The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [157]
If theme knickknacks alone were enough to attract customers, these places would probably drop the food. Even the famously bumbling Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office has opened a gift shop to cash in on the celebrity-trinket craze. Along with the usual T-shirts and boxer shorts, the coroner sells authentic toe-tag key chains, ready to be personalized, and beach towels decorated with a facsimile of the chalk outline that police draw around a corpse on the sidewalk. “Reserve your place on the beach,” the brochure says. At press time, the L.A. coroner had no plans to expand to New York.
But Warner Brothers has evidently decided that food and souvenirs are inseparable. Its three-story store at Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue—which, by offering clothing and novelties decorated with images of Daffy Duck, Tweety, and Bugs Bunny, has become one of the most successful shops in the world—reportedly grosses $100 million a year. Warner Brothers’ rumored expansion of forty thousand square feet will include three restaurants.
Fifty-seventh Street is the new epicenter of New York’s theme world. For generations it had been the royal road to Carnegie Hall, once home base of Bergdorf’s, Bendel’s, and Bonwit’s, Rizzoli and Steinway, the Osborne apartments and Hammacher-Schlemmer, the Fuller Building. Then, in 1984, the Hard Rock Cafe arrived, and by 1995 the boulevard had acquired the nickname Theme Street, in honor of the arrival of Planet Hollywood, Le Bar Bat, Brooklyn Diner, U.S.A., and the fabulously successful Warner Brothers store, all of them right on Fifty-seventh; the Jekyll & Hyde Club and Harley Davidson Cafe a block away; and Fashion Cafe in the general vicinity.
And more are yet to come. Opening soon will be the Motown Cafe (beating out Steven Spielberg’s Dive! to take over the site of the New York Deli, which had supplanted the great Art Deco Horn & Hardart Automat); Dive! (the decor is bathysphere, the cuisine “reinvented” submarine sandwiches); and Nike (a four-story sneaker theme park behind a copy of the Ebbets Field facade, near Fifth Avenue). Dolly Parton is whispered to be ransacking Fifty-seventh Street for an addition to her country-and-western restaurant chain. And the vultures are waiting for Wolf’s Delicatessen on the corner of Sixth Avenue to stumble. Suddenly this once-obscure patch of earth makes downtown Tokyo look like small change. Soon you will stand on this corner and not know what city or even what country you have landed in.
Nearby, Television City will open its theme restaurant and shop at Rockefeller Center; (Ed) Sullivan’s Restaurant and Broadcast Lounge has parallel plans for a site on Broadway. One subway stop south, in Times Square, look forward to a huge Disney complex (to complement its studio store down Fifth Avenue from Warner Brothers, right next to the Coca-Cola gift shop), entries from MTV and HBO, and from Robert Earl (towering genius of the theme movement, high Hard Rock executive in the eighties, a founder of Planet Hollywood in the nineties), Marvel Mania and the Official All-Star Cafe, which expects backing from Shaquille O’Neal, Andre Agassi, and Wayne Gretzky, all reported to be internationally famous athletes. And I can’t wait for Tito Puente’s 275-seat Puerto Rican theme restaurant on City Island in the Bronx, somehow combining Latin jazz and family fare. Puente (the salsa giant) has chosen the estimable Yvonne Ortiz (author of A Taste of Puerto Rico) to direct the kitchen. They expect their Frozen Mango Mambo to be the next piña colada. Las Vegas interests are rumored to be shopping for a property in which to establish their Saturday Night Live theme