November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

May 19th, Saturday evening, my wife IM and I decide to spend having dinner at a nice restaurant nearby the Buckingham Hotel where we’re spending a long weekend in Manhattan. I’m recounting the four days in the Big Apple through the receipts I’ve collected during our stay. I’m on the 9th receipt, which we acquired Saturday evening at the Brasserie 8 ½ Restaurant at 9 W. 57th Street—just over a city block from the hotel. The towering 725-foot high 49-story black and white building occupying 70 percent of an acre of prime Midtown Manhattan real estate where the restaurant resides is a landmark on 57th Street. A large red sculpture of the number “9” smack in the middle of the wide pedestrian travertine marble sidewalk in the front of the building announces its address.

What makes the building—designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—unique is its shape. Viewed from a distance looking east or west you can see a distinct bell-shaped 40-degree slope on its north and south face as the building descends from the 19th floor to street level. Looking at the east or west side of the building, you see two white columns of travertine marble separated by a dark area slightly wider than either column. The white marble frames the dark area at the top. Within the dark glass covered center column you can make out three huge “x”s—the width of the center column—equidistantly spaced between the roof and ground floor of the building. The north and south façade of the building is likewise covered from top to bottom in dark-colored glass framed on the sides, top and bottom by a width of the same white travertine marble.

Brasserie 8 ½ occupies the basement of 9 West 57th Street. You get there by descending a red-carpeted spiral staircase that curves around a red-carpeted lounge within the center of the spiral, passing a long bar—about as long as the diameter of the lounge with a slight bow in its middle—and ending at a Maitre ‘d at the end of the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase, the long bar is on your right and you’re facing a smaller bar just ahead and in front of the 250-person capacity main dining room—one bar is smoking; the other non-smoking. At the end of the room opposite the staircase is the kitchen.

Patina Restaurant Group owns the restaurant along with many others scattered on the east and west coast of the country. One of the restaurants the company owns in Manhattan is the Brasserie, located in the Seagram’s Building at 100 East 53rd between Park and Lexington Avenue, where my wife IM and I have dined on many occasions starting back in 1979 when I first started traveling to New York as a PR account executive.

The Brasserie derives its name from the French word brasseur, meaning brewer. Refugees from the Franco-Prussian War in the late 1800s found their way to Paris from the Alsace Region. Some Alsatians started breweries like those they owned in their region. In the breweries they also served the food typically found in a hofbrauhaus in Germany—sauerkraut with sausages of various kinds, which the French called choucroute garnie—as well as the dishes Parisians demanded.

Patricia Wells writing in the December 4th 1992 issue of the Herald Tribune described the quintessential Parisian brasserie, “Le Train Bleu” founded at the turn of the 20th century. She writes “the two giant dining rooms—with their eclectic, "neo-renaissance baroque" décor—are adorned with signed paintings by more than 30 provincial artists, each selected to depict the glories of his region. The paintings fill the walls, curling up onto the ceiling, and their cheeriness is particularly welcoming on gray Parisian days.”

The Brasserie was the place where the classes mixed: shift workers showing up before or after the morning, swing, or graveyard shifts for a quick, inexpensive, good, and filling meal; rubbing elbows with artists, professionals, politicians, and every other occupation found in a thriving metropolitan city. That’s how I came to first find my way to the Brasserie on East 53rd in the late 1970s. Landing at Kennedy at 8:00 PM on a Sunday evening and wanting to grab something to eat after a long flight from the west coast, my companion—a product marketing manager from Apple Computer—and I ended up there having dinner and wine at 10:00 PM.

The Brasserie 8 ½ couldn’t qualify for the description Patricia Wells attributed to “Le Train Bleu”, though the original Brasserie in the late 1970s certainly fit the mold of egalitarian eatery. Both restaurants today tend toward the avant-garde in décor. The banquette of the 1970s in the original Brasserie replaced by plush leather booths—the bench seat backs of which extend to the ceiling providing a floor to ceiling barrier between diners in adjacent booths.

We had arrived at 7:30 PM and the Maitre ‘d showed us to our table and the waiter showed up with menus and we each ordered a glass of champagne, Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label. We ordered a dish of Escargot—the evening’s appetizer special—to split between the two of us. The evening’s fish was a halibut, something IM couldn’t resist. I, for my part had my heart, set on steak frites. Before the snails arrived, the waiter showed up with a complementary appetizer, a bite of something special he had come up with to surprise each guest. The main course came and I ordered a glass of Chianti to go with the medium rare steak. IM opted for another glass of Veuve. We finished off the meal with chocolate cake that we shared and latte for IM and regular coffee for me. The receipt came to $222.41 with tip. Up the stairs a little after 9:00 PM, we decided to walk our dinner off along Central Park South.

November 1, 2007 - Receipt #9 – "Curtains"

November 1, 2007 - Receipt #9 – "Curtains"

In recalling four days in Manhattan earlier this year through the receipts I collected during the stay, I’ve arrived at the ninth one, which was acquired during the middle of a day of walking through midtown with no other goal than to get some exercise and experience the city on its first weekend day. It's Saturday morning May 19th and most of the Manhattan’s weekday workers have abandoned their jobs and those living in the city have started enjoying themselves. Mayor Bloomberg or someone in the city’s bureaucracy had issued a permit that turned 6th Avenue from 56th Street south for a good 15 blocks or more—we didn’t walk the entire length—into a street fair. We stumble upon the festival after leaving our room at the Buckingham Hotel and walking out into the now overcast Saturday morning south on 6th Avenue.

At 56th Street, NYPD-blue painted wooden horses with white lettering blaring “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” blocked southbound vehicular traffic on 6th Avenue. Once behind the police line, we joined pedestrians filling the center of the avenue. On either side of the wide thoroughfare along the curb stood a line of mostly white tents, each occupying a 10-foot square space. Supporting each were four poles, one at each corner holding aloft a four-sided pyramid top. Beneath each top, vendors offer everything imaginable for sale: ethnic foods, tee shirts—lots of tee shirts, Big Apple souvenirs, etc. As we walk, a blue- or green-topped tent intermittently disrupts the uniform pattern of white. And nearly every block has its flat, square-topped, red or yellow tent with huge “Gyro” sign painted on each side of the square. As we walk, a loud speaker somewhere to our right blares out entreaties to “step right up for a free sample of fresh made kettle corn.”

As we reach Radio City Music Hall, we see one vendor who has broken the uniform mold of his conformist neighbors. He has constructed a complete emporium of ladies decorative shirts hanging from pipes within his unusual tent. This structure is unique in that the pipes supporting each 12 ft tall sidewall form the shape of the Greek letter pi. At the top of the tent, a pipe running between the two pi-shaped structures at the front and at the back keeps the sides upright. A large blue tarp drapes over the top and hangs down both sides. Hangers on the pipes contain the large variety of women apparel being offered for sale.

Next to this large tent in a simpler one with a shallow inverted “V” tent top and no sides. It has a huge “OILS” sign hanging in the front. Next to it is a red tent the size of the white ones we’ve passed along the way. It carries a large sign reading “psychic”. In the center of 6th Avenue between 49th and 50th street is a smoke stack twelve foot high or more and about a foot in diameter painted the familiar alternating bands of international orange and white, with smoke or steam wafting up. You see them in the video intro to “Saturday Night Live.” Is this why 6th Avenue was converted into a street faire so that New York City Public Works could perform maintenance without the distraction of traffic?

At 45th Street we leave the faire and head west toward Times Square. Before I left the room this morning, I had gone on line and purchased theatre tickets to “Curtains” at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre for a matinee performance on Sunday. We made our way toward the theatre, which sits at the corner of 8th Avenue and 45th Street, to claim the tickets waiting for us at the will-call window. The overcast that had begun the day persisted casting a somber atmosphere to an otherwise upbeat, frenetic one.

Each time we pass through Times Square I’m reminded of earlier visits to Manhattan and the appearance of the place at that time compared to now. The last time was the spring before the September 11th attack. Back then NBC had a hit program entitled “The Weakest Link” hosted by Anne Robinson, and her image towered above Times Square. On this visit corporate brands had replaced the pop star. Sony was promoting its screen super hero, Spider-Man.

We found the theatre and collected our tickets at 2:55 PM, a grand total of $223.00 including a restoration fee of $3.00 and unspecified expense by Telecharge.com for processing the order. The cost of live theater like that of every other good and service we purchase has gone up.