Copyright 
Penton Media, Inc. May 2004| [Headnote] |
| Want to pump new life into a decrepit part of town? Nothing beats a hip restaurant as a way to kick it off. |
When the events of 9/11 effec-tively shut down New York City, thenMayor Rudolph Giuliani received a call from Sirio Maccioni, owner of Le Cirque 2000 in midtown, asking how he could help in any way. Giuliani replied bluntly: "Just stay open."
It was a brilliant answer, for Giuliani knew that the best way to reduce fear and to show the city's rebounding vitality was for restaurants to keep their lights on and to get people back behind the dinner table. While Le Cirque didn't do much business that night or in the few following, its staying open-along with hundreds of other New York restaurants-was testament to the city's determination to drive away the shadows and beckon like beacons in the night to those who needed refreshment of both body and soul.
| [Photograph] |
| RED-HOT: Cool restaurants and bars helped Dallas' onceseedy Deep Ellum spring back to life. |
Many restaurants were in fact driven out of business in lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center was located, so it was that the opening of the first new restaurant in the area, The Harrison, seemed a brave-or perhaps crazy-move for its owners, Jimmy Bradley and Danny Abrams, who were justified in thinking their timing was perhaps the worst imaginable.
Yet an amazing thing happened: The night they opened people thronged the place and did so every night afterward, buoyed by very good reviews from food critics who noted the significance of the restaurant's opening. More important, many of those people who came to eat at The Harrison told the owners how proud they were of them and how the restaurant demonstrated the triumph of hope over horror.
There is no better example of the way restaurants have a restorative and invigorating effect on a neighborhood than The Harrison (see RH, Jan. 2004, p. 37). But, even in less troubling instances, the opening of a restaurant in a problem neighborhood is always cause for rejoicing. Indeed, the improvement in a neighborhood-which some call "gentrification"-usually starts with a restaurateur or two who dare to be among the first to rent space there.
Take the example of Wylie Dufresne, who opened a tiny, very personalized American bistro with the quirky name of 71 Clinton Fresh Food on NYC's decrepit Lower East Side, whose reputation as a dangerous, drug-ridden area far outweighed its promise as a place on the edge of development. But after winning rave reviews, 71 was packed every night, often with limos outside the door bringing the kind of people who started to take another look at the area.
Soon more restaurants were popping up on the Lower East Side, along with coffee houses and boutiques. Now it's one of the fastest growing residential and commercial areas in the city.
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| STABILIZER: At Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's request, Le Cirque 2000 stayed open after the 9/11 attacks. |
The same thing happened fifteen years ago in TriBeCa, when Drew Nieporent scraped together enough money to open Montrachet on a dreary stretch of West Broadway. His overnight success spurred immediate interest in a neighborhood that has since developed into one of the trendiest in the city, and, along with Nieporent's opening Nobu and TriBeCa Grill within a block of Montrachet, other top restaurateurs, including David Bouley (Danube, Bouley) and David and Karen Waltuck (Chanterelle) also brought life to the burgeoning area.
New York neighborhoods are full of such developments kicked into gear by new restaurants, from SoHo and the Meatpacking District to the recently revived Upper West Side. And around the U.S. there are similar stories: Lincoln Road on Miami Beach, Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, the South Loop and Wicker Park in Chicago, Deep Ellum in Dallas, the Ladder District in Boston, and the Warehouse District in New Orleans, where Emeril Lagasse's opening of his first namesake restaurant had an astounding effect on that neighborhood.
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| LEADER OF THE PACK: Wiley Dufresne's 71 Clinton Fresh Food and WD-50 restaurants invigorated New York's Lower East Side. |
This is a wonderful and empowering thing for a restaurant to do, for in merely opening the door and pulling away the curtains, a restaurant throws light onto a street and dissipates the darkness and those who hide in it. There is gaiety behind a restaurant's doors and the sound of people enjoying themselves, and maybe happy music. As Hemingway wrote of his favorite haunt in Venice, "Then he was pulling open the door of Harry's bar and was inside and he had made it again, and was at home."
Restaurants have always functioned as homes away from home-and to use another Hemingway phrase, "a clean, well-lighted place"for that's what they are at their best. And the very best of all seem always to have been there, like beacons in the darkness.
-John Mariani
| [Photograph] |
| PIONEERS: Karen and David Waltuck were among the first to open a fine restaurant (Chanterelle) in NYC's then-dreary TriBeCa neighborhood. |
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