A Writer's Life (56 page)

The fifth restaurant to open at 206 East 63rd did so during the holiday season of 1988. It was called John Clancy's East, and was an uptown affiliate of the critically acclaimed and financially solvent two-story John Clancy's seafood specialty eatery that had opened downtown in 1981 on West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village. The restaurant's founder and namesake was an introverted ex-U.S. Marine Corps' cook during the Korean War named John Clancy, who preferred to work in the kitchen while his extroverted partner, Sam Rubin, stood near the front door, greeting customers and escorting them to tables. Since the two partners looked alike—both were tall, bearded, and balding—and since Clancy continued to distance himself from his clientele while preparing the meals, most customers assumed that the sole owner and namesake of John Clancy's was Sam Rubin. After John Clancy had gone into semiretirement in 1984, Rubin did become the sole owner, and, having purchased the legal use of the trade name, Rubin used it in 1988 when he expanded uptown with John Clancy's East at 206 East 63rd Street. Rubin had been persuaded to take over this moribund space that had been Moon's by a friend and fellow restaurateur named Michael Schwartz, an articulate and personable New Yorker in his fifties, who had been so sanguine about the Sixty-third Street venture that he volunteered to underwrite it and to assist Rubin personally in its operation.

Michael Schwartz had grown up in a family that had long owned and operated restaurants in the Wall Street area, and he took pride in being a shrewd investor in dining properties and an experienced administrator in all aspects of the business. Michael Schwartz's enterprising grandfather from Austria-Hungary, Sigmund Schwartz, had arrived in New York in the 1880s, and, as a part-time waiter at a restaurant downtown on Chambers Street, Sigmund Schwartz was known to tell his customers complimentary things about
another
restaurant nearby in which he also worked
as a part-time waiter
and
had a small investment. By 1902, having enlarged upon his investment, Sigmund Schwartz was sufficiently affluent to launch his wholly owned Schwartz restaurant on Church Street. In 1927, his son Henry opened a second Schwartz not far away on Broad Street. In 1967, the grandson Michael Schwartz introduced Michael One on Trinity Street, and in later years had Michael's on Broadway and Michael's on John Street.

But after Michael Schwartz had signed a contract with J. Z. Morris for the sublease of the dining space for John Clancy's East, Schwartz would prove to be no more adept than Marvin Safir had been in overseeing a profitable enterprise at 206 East 63rd Street. Schwartz and his partner Sam Rubin were equally perplexed by this situation, and so was the
New York Times
food critic at the time, Bryan Miller, whose 1989 review of the restaurant began: “John Clancy's, one of the best seafood restaurants in Greenwich Village, recently opened a handsome new branch at 206 East 63rd Street called John Clancy's East. A recent visit found that the fish have not fared well on their migration upstream. This is puzzling because the chef, Lynn Aronson, used to run the downtown kitchen.…” Defending the chef's cooking at John Clancy's East, however, was the veteran critic Mimi Sheraton, who in her popular newsletter referred to the restaurant as “practically what the doctor ordered,” and Sheraton added, “Nowhere will you find a thicker, more delicately woodsy fillet of smoked trout with a fluff of horseradish-flecked whipped cream or larger, firmer shrimp served with horseradish and a puree of sweet red peppers. Dillscented gravlax, the raw salmon marinated to near translucence … equally good are the little necks, steamed in a good-to-the-last-drop tomato fennel broth.” Still, John Clancy's East was unable to lure enough customers to sustain itself beyond 1991. In dissolving the partnership with Sam Rubin, Michael Schwartz recalled a remark made to him long ago by his late father: “There are no answers in the restaurant business.”

The sixth restaurant at 206 East 63rd opened in 1992 under the auspices of a vivacious thirty-nine-year-old black woman named Yvonne Bell, who was popularly known as “Lola” Bell, and who specialized in Caribbean cooking. Born in New York City of immigrant parents from Jamaica, and aspiring to a career as a singer and dancer, Lola Bell worked during her teenage years as a waitress in order to support herself between auditions; but since none of her auditions led to professional fulfillment, she continued to work in restaurants, becoming in time a hostess and manager of a place near lower Broadway and the Flatiron Building. Here she cheerfully greeted and seated her customers in a way that made them
feel very welcome and wanted, and she also gained distinction by dressing sumptuously, favoring colorful gowns shimmering with sequins, and light-catching rhinestone earrings and bracelets, and she often covered the close-cropped hair on her small head with one of a multiplicity of stagy wigs. She soon attracted crowds of regular customers, one being the celebrated Broadway dancer and director-choreographer Geoffrey Holder, in front of whom she had once auditioned unsuccessfully. “You don't have to be onstage,” he said, referring to her restaurant job. “This is your stage.”

In 1985, she attained marquee status in the dining world after acquiring the financial backing to open Lola's at 30 West 22nd Street. It not only featured her specialties—spicy Caribbean fried chicken, shrimp and chicken curry, honey-glazed ham steak with black-eyed peas and collard greens—but on Sundays she added what she called a “gospel brunch.” Between noon and 3:00 p.m., while her customers were being served, they were serenaded by a standing group of black men and women who were among her churchgoing choir friends. The fact that the singers received favorable notices in newspaper columns brought in additional customers. But along with the commercial success of Lola's restaurant arose managerial disagreements between Lola Bell and her partners that would remain unresolved, and would lead in 1992 to her departure from Lola's and her acceptance of financial help from Michael Schwartz (who had been among her Sunday brunch customers) to take over the space vacated by John Clancy's East at 206 East 63rd Street. She would rename the place Lolabelle.

She changed the old decor but otherwise infused the dining area with her customary charm and exuberance, her Caribbean culinary specialties, and, on Sundays, her gospel brunch. She also decided to entertain her dinner guests on two or three nights a week with the accompanying sounds of reggae musicians, jazz combos, and vocal soloists. She believed that the possibility of success on Sixty-third Street would be fostered by the presence of live music, and so she alternatively used the second floor and sometimes the first floor as well in featuring Lolabelle as a combination restaurant and supper club. Since she would not be opening the place for lunch on weekdays—none of the five previous restaurants at this address had drawn a large-enough luncheon crowd to offset their midday operating costs—she would be counting on an increased volume of business at night to make a profit after meeting her expenses, which included J. Z. Morris's monthly rent of $14,000, nearly $3,000 a month for the electricity, $2,000 for the linen, $1,500 for the water, $850 for private cartage, perhaps $30,000 to purchase the food and liquor, plus a weekly
total cost of about $10,000 in salaries for the kitchen crew and dining room staff. Still, she started out convinced that Lolabelle would soon triumph as an establishment.

It would not happen. Her business began promisingly, but then, slowly but steadily, it went into decline through 1993 and into 1994. The crowds that had patronized her at Lola's downtown did not flock to Lolabelle uptown. The quality of the food uptown was the same as it had been downtown, the prices were the same, the voices of her Sunday gospel singers were the same, but the revenues generated were hardly the same. After a bit more than two years at 206 East 63rd Street, Lolabelle ceased to exist.

Five months after it closed—Lola Bell had meanwhile signed a televison contract to anchor a food show—a
seventh
restaurant prepared to make its debut at 206 East 63rd. It was the Napa Valley Grill. It was being financed by a young New York investment banker and food fancier named Michael Toporek, who, having become enamored of northern California during his sojourns in the wine country, sought to transfer some of its ambience and flavor to Sixty-third Street.

Prior to the restaurant's opening, Toporek spent extravagantly on interior alterations and renovations. He sent his workmen inside to knock a square hole through one side of the second floor so that the lengthy tropical plants he planned to hang upstairs would dangle below and be visible to the customers seated in the main dining room on the first floor. He furnished both floors with comfortable silk-covered green banquettes and tables covered with fine linen, as well as china decorated with floral engravings. In the rear of the first floor, next to the door leading into the kitchen, he spent $35,000 on the construction of a seven-foot-high circular brick wood-burning oven. On the sidewalk overlooking the entrance-way he replaced the beige canvas marquee labeled
LOLABELLE
with a sprightly tricolored one that was a blend of yellow, pink, and violet and that spelled out in scripted lettering
NAPA VALLEY GRILL
.

In a printed statement that was included with the opening-night menus, Michael Toporek explained, “While traveling through the Napa Valley last year and enjoying the fine food and wine the region has to offer, my wife and I heard an interesting story that helped inspire the concept behind this restaurant. We heard that a well-known movie producer has a vineyard in his backyard where he also has a wood-burning brick oven and an open grill. One of his favorite ways to spend an afternoon is to have his friends over, enjoy great wine from his own vineyard, great pizza from his wood-burning oven and fine food from his grill. What we hoped to create here is a place where people could relax, feel comfortable,
and have fine food and wine with friends, as if they were sitting in our backyard.”

A large crowd gathered at the Napa Valley Grill to attend the opening-night party on March 21, 1995. During the summer and fall of 1995, however, there were far fewer customers being served. And then on a cold day in late November while I was passing the Napa Valley Grill during a midafternoon stroll—only two days after I had last dined there—I saw the front door padlocked, the dining room vacated, and a
FOR RENT
sign posted behind the plate-glass window. I was startled to learn about the sudden demise of the Napa Valley Grill, for despite its brief tenure of only eight months, it had largely fulfilled my expectations of what a desirable neighborhood restaurant should be. Its service had been friendly and efficient, its food attractively presented, and its maître d' used to wink at me knowingly whenever I walked in during uncommonly busy evenings without a reservation, indicating that he would seat me ahead of whoever else was waiting but lacked my status as a recognized regular.

I immediately tried to contact Michael Toporek at his apartment uptown on York Avenue, hoping to gain his insight into what had gone wrong at the Napa Valley Grill. But he neither returned my calls nor replied to my letters, and I never again caught a glimpse of him walking around in the vicinity of East Sixty-third Street. He was dodging his creditors, I was later told by one of his friends, who went on to say, “As a restaurant owner, Michael made a cardinal mistake—he fell in love with his restaurant. He took five months to fix it up, and spent a fortune fussing over it. Whatever he bought was the best quality, the best workmanship, but when he
finally
opened up his restaurant, he was too deeply in debt to continue to run it. His creditors were swarming into his place all the time, demanding to be paid for their construction work, their food and beverage deliveries, the delinquent utility bills and other charges.” I also learned, after calling J. Z. Morris in Sarasota, that Michael Toporek was usually in arrears with the monthly rent, and when Toporek would see Jackie Ho coming in to collect it, he would try to elude her by retreating into the kitchen and then descending via the rear staircase into the basement's wine cellar.

In January 1996, a new group of restaurant investors had arrived at 206 East 63rd Street, and, after they had spent some weeks redecorating the place and otherwise preparing for the opening of the
eighth
restaurant on this site, they removed from above the front door the Napa Valley Grill's tricolored awning and replaced it with a green one bearing the name Tucci. The name honored the northern Italian hometown of the fiancée of the new chef, a New York-born Portuguese-American named
Cliff Pereira, who had met his Piedmontese lady friend, Marguerita, two years before when they were both working in the kitchen of Le Madri on West Eighteenth Street. But the chef's subsequent conflicts with the financial backers of Tucci (a five-man consortium consisting of two lawyers, a retired raincoat manufacturer, and two admen known for their work on the Miller Lite commercial—“Tastes Great, Less Filling”) provoked his dismissal in June 1996, a little more than four months after Tucci had opened.

I had met Cliff Pereira a number of times before his departure and had been impressed with his engaging personality. I saw him as one of many media-conscious New York chefs who were consumed with Food Network aspirations. He liked to step out of the kitchen after the final serving and, while wearing his white toque and a broad smile, he would stroll around the dining room of Tucci, greeting the guests and seeking their opinions of the dinners that he had prepared for them. It was my feeling that the restaurant's owners—one or two of whom posted themselves at night near the front door, greeting the arriving guests—would have preferred that their chef remain in the kitchen, where they thought he belonged, rather than making public appearances in the dining room and occasionally taking bows. But there was no stopping him. He was a product of this period in which the media were heralding the restaurant business as a glamorous growth industry and chefs were being extolled as culinary artists with drawing power and the potential to extend their influence beyond the swinging doors of the kitchen. An article entitled “The Chef as Mogul” was published in the
New York Times Magazine
, and it told the story of an ambitious ex-kitchen worker named David Bouley, who at the age of fifteen had washed dishes after school in a Connecticut restaurant, and who at the age of forty-four was a millionaire posing for the
Times
cover photo in the manner of a Hollywood studio magnate, wearing dark glasses and a blue denim shirt and speaking into a cellular phone while reclining in the sun. As the chef and co-owner of Restaurant Bouley, which opened on Duane Street in downtown Manhattan in 1987, David Bouley's exceptional cooking and presentation quickly drew crowds of customers and show business celebrities, the
Times Magazine
article pointed out, and within a few years his place would have a four-star rating and be grossing about $9 million annually.