Review of Marvelous Manhattan: Stories of the Restaurants, Bars, and Shops That Make This City Special by Reggie Nadelson Review by Michael Quinn.
Now that the city’s opening up, where are you looking forward to going? Should you be willing to venture across the river, author Reggie Nadelson has some swell suggestions. Her new book, Marvelous Manhattan: Stories of the Restaurants, Bars, and Shops That Make This City Special, compiles a list of old-school New York institutions (collected from “The 212,” her column for The New York Times’ T Magazine), almost all of which, incredibly, survived this past year. Nadelson writes, “The places in this book are the places I love, my personal favorites, restaurants or shops that have history for me and that seem to me evidence that New York is still alive, that it is still the real thing.”
Nothing is as irresistible as authenticity. After all, one of the things that has always drawn people to the city is the promise of freedom to be who we really are. Paradoxically, this sometimes involves a process of reinvention. In 1925, Nadelson’s mother, driven by a “fierce need” and “ambition to become someone else,” moved to New York from Canada, changed her name (from Sarah to Sally), and joined the Communist party. Nadelson writes, “My mother felt that life would not be much worth living without New York City.”
Nadelson grew up on East 10th Street and now lives downtown. The pandemic brought out the love-it-or-leave it attitude she inherited from her mother: “As the lockdown began, I watched Soho residents clear the shelves of groceries, pack up their Mercs and Jeeps, and head for the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley. My fellow stalwart New Yorkers and I saw them go and, with a certain bravado, thought: Bye-bye. More space for us.”
Deeply personal, Marvelous Manhattan forgoes the usual guidebook structure. Rather than corral its entries by type, Nadelson starts near where she lives and winds her way uptown, pointing out spots along the way. She gives a little history about each place, introduces us to some of the owners, and makes recommendations about what to eat, buy, or experience. Her vignettes are like little character sketches.
Russ & Daughters, world-famous purveyors of smoked salmon, bagels, babka, and the like, also provides the “nutrients you get from eating Jewish: comedy, history, nostalgia.” A real New York success story, what started as a humble storefront on Orchard Street in 1914 now includes the shop on Houston Street, a nearby café, a Jewish Museum outpost, and a huge baking facility in the Brooklyn Navy Yard—still run by generations of the same family. Nadelson writes, “In a way, Russ has give me a sense of my own past, even of my own Jewishness, a very particular kind of secular New York Jewishness—and a desire to reclaim it.”
Italian specialty shop Di Palo’s on Mott Street is a delicious trip back in time (“In 1950, half of Little Italy was Italian; by 2000, it was down to 6 percent”), whereas the Upper East Side German butcher Schaller & Weber is “peppy as a polka but contemporary as a Berlin rock club.”
Donohue’s Steak House, also on the Upper East Side, “has the kind of patina that comes with generations—not patina in the designer sense, but the emotional luster that is produced by seventy years of staff attention and customer affection,” Nadelson observes, whereas Keens Steakhouse in the Theater District (“dark and secret, tables and booths set in deep corners”) has her panting over the food: “This is like sex with your clothes on, and nobody hurries you to finish.”
Some places are worth it for the atmosphere alone. The Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side, across the street from St. John the Divine, and a hub for Columbia University students and writers of all stripes, still has a beatnik coffeehouse vibe (“no Wi-Fi, and the lighting is not great, but the coffee refills are free, and the pastries are large and sweet,”) whereas Caffë Dante in Greenwich Village has managed to retain something of its heritage while bringing its look, menu, and service into the 21st Century: “The sight of a few white subway tiles might have sent some locals into paroxysms of despair, but if you don’t embrace change in New York, you can drown in nostalgia and misery.”
Of course, as anyone who’s lived in New York for a while realizes, our own pasts become inextricably linked with the city’s. We mourn the vanished places of our youth and worry for the ones that are still managing to hang on—even if we no longer frequent them. Marvelous Manhattan is a good reminder to step up that commitment. Returning to the Village Vanguard, Nadelson is shocked to realize that there’s “no room in the world that sounds as good for jazz as this one in Greenwich Village.” Up at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, Nadelson is reminded of the greats—Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker—who had not only performed at the club, but had invented modern jazz—“dissonant, complex, strange, hard, seductive, and gorgeous in a cerebral way”—while doing it. She writes, “The music, the clubs, the idea of it all, is, for me, wrapped in a web of nostalgia for both my youth and a disappearing New York; melancholy, too, because so much of the music, even the sharpest, most angular bebop always seems tinged with the blues.”
Places disappear; people do, too. For Nadelson, the loss of her mother is a keen one, but her spirit lives on in her daughter’s shared passion for the only place they’d ever want to call home. Whether as an introduction to New York’s special spots or as a reminder that they’re just as vibrant as ever, Marvelous Manhattan will make you fall in love with the city—either for the first time, or all over again.
