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By Root 1220 0

tell me that most tourists need to feel safe and comfortable. Brand names do that for them. The streets of New York do not. In a city where the nightlife is stratified according to so many baroque and unknowable rules of inclusion and exclusion, the theme restaurant is the ultimate in democracy: stand on a line and you are sure to get in, and once you are inside, your table will probably be assigned by a computer. In a nation growing less literate by the day, where the dominant culture has become Hollywood and Disney, anything connected with the movies—in fact, anything remotely famous, even Kato Kaelin—draws vast and milling crowds. So tourists travel from city to city and country to country, collecting Planet Hollywood T-shirts, identical except for the name of the city of origin printed below the logo. That’s why Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock refuse to sell their goods by mail.

Why Eating Out in New York Costs Seventy-five Dollars a Person Except When It Costs Even More

A celebrated chef explained it to me this way: Take an entrée of Skate with Brown Butter. Fourteen ounces of skate costs $1.31 wholesale. The ingredients for the quart of nage in which it is poached cost $1.92. The sauce requires four ounces of butter ($.44), an ounce of capers ($.26), two ounces of fish stock ($.22), salt and pepper ($.04), and a half ounce of vinegar ($.01). Total cost of these ingredients is $4.20, plus a 5 percent allowance for waste and spoilage, or $4.41.

The restaurant lists every dish at five times the cost of its ingredients to cover rent, labor, and interest on bank loans and yield a profit. This is the key. This is why what sells for $25.00 in a New York restaurant sells for $8.00 in the suburban Midwest, if you can find it. The customer is renting an extravagantly decorated twenty square feet of Manhattan for two or three hours.

So the Skate with Brown Butter will be priced at $22.00. The cost of an appetizer, dessert, and coffee approximately equals that of the entrée, say another $22.00. Half a modest $30.00 bottle of wine is $15.00; half a bottle of sparkling water is $2.50.

The total so far is $61.50. Tax adds $5.07, a 15 percent tip another $9.99. Grand total: $76.56.

And it all started with $1.31 worth of skate.

September 1990

These national chains with their shoddy, overpriced mementos are neither the first nor the only theme restaurants in Manhattan. When you’re on the prowl, it is amazing how a new specimen turns up every place you look. Near my house on Twelfth Street is the oldest theme restaurant of them all, the seventy-year-old Asti, where the theme is waiters who sing opera. And scattered around the city are Mickey Mantle’s and Rusty Staub’s and scores of lesser sports pubs.

Neither Fifty-seventh Street nor Times Square is a patch on the real boom area for the hottest trend in theme cafés and restaurants. The neighborhood around St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side has become home to the cybercafé movement, including Internet Cafe on Third Street; Cyber Cafe at 273A Lafayette Street, which offers full T1 access, eight multimedia computers, and a sparse collection of muffins and soft drinks; Heroic Sandwich on Fourth Street; and the most elaborate of them all, @Cafe at 12 St. Mark’s Place, which opened nine weeks before I arrived there.

@Cafe (http://www.fly.net) is a wonderful place whose only problem is that it opened nine weeks too early. Despite the full T1 access, ten Power Macs, three Windows, two Unix, two huge projection screens, Japanimation, a lovely blonde technical-support cyberfairy named Jessica, and an ambitious menu of Asian appetizers and Cal-Ital main courses, nothing worked right during our visit. At least the farfalle with spinach and the grilled chicken sandwich tasted fine, though the bread was inexplicably closer to Wonder bread than to the real thing. I still have high hopes for @Cafe and will return when it has had a chance to work things out.

I will probably never return to Medieval Times. We boarded a $7 bus to Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and twenty minutes later pulled