaye, who is in a grey Champion sweatshirt and — avert your eyes, James Knappett — a Ralph Lauren cap. “We make the beans in-house — it’s a rich tomato sauce that we slow cook for hours and hours. Lots of time and effort goes into it. Then, we just put that on a base of sliced white bread, and it’s the perfect balance of flavours. If you put that on sourdough, it wouldn’t be beans on toast”

With their latest venture, Finkelstein and Ross are proving to be gifted preservationists as well as savvy restaurateurs. For legal reasons, they had to drop Eisenberg’s as a name, but historical research solved the problem: before it was Eisenberg’s, it was briefly called S&P Sandwich Shop, after the founders. This reinstatement is just one example of the pair’s deft efforts to distill the shop to its essence. They rehired long-term staff members, such as Jodi Freedman-Viera, who had worked the register for around fifteen years. They spruced up the interior, but not so much that it doesn’t look and feel just as it ever did: comfortable and clean yet decidedly worn around the edges, the original forty-foot counter intact and lined with vinyl swivel stools. The menu has been pared down, but it still feels encyclopedic in the tradition of a short-order diner, featuring roughly three dozen sandwiches, including hamburgers. The classics have not been updated so much as painstakingly honed.

The proprietorship of Mosca’s has changed only with the generations, and there has always been a Mosca in the kitchen. When Provino died, in 1962, the cooking was taken over by his daughter, Mary, and, eventually, her husband, a former Louisiana oysterman named Vincent Marconi. His family was originally from the town in Italy where Provino Mosca was born—San Benedetto del Tronto, on the Adriatic. Provino’s widow, Lisa, also known as Mama Mosca, became the proprietor of Mosca’s. (I have always treasured her for having said to a reporter from the New Orleans States-Item, in 1977, “You can write all that you want, it won’t bother me because I cannot read or write.”) By the time Mary retired, John’s wife, the former Mary Jo Angellotti, some of whose forebears had also made the journey from San Benedetto del Tronto to Chicago Heights, had been helping with the cooking for nearly twenty years, and she took over as chef. At Mosca’s, the chef does not oversee the cooking; she cooks. When Mosca’s was given a James Beard award, in 1999, Mary Jo apologized for not being able to come to the ceremony in New York to accept it. She said, “We’d have to close the restaurant.”

The dining area of Mosca’s always seemed the same: One room, as you entered, had a bar and a few tables and a jukebox, heavy on Louis Prima. A larger dining room was off to the right. The late Allan Jaffe, the co-founder of Preservation Hall and a storied New Orleans trencherman, once told me about a conversation he’d had in the bar dining room one autumn when he came in to repair the deprivation he’d suffered during Mosca’s annual August closing. Jaffe mentioned to John Mosca, who by then was running the front of the house, that something seemed different. John explained that, some years before, he had permitted a slight extension of the bar and it had never looked right to him. It looked changed. So during the August closing he had come in and sawed it off.

Often, being bought by a chef is deadly for old diners, luncheonettes, clam shacks, soup counters and the like. These places ought to be somewhat interchangeable. This is the thing that S & P Lunch gets absolutely right. The chef the owners installed, Dan Ross-Leutwyler, seems to devote himself to making everything slightly better — and in some cases, more than slightly — without pushing the flavors to their limits or twisting things into creative new shapes. The corned beef hash is chopped and fried in-house, but if you weren’t paying attention you might not notice, and that’s fine.

A buyer always turned up just in time. Even so, the faithful worried. A new owner might change the menu, might clean up too much, might even kill the spirit of the place entirely — introducing a cocktail “program” with boozy egg creams; replacing the PB&J with razor clams; staying open at night, with votive candles flickering on the counter of green marble so dark it is almost black. Eisenberg’s was where New Yorkers went to get away from self-conscious restaurant mannerisms. The last thing anyone wanted was for the guy who had made your egg-salad sandwich to lean over and ask, “How are we enjoying the first few bites?”

Unlike Le Pavillon, La Côte Basque and their ilk, and unlike Keith McNally’s immersive brasserie sets, which came later, these bistros were rarely fashionable. They were filled with professors and psychotherapists, Paris Review readers and Film Society of Lincoln Center members. Occasionally a passer-by out walking the dog would stand on tiptoe to peer over the curtain, but paparazzi did not stake out the doors of these establishments.

Ian eventually suggested the two six-foot statues be carved by a classically trained sculptor friend of his, Brandt Junceau, whose only question was a discomforting one: Did I know a woman with a voluptuous body and firm breasts like those in the photo who was willing to model for him? (Classically trained sculptors have all the fun.) What I did next I would never risk in these ardently prudish times, but I asked two waitresses from my vodka bar, Pravda, if they would like to model topless for the sculptor. Without batting an eyelid, they both agreed. The faces, bodies, and breasts of the statues are a mix of the two waitresses. Which parts are from which woman only the classically trained sculptor knows.

I had come up with the notion for Balthazar three years earlier while living in Paris. Like most of the few good ideas I’ve had, this one came about accidentally. I was searching for antique curtains in Clignancourt’s flea market when I stumbled across a photograph of a huge Edwardian bar. Behind the bar were shelves stacked 20 feet high with a magnificent display of liquor bottles. These bottles were flanked on either side by two towering statues of seminaked women in a classically Greek style. I was so impressed that I said to hell with the antique curtains and bought this battered photo instead.

Construction of Balthazar began in January 1996. The $2 million required to build the restaurant was provided by my new investor, Dick Robinson, the CEO of Scholastic Press. Once I took possession of the space, my first decision was to block out two huge windows on the building’s side street. For most restaurateurs, dining room windows are sacrosanct, but when you like breaking rules as much as I do, you tend not to give a toss about convention. Anyway, I believe that restaurants, like plays and films, work best when they create their own world. Being exposed to the outside world while dining is like hearing the doorbell during sex.

“They do it OK,” he says of his five employees. “They can’t do like I do. My customers want to see me.”

A woman stands in front of Mazzeo, gently patting melons, trying to find the right one. He chooses one for her, telling her, “This is a good one.”

“I live a simple life,” he says as he sits back down. “I’m here, I’m home, I’m happy.”

“This is my life,” he says on a recent morning, sitting in a chair opposite the entrance. “Not even one day I take off. I like what I’m doing.”

Other restaurateurs, however, are natural-born Secondos. Take Mario Carbone, who in 2013 opened Carbone, a throwback Italian-American restaurant in the West Village that looks like a high-end version of Paradise, complete with tuxedoed waiters and Louis Prima on the sound system. Carbone’s a total Secondo, his partner Rich Torrisi a Primo.

What’s gone, and won’t be back now that the surrounding addresses have been taken over by shops like Loro Piana, Sephora, Hermès and RH, is the pure downtown electricity Pastis once generated. Sharing real estate with meat cutters in blood-smeared aprons and prostitutes in dresses as tight as the skins on a boudin blanc, Pastis did a drop-dead perfect imitation of the coolest restaurant in France. The French part was fake, but the cool was real.