The New Slumming

On Thursday night, I went to see my friend's band at the Lansky Lounge. The address of and the entrance for this place is on Norfolk Street, but the front of the establishment is on Delancey. To enter, on the Norfolk side, you have to go down some stairs and through an alley. The entrance feels like a speakeasy.

My friend told me that the place was recently a Jewish restaurant in the front, with a speakeasy in back. After doing a little research, I've discovered that the restaurant was called Ratner's and it fronted Delancey Street. At some point in the 1990s, the Lansky Lounge opened in back and shared a kitchen with Ratner's. The name is a nod to Meyer Lansky, the famous Jewish gangster. An old-school Jewish deli with a trendy bar in the back--cute, right? Now, though, all the old-time Jewishness of it is gone. The Lansky Lounge took over all of Ratner's to become a regular trendy New York lounge/restaurant. To see the decidedly non-Jewish, non-Kosher menu, go here: http://www.lanskylounge.com/ This place is part of a recent trend that I call "the New Slumming."

The idea of "slumming," originally, was that those in search of a booze, drugs, and a general good time would hit bars or clubs in a seedy part of town, where the seedy bars were. Before post-modernism, such a practice was hardly ironic. The bars would be dives, but they were authentic. Yes, the term "slumming" has a negative connotation--it brings to mind images of rich white people heading downtown for a night. But the New Slumming is worse.

The New Slumming is about as un-authentic and contrived as you can get. A new bar or restaurant opens in a newly gentrified part of town, usually in a neighborhood that was recently slum-like. The establishment is hip, clean, pricey, loungy, trendy, or any combination thereof. The clientele are yuppies, Eurotrash, advertising executives, etc. They tend to be loud and annoying. They come in many forms, but they have two qualifying characteristics: they have money, and they lack appreciation for the city or the neighborhood.

The establishment will often have a name that is ironic, although it is unlikely that the proprieter intended it so. Usually, the name harkens back to the neighborhood before it was gentrified. In addition to the Lansky Lounge, another good example is a place called Schiller's Liquor Bar. I just read story in the New York Times about how residents are trying to get the liquor license revoked for Schiller's, which is on Norfolk and Rivington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/nyregion/27BAR.html

The owner of Schiller's also runs Odeon, Balthazar, and Lucky Strike, which are similarly trendy places, although none is in what was recently a slum. All of these restaurants are in the appropriately trendy neighborhood of SoHo. This guy also owns Pastis, which is in the Meatpacking District. I suppose in trying to branch out, he saw the Lower East Side as the next place to open a restaurant.

His last name is McNally. I don't know what you call this (pandering, maybe?), but it looks to me like he picked a Jewish-sounding name for his Lower East Side establishment. Do you think people would go to Schiller's if it was 15 blocks east, on Mercer and Spring? Of course, the people who frequent Schiller's wouldn't know the Jewish history of the Lower East Side if it came to life and bit them on the neck.

This paragraph from the Schiller's website says it all:

"Schiller's Liquor Bar is a low life bar and restaurant at 131 Rivington Street. The menu is inexpensive and includes rotisserie chicken with roast potatoes, pork chops with onions, lamb curry, steak and french fries, grilled swordfish with mint and tomato and various pastas and sandwiches. The wine list consists of only 3 wines: cheap, decent and good. Cheap is the best."

How ironic--Keith McNally's Lower East Side restaurant is a "low life" place. A low life place with swordfish and lamb curry on the menu! Fabulous! And how about that wine list? Don't you see how funny they are by saying that the "cheap" wine is better than the "good" wine? What a funny use of positive, comparative, and superlative!

Give me a break.

http://www.schillersny.com/home.html

While I'm on the topic, there are two other places off the top of my head that follow a similar marketing ploy. One is "Tenement," also on the Lower East Side. I'll tell you that the place opened about a year ago and it's on Ludlow Street. You can make your own inferences from that.

The other is Leshko's. For the longest time, Leshko's Coffee Shop, on Avenue A, was your regular eastern European diner. It was a Polish place, I think--one of those time-warps that somehow managed to outlast everything else in the neighborhood. Then one day it was renovated and came back as a trendy restaurant. From what I understand, its ownership changed. The new owners kept the name, but nothing else. The new Leshko's was a regular trendy restaurant, the type of place in which none of the former Leshko's regulars would set foot. The new Leshko's is actually closed now--I guess the new owners didn't have the same business sensibilities as the original ones, who were there for over 40 years.
- posted by Brian @ 5:53 PM