October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

I’m recounting four days in Manhattan through the written receipts we’ve amassed during our stay. This is the sixth. After paying for our purchase we leave the store and find a bench across from the museum store entrance to sit for a second to gather all our purchases in a single large plastic bag. All around us is a steady stream of pedestrian entering and leaving Rockefeller Center Plaza, many stop on either side of where we are sitting and attempt to take photos of sculptor Paul Manship’s famous gilded statue of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind. Prometheus guards the Rockefeller Center Plaza subterranean patio as you enter from 5th Avenue. The statue was commissioned in January 1933 for this quintessential Art Deco center built in the depths of the Depression. It was the ultimate statement of capitalist optimism in the darkest period of modern history—“let them eat cake,” and why not?

Purchases all packed into a single bag, we head back to the hotel along 5th Avenue, passing at 55th Street, the St Regis Hotel, which was the preferred Manhattan staff lodging during the year and a half I spent in the late 1970s working for Regis McKenna Public Relations in Palo Alto—himself having a penchant for staying at the hotel that bore his name. It was a late night arrival on the occasion of my first visit to Manhattan in the agency’s employ that the St. Regis Bellman introduced me to the Brasserie Restaurant at 100 East 53rd Street. “It’s open 24 hours a day, has modest priced, great food, and it’s where everyone who work nights in Midtown go for dinner when they get off,” he enthused. I had a product marketing manager from Apple Computer Inc. in tow at the time and the two of us had great steaks and pommes frites, accompanied by a California red. Back then the Brasserie was the kind of egalitarian hang out with the 1960s décor that resembled its Paris namesake.

A block further north, we pass Trump Tower; the first three stories of the building’s face wrapped in a bright red advertisement for Gucci—the wrap art style of Christo and Jeanne-Claude commandeered for a completely commercial purpose. How could you ignore all that red adorned with glamorous women, made-up and coifed to look perfect in Gucci designed apparel? IM and I certainly couldn’t. A block further north and we turn left onto 57th Street intending to return to the Buckingham, but hunger sets in and the two of us realize we’ve not had anything to eat since getting up this morning except a glass of orange juice. On the south east corner of 6th Avenue and 57th Street, we spy the restaurant Rue 57 and determine there is where we’ll sate our appetite. The restaurant’s entrance is on the 57th Street side of the corner and we enter to a full room of diners—the midtown lunch crowd finishing up before heading back to their offices to finish off their workweek. Being in a big city on a weekday when everyone else is committing themselves 9 to 5, I always have the impression of being truant from school. All around you the conversation is shoptalk, except for the smattering of tables with other truant tourists like IM and me.

Just as we give our name to the hostess, a corner table comes available at the back of the restaurant opposite the entrance. We follow our hostess to our table snaking between diners’ chairs squeezed so compactly together that it was hard not to brush the back of each chair you passed. Once seated IM orders a Margarita, and I order a glass of champagne. The three tables to our right, toward the reception desk, were being bussed and made ready for new patrons when we were seated and by the time our drink order arrives, the two tables next to us are squeezed together for a party of four. The one lone third table accommodates of a couple that arrive just after the foursome is seated. Our neighbors are a young couple and an older couple—son and significant other being treated by Mom and Dad—or vice versa to lunch in midtown. The older couple speaks French to one another and English, with little accent, to the younger couple, with the conversation eventually becoming all English. I’m not terribly observant when it comes to other peoples’ conversations except when their body language conveys tension that compels me to listen. The foursome’s conversation resembled white noise to me, sounds beating against my consciousness but nothing registering. IM and I discussed the day, what our kids back in California were doing now, how bad the plane ride was and how great it used to be, and what New York used to be like when we were younger.

IM and I met at the Page Two, a nightclub in Oceanside on Long Island in February 1964, which had dancing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was looking to meet someone and IM was dumping her boyfriend. She was sitting alone at the bar drinking a rye and ginger and I asked her to dance, She accepted and we spent the rest of the evening dancing and talking. She had come with girlfriends and left with them later but not before I had asked her out the upcoming Saturday to tour the city doing tourist things. She accepted and I spent the rest of the week trying to plan out the day, without much success.

The next Saturday I picked her up at her place, without a clue as to what we were going to do for the day. We walked to the train station near her place, and took the train into the city, getting off at Penn Station, where all the commuter trains disgorged their loads. Our first stop was the United Nations, which I had wanted to tour. IM had already been but was eager to do it again. The UN was a major topic of discussion during my current affairs class at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington—taught by a retired military officer, who had been stationed all over the world and had turned the whole class on to getting out and seeing what had excited him so. He was one of the reasons I joined the Navy rather than going on to college. You could say he contributed to my being where I was at that instant.

Secretary-General U Thant headed the institution back then, but I was more familiar with Dag Hammarskjöld, the man who preceded him. I was struck by his untimely death in a plane crash on a peace mission in the Congo. Men like him were larger than life characters and to have one of them die accidentally made you realize that death didn’t make exceptions for standing in the community. I recall during the tour how small the rooms appeared. On television during the evening news broadcasts, the rooms all seemed larger and more spacious. It was especially large when black and white video showed Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on his desk in the General Assembly during the fall of 1960. Did the camera lie or did my mind make these places and events larger to fit their purpose in the world? I suspect the latter. The other impression I left the UN with was the diversity of people working there. It was my first encounter with black Africans, Europeans, and Asians in such numbers, more than I had ever come across in all the travels the Army provided my family and me. IM and I toured the UN again during our visit in 2001. The revelation then was the increased diversity of people over our first visit, not only working at the UN but among the visitors touring it as well.

Our lunch arrives, IM has a chicken salad and I have veal scallopini and another glass of champagne. On our first date in New York IM and I left the UN in the afternoon and took in a movie—Goldfinger—Sean Connery playing James Bond, a young Dame Shirley Bassey singing the title song during the opening credits. After the movie we walk around midtown riding up the Empire State Building elevator and looking out over the city, wandered about Rockefeller Center and eventually ended up in a little Italian restaurant on one of the streets in the Theatre District. All I remember of the place was our table had a checkerboard tablecloth in the center of which was a bulbous-bottom Chianti bottles wrapped in basket with a candle burning and candle wax encasing its neck and bottom. IM and I talked about our families, her mom and dad, her married older sister and two bachelor brothers in Scotland. I described my Filipina mother, Southern Baptist father, and three younger school-aged sisters. Here we were two people from the opposite ends of the earth having dinner in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan—what were the chances? Our lunch at Rue 57 was memorable because we were both very hungry; our dinner at the little Italian restaurant 47 years ago because it was the first, because the day had been perfect, and, except for a few other tables of early-bird diners we had the place to ourselves.

The waiter returns after we had finished our meal and asked if we wanted dessert, which we both decline. I offer him my credit card and he returns a few minutes later with the credit card slip, which I sign. The bill came to just under $112 with tip. It was just coming on 3:00 PM and sated, we snake our way back to the front of the restaurant and out onto 57th Street. We walk back to the Buckingham and take a rest before the performance of Spamalot at 8:00 PM that evening.