80s Cheap Eats Pt.2: A Greek coffee shop on every block

It seemed like there was one – or more – on every block in Manhattan: 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 1960s until the ’90s or so the Americanized Greek coffee shops dominated the cheap dining scene in New York. These were everyday spots, with regulars well-known to the staff and lots 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 14^th Street near 6th Avenue. The Courtney was not only a couple bucks cheaper than its competition, but the food was better, too. 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 50s, 60s, 70s. 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!” He was a nice man. The Courtney went out of business sometime in the late ’80s, a few years before the Starbucks deluge washed away the diners and their admittedly watered-down coffee.

The Courtney House today

In October 1981 I moved to a building at the corner of 14th street and 9th Avenue where a nameless Greek coffee shop occupied the ground floor. It was run by two brothers-in-law both named Georgy. I quickly got in the habit of buying my morning coffee there before leaving for work. Strategically located at the edge of the (pre gentrification) meat-packing district, this corner diner drew a colorfully mixed clientele at 7:30 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 those days. The Georgies were unfazed by this scene but I found it quite the eye-opener, figuratively and literally.

80s NYC Cheap Eats Pt.1

Naturally, moving to NYC expanded my palate. And I always loved to eat. I was exposed to Cuban food in Ohio, through my father and his sugar business connections. My mother even made a convincing version of picadillo for visitors from Miami. In 1980s era Chelsea, a working class Hispanic neighborhood just north of the West Village, Cuban-Chinese 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. I rarely saw anybody order the Chinese food at any of these 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, and the only one offered, was rice and beans: your choice of yellow or white, black or red, respectively.

My favorite Cuban-Chinese was Mi Chinita. Situated in an old-fashioned dining car on the corner of 19^th and 8^th Avenue, Mi Chinita was the domain of a grumpy, graying Chinese man named Sam.  The specialty of the house was fried chickpeas and chorizo piled next to a mountain of yellow rice and sweet plantains (fried bananas). You stayed full.

A couple years later I took my dad to Mi Chinita during a business trip. He liked the picadillo and he laughed when I told him we’d received unusually attentive service from Sam because we’d ordered Heinekens, the most expensive beverage on the menu.

Another tip I’d gleaned from my dad concerned the existence of cafeterias serving homely 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 spent his breaks in Taxi Driver, had closed by then. Dubrow’s Cafeteria was it. But what a grand place, an art deco relic 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 commanded the sidewalks with their careening handcarts and coat-racks.

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.

Noise Fest June 1981

A passer-by might reasonably have wondered what the hell was going on. Dozens of people filtered out of a generic industrial building, milled around in the street for half an hour, and then drifted back inside. Repeat. Of course there were almost no passers-by; on weekend nights, the western fringes of Soho, home of printers and trade publishers like my first employer, were deserted.

During the week I’d passed by this place a couple times on my way to have a vodka-soaked lunch with my boss at the nearby Ear Inn, a homey bar with decent chili. Across the street, a sign in the big picture window identified the empty ground floor showroom as an art gallery called White Columns. If there actually was art hanging on the walls, then I never noticed.

I was drawn to my work neighborhood on the evening in question by an enticing Xeroxed handbill that read like this:

I wound up attending multiple nights of the Noise Fest but the top-billed performance on Saturday the 20^th was the one that permanently rearranged my molecular structure. The evening’s entertainment, if you could call it that, was flat-out insane: half-a-dozen electric guitarists lined up like a firing squad, just hammering away at their amplifiers, each player strumming and scraping the same chord for ten minutes at a stretch, with a single rigid drummer keeping time.

Instantly I recognized the group’s leader. Glenn Branca conducted his ensemble by fanatically waving his battered Fender like a baton. Or weapon. I’d already seen this rangy guy striding around St. Marks Place and the East Village any number of times, always swilling from a 16 ounce can of Colt 45, accompanied by several severe-looking yet oddly attractive women – artistic types. Between these rapt followers and his radical approach to making, er, music, he resembled the leader of a cult.

While Branca played that Saturday night I could see the warm waves of raw high-volume sound waft out across the stuffy, smoke-filled room. It felt like standing on the runway at JFK behind a departing jet. The effect was cleansing, and after the initial shock, even uplifting. Listening was a fresh physical experience, brutally sensual, the actual notes (signal) and their amplified echo (noise) merging into one dense roar, connecting my ears, brain and guts on an instinctual circuit rarely plumbed by music. Above all else it felt controlled, deliberate: a far cry from the chaotic, cathartic release of punk rock.

I bought a lukewarm Heineken from the genial blond stringbean who more or less seemed to be running the show as well as the makeshift concession stand. (Of course he turned out to be Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.) Otherwise the ringing in my ears and my big city reticence precluded any reaching out to the kindred spirits in attendance. But the social ice began to melt away for me at the Noise Fest. As intimidating and crazy as the bill of fare appeared on the surface, I was encouraged by the fact that a handful of other people heard this cacophony as liberating rather than obnoxious. Nobody fostered any illusions about mass popularity or acceptance. In our obscure corner of the city, as long as somebody listened, well, anything seemed possible.