R.I.P. Beppe
Since I’m about to sublet my apartment until next summer, I’ve been doing a ruthless decluttering, throwing out pretty much everything or giving it away. Tossing things out, ripping them up, hurling them into trash bins: It’s fantastic therapy. Highly recommended. As I wade through closetfuls of junk, I’ve been making a few observations, like my tendency to collect Best-of-NYC restaurant issues—annual tomes put out by New York Magazine, Time Out NY (my alma mater), et al. I rarely refer back to the issues, but somehow they still pile up year after year.
New York Mag’s Where to Eat 2004 issue caught my eye, and I scanned the restaurant Hot List from that year. Whoa—dozens of the so-called “Hot List” restaurants from ’04 don’t even exist anymore. Felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I counted up the corpses: 40 restaurants on that Hot List—that’s more than a third of the 115 places listed—are now closed. Dead, gone. What does this all mean?
We know New York City can be a brutally harsh place for dreamy entrepreneurs. We know the recession is decimating the city’s restaurants, or at least editing them way down so that only the Darwinian superstars survive. But damn, either New York Mag’s Hot List was horrendously off-base six years ago, or the ongoing restaurant bloodbath citywide is even grimmer than it seems.
Still, I’m hoping (betting?) that the restaurants here on Salmaland have long-term chops. Many have already been around for years or decades, and some are admittedly the new/hot thing—but most of them, in my humble opinion, are more than just passing fancies. Am I willing to put money on that? Ask me in a few years…
A quick post-mortem:
These are the dead restaurants I mourn most on NY Mag’s Hot List: Beppe (terrific Italian from Cesare Casella—now of Salumeria Rosi—in a neighborhood that needed it) and La Caravelle (beautifully executed haute-French food in a charmingly mural-covered dining room, one of the last and best restaurants of a now-gone genre).
And these are the dead restaurants that were obviously doomed from the second they opened:  Mix (a short-lived, ill-conceived Alain Ducasse casual-French project), 66 (a short-lived, ill-conceived Jean-Georges Vongerichten dim sum project), Ida Mae Kitchen ‘N Lounge (flimsily executed soul food), and Pearson’s Texas BBQ in Queens—because you can’t really do true Texas BBQ in New York; at least, as an ex-Texan, I’ve yet to find it, although Hill Country does come pretty close.
Here’s to a new decade of better, bolder, fiercer, fitter restaurants in NYC, the best (ok, arguably the best) food city in the world.