and lunch service when we are seeking a more mature, civilized experience.
The kitchen for its part is hunkered down, the two full rails packed with tickets that all look exactly the same because it’s all pancakes, eggs, and bacon with no coursing to be done. Sunday is an order fire day. Every ticket comes in and is shouted out and is picked up immediately. We do not wait patiently while the customer enjoys a section of the NewYork Times over a nice bowl of homemade granola before firing up his sour cream and caraway omelette. We do not. We are sometimes laying down omelette pans on the flames by the half-dozen, and delivering that many omelettes in as many minutes. My station, if I am expediting and not working eggs, is at the front of the pass, where I can look out over the dining room while simultaneously keeping my focus on frantically assembling fruit salads, smoked fish platters, youth hostel breakfast plates, and ricotta with pears and figs and pine nuts, and buttering every piece of toast or English muffin that leaves this kitchen, which, on a weekend, is about 192 Thomas’s and 1,440 eggs. This is nothing compared to a hotel or even a big restaurant; the only thing that makes it monstrous is that we are doing it in a kitchen the size of a Lincoln Continental.
In the middle of this high-octane frenzy is when Mr. United Nations strolls in wearing cutoff shorts and flip-flops and stands in the middle of what there is to our dining room as bussers, waiters, and customers blow by him on their way to the pass, the bus tub, or the table, with a wrinkled envelope in his hand containing our water bill or some other rather important item. Only to him could this look like the right time to talk to me about co-op business. Invariably, he gets flustered and hands the envelope to the bartender or a waitress who is relentlessly trained to be helpful and friendly no matter what, who shoves the envelope into the cash drawer behind the bar or in their apron pocket along with the dirty napkins and pens they’ve got accumulating in there, or he hands it to me and I retrieve it with buttery fingers and shove it in the first-aid kit for safekeeping where I forget all about it. All I can think is that if he had been left in charge of brokering the peace in a thousand-year-old tribal nation, the ethnic cleansing would have been complete as he stood there, in flip-flops, totally flummoxed.
The only person from the co-op who’s been with us from the beginning and still with us today is a renter; an elderly woman who looks like she’s been avoiding animal protein for so long that her skin is now tissue paper and her hair is as brittle as shredded wheat. Annie memorized our phone number the day it was published and calls us every day to tell us to turn down the music. And she’s got us on redial. In the first few months, we were energetically neighborly and ultra-accommodating to all of the needs of all of the people in the building upstairs, and the building next door, and the building on the block behind us. And the building on the north side of us, and the west side and so on until we finally realized that when you open a restaurant, you are a magnet for every lonely, angry, unfulfilled New Yorker who can’t afford a better apartment, a haircut, or a meal in a decent restaurant. It’s like shaking a tree and out fall all the critics, the naysayers, the people with allergies to even the smell of anyone else’s success, or with litigious impulses over the sound of silverware in a dish rack being hosed down, or who call the fire department at the suggestion of meat grill smoke. You get all the people who moved from elsewhere to New York in the first place to bask in its nearly assaulting vibrance but who now write letters to councilmen and form committees to make it more like Main Street back home.
Annie’s thing was “black music.” We could be listening to Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Johnny Cash, and The Talking Heads all night long at a healthy volume, and she wouldn’t ever call and as soon as Angie Stone, Stevie Wonder, or Finley Quaye tracks hit the rotation—we could set our watches by