The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [158]
But why would a tourist come to New York to eat mall food in this city of fifteen thousand restaurants? Manhattan does have one mall, at South Street Seaport on the East River, and I visited the food court there for the first time to deepen my understanding. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and the river view from the third floor at the end of Pier 17 took my breath away, south to the Statue of Liberty and north to the Brooklyn Bridge, both of them erected in an age of stupendous engineering triumphs, when the city was eager for immigrant workers from everywhere in the world and rich beyond counting.
Just behind me was the food court. I eagerly tasted something at every counter. The Chinese food, from a regional chain, was distasteful and gummy—just footsteps from New York’s Chinatown, the largest aggregation of Chinese outside of Asia. The mealy, spongy bread was a disgrace, in this city with the finest bread east of San Francisco. The pizza was mediocre, a mile from Ellis Island, where this country welcomed the first Neapolitan immigrants, and two miles from the first pizzeria in the United States, on Spring Street, opened ninety years ago. Most painful was a delicatessen counter that could have prospered in St. Paul or Tucson (it’s one in a chain of 450), serving dank, reconstituted turkey loaves and albino, boneless boiled hams, in this city that was once a megalopolis of real delicatessens, and where the torch of true pastrami is still, today, held aloft.
A native New Yorker leaves the city he loves when he enters South Street Seaport. Nearly all the customers are tourists, and they could be anywhere in the country, spending and eating at Body Shop and Brookstones, and a dozen fast-food chains. I was once proud that establishments like these had never penetrated into my prismatic and unique city. Now, standing at the end of Pier 17 and ruminatively chewing on a thick and floppy pizza, I felt that I was nibbling on the corpse of a great metropolis.
I rushed down the stairs and into a taxi, hoping that the meals on Theme Street would be better than this. Both menus and food were, for the most part, indistinguishable at Fashion Cafe, Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Cafe, the Jekyll & Hyde Club, and the Harley Davidson Cafe. If Planet Hollywood were serious about its theme, it would serve famous meals from the movies, like the lusty eating scene in Tom Jones and the dinner in the Godfather when Al Pacino assassinates the corrupt Irish police official played by Sterling Hayden, and a thousand more. Elvis’s favorite foods have been well documented, yet Hard Rock seems oblivious. And Harley Davidson Cafe could serve its theme drinks in miniature hubcaps or motorcycle gas tanks.
But interesting food is not the point. Above all, the menu must be familiar, inoffensive, and inexpensive. A family or a group of friends with diverse tastes should be able to dine together comfortably, order lots of alcohol, then concentrate on the merchandise. What better choice than fast food and theme drinks, which for five or six dollars extra come in twenty-three-ounce logo glasses you can take home with you?
Some of the foods deserve special mention. The ribs at Hard Rock were remarkably good (most other fast-food kitchens parboil theirs first, turning both the meat and bones gray and diluting their sweet pork flavor), and most of the food at Harley Davidson was inedible. Le Bar Bat has real food and slightly higher prices than the others (tender lettuces, good bread and pecan pie, deliciously charred lamb, but an impenetrable icecream sandwich). Come to think of it, Hard Rock was also the most fun, with sixties mantras on the wall that brought a nostalgic mist to my eyes. ALL IS ONE. LOVE ALL, SERVE ALL. Most theme restaurants take no reservations and make you wait, even when there is no need to. Nowhere did the espresso have a layer of crema on top. Espresso without crema is not espresso.
Why are these places so successful? People in the business