Cheap Eats in Pre-Foodie NYC
Fine Dining on a Budget in 1981
CUBAN/CHINESE (CHINAS Y CRIOLLAS)
La Taza de Oro (The Cup of Gold) was a compact storefront diner on Eighth Avenue between 14th and 15th Street. In the early Eighties I ate there once a week. Usually I was the only gringo sitting at the long counter (there were also half-a-dozen tiny tables); in those days Chelsea was a working-class Hispanic neighborhood. Five dollars (plus tip) brought a modest serving of slow-cooked protein and a lavish plate of rice and beans. My go-to order was roast chicken with breath-destroying garlic sauce plus a cafe con leche. The no-frills cuisine at La Taza de Oro was homey, nourishing and delicious. It sustained me through several periods of budget-conscious urban struggle.
Moving to NYC at the beginning of 1981 expanded my palate. And I’d always loved to eat. Surprisingly, I’d been exposed to Cuban food growing up in whitebread Ohio, through my father and his sugar business connections. My mother even made a convincing version of picadillo for visitors from Miami. In Eighties-era Manhattan, Puerto Rican and Cuban-Chinese fusion restaurants dotted the landscape. Comidas Chinas Y Criollas. The Chinese side of the menu ran to the Americanized basics, platters with egg roll and fried rice. Only rarely did I see anybody order the Chinese food at any of those places.
Latin dishes were the draw, the common specialties of Cuba and Puerto Rico: picadillo (spicy ground beef), ropa vieja (shredded beef in vinegary sauce), pot roast stuffed with chorizo sausage, garlicky chicken, fried pork chops and pernil, leathery roast pork cut in thick fat-laden slices. The perfect accompaniment, far preferable to pallid iceberg salad and fried plantains, was rice and beans: your choice of yellow or white, black or red, respectively.
My favorite Cuban-Chinese was Mi Chinita (later Sam Chinita). Situated in an old-fashioned dining car on the corner of 19th Street and Eighth Avenue, Mi Chinita was the domain of a grumpy, graying Chinese man known as Sam. The specialty of the house was fried chickpeas and chorizo piled next to a mountain of yellow rice and sweet greasy plantains. You stayed full.
Around 1984 I took my father to Mi Chinita during a business trip. He thoroughly enjoyed the picadillo and erupted in laughter when I informed him afterwards that we’d received unusually attentive service from Sam because we’d ordered Heinekens, the most expensive beverage on the menu.
CAFETERIAS
A crucial NYC dining tip I gleaned from my dad before moving concerned the existence of cafeterias serving home-style square-meal fare at reasonable prices. Sound advice, though out of date: by 1981 there was really only one left. Even the Bellmore Cafeteria, where Travis Bickle famously spends his breaks in Taxi Driver, had closed by then. Dubrow’s Cafeteria was it. But what a grand place, an art deco relic on Seventh Avenue in the Garment District between Times Square and Herald Square. The Garment District was another of New York City’s worlds-within, where daredevil delivery guys dominated the sidewalks with their careening coat racks and out-of-control hand carts.
The sumptuously designed and ornamented surroundings at Dubrow’s, only slightly worse for the wear, belied the stolid nature of the cuisine on offer: punishing helpings of Jewish soul food. Paperback-sized slices of eggy challah bread with butter, mashed potatoes supporting a lean-to plank of mushroom-studded meat loaf, cabbage or peppers stuffed with meat and rice, dry overcooked chicken, nuked brisket or the melting beef short ribs that many Dubrow’s customers probably ate without their dentures. I loved the kasha varnishkes, nutty buckwheat grains tossed with buttered noodles and sweet browned onions, but it was the kind of side dish that put a damper on the rest of your dinner. Dubrow’s was soul nourishing, on an abstract level, and acutely stomach-damaging. Eventually I really did get sick after eating there, winding up in St. Vincent’s emergency room with my first case of food poisoning. Understandably, I never went back after that. Dubrow’s closed in 1985 and the interior was gutted. I hope somebody saved the fixtures.
COFFEE SHOP/DINERS
It seemed like there was one — or more — on every block in Manhattan: the affordable restaurants with unfathomably long menus known as diners or more commonly, coffee shops. Almost always, the owner/operators were Greek immigrants. The concept began with the traditional Greek coffeehouse or kaffenion where patrons would hang out while slurping thick espresso and shots of ouzo. From the Sixties until the late Ninties or so, Americanized Greek coffee shops dominated the cheap dining scene in New York. These were everyday spots, with regulars well-known to the staff and plenty of canned repartee. Despite the expansive bill of fare everybody stuck to the basics: burgers, breakfast and All-American entrees like meatloaf with mashed potatoes. Two iconic images will be forever associated with the Greek diner or coffee shop: the to-go coffee “container” and the “show off case” or revolving dessert display.
During the summer of 1981 I ate most often at the Courtney Restaurant: a Greek coffee shop with soul, tucked away beneath the high-rise Courtney House apartment building on 14th Street near Sixth Avenue. The Courtney was a couple bucks cheaper than its competition, and the food was better, too. Dinner entrees came with a side dish of tasty, not-too-mayonaissed coleslaw.
The tiny restaurant — just a counter and single row of two-seater booths — was always staffed by Gus in the front and Georgy in the kitchen. (Even on other shifts, when it was two different guys, they answered to the same names.) The other customers were men in their fifties, sixties, seventies. Many, I suspected, were retirees, bachelors or widowers who took all their meals there. Gus, the counter man presiding on most evenings, looked kindly on me. He seemed pleased to have a younger person as a regular. But he knew I was just passing through. “Put a ro’ chicken on the fire, Georgy, and Make It Nice!” The Courtney went out of business sometime in the late Eighties, a few years before the Starbucks deluge washed away the diners and their weak, watered-down coffee.
In October 1981, I moved to a building at the corner of 14th Street and Ninth Avenue where a nameless Greek coffee shop occupied the ground floor. It was run by two brothers-in-law, both called Georgy. I fell in the habit of buying my morning coffee there before work. Strategically located at the edge of the (pre-gentrification) Meat Packing District, this corner diner drew a colorfully mixed clientele at 8:00 AM: butchers in blood-spattered white lunching on huge sandwiches (it was mid-day for them), and leather-clad stragglers stopping for breakfast after a long night of socializing at the infamous gay clubs that dotted the district in that bygone era. The Georgies were unfazed by this scene but I found it quite the eye-opener, figuratively and literally.
CHINATOWN
Perhaps I’d have found these restaurants on my own. Probably not, though. I had an expert guide; a sherpa. The late Jeff Reidel was superintendent at the building where I lived during the summer of 1981. Jeff was a friendly yet deeply eccentric middle-aged man — in many ways he still qualifies as the strangest person I’ve met in New York City. Jeff was also the budget gourmet supreme, a limitless resource on the culinary underside of downtown Manhattan. He became my guru in the matter of finding cheap, sustaining and delicious meals. Jeff was the first foodie I encountered.
“I used to spend $5 total for three meals a day,” he’d say, with a sigh. “But New York is so expensive now.”
It was in Chinatown, on the streets as well as in the restaurants, where Jeff introduced me to another side of the city, a world within a world, at once alien and alluring, delectable and disgusting. Chinatown was a melee of sights and smells. Mott Street, the main drag, was lined with restaurants, souvenir shops and outdoor market stalls stocked with oddly shaped fruits and unfamiliar root vegetables that looked like unearthed tree stumps. Fishmongers stacked row after row of fragrant whole fish on ice in front of their storefronts, dozens of different species set out in the sun alongside barrels of edible shell creatures ranging from shrimp to snails to wriggling live crabs. Until then, I’d only shopped at suburban grocery stores, and crunchy-granola food co-ops in my college town.
Jeff certainly knew his way around Chinatown’s twisting streets. He favored a tiny basement restaurant than specialized in dense noodle soups, the fatty broth studded with floating islands of meat and bone. I never felt comfortable or especially welcome there, and considering that we were always the only Caucasians in the joint, I understood why the service was non-existent. I much preferred the row of Szechwan-style restaurants on East Broadway. The best one was all the way down the block, practically underneath the Manhattan Bridge. This restaurant’s name is lost to me now — Shanghai something? The walls were papered with dozens of signs advising patrons on the specials of the day in Chinese characters, though the regular menu offered rudimentary translations: “lions head” was a giant globe-shaped pork meatball served on a bed of savory soft-cooked cabbage. Bony chicken nuggets in sauce had an addictive sweet spicy tang until you accidentally bit into one of the painfully hot red peppers dotting the dish like land mines and lost your sense of taste for the next hour or two.
EAST VILLAGE EASTERN EUROPEAN
As the summer wore on, I avoided eating with Jeff anywhere east of Broadway. The World War II era décor and cafeteria service at Katz’s Deli suited his taste to a “t”, but at $5 plus their Himalayan pastrami sandwiches were too expensive for anything besides a special treat. And his enthusiasm for global cuisine evaporated before the Indian restaurant row on East 6th Street. On the other hand, the Ukrainian and Polish fare on offer throughout the East Village was right up Jeff’s alley: starchy, filling and cheap. Borscht, pierogis stuffed with meat or potato, kielbasa with sauerkraut. But for me, there was a catch. Unlike the Greek-American diners Jeff frequented in the West Village and Chelsea, east side coffee shops like Kiev, Leshko’s, Veselka, and Odessa were full of people closer to my age not to mention appearance.
Honestly, I’ve never been much of a fashion maven, and at first glance I found my style-conscious peers in New York to be more than a little intimidating. Nevertheless, after a few months in the city I began to subtly alter my look. Slim-cut black jeans (which I’d never encountered in the Midwest) actually felt more comfortable than my traditional baggy blue Levis. And after my first short-sides hair cut, I was humbled by the realization that my long wavy locks looked ridiculous in a shaggy Seventies hairdo. As I began to fit into the East Village scene, or at least not stand out quite as much, I became aware of how incongruous Jeff appeared as my dining companion. We were one odd couple.
More and more, I dined out alone (another hallowed New York City tradition).
Jeff was confused and hurt by my sudden reluctance to discuss the day’s New York Times over leisurely dinners. Looking back, I’m stunned by my callow behavior — bordering on cruelty — toward the unfailingly kind (and oddball) advisor who’d taken me under his wing: “showing me the ropes,” as he put it. But as my raw hunger for human company abated, or became sated in other situations, socializing with Jeff started to cramp my style. To this day I feel pangs of guilt about my abruptly abandoned friendship with my first New York mentor. But mostly, I feel gratitude for the nourishment he provided.
