On a warm August evening in 2020, Bob and I sat at a table on the uneven sidewalk outside Union Square Cafe (USC) for the first time since the pandemic began, watching the patchwork staff somehow making it work. USC’s new Chef Lena Ciardullo was back in her kitchen, but so was Chef Tom Allen from the Modern, who was serving as her sous chef until whenever his restaurant would reopen. Denez Moss, who’d left Manhatta to become the new general manager at USC only a month before lockdown, was pouring drinks, and Halle Murcek, now Guest Experience Manager for the entire restaurant group, was waiting tables. Together they managed just about everything at the front of the house (or should I say out in front of the house) with the skeleton crew they’d assembled.
They all looked grateful to be back, and very happy to have us back. They also looked a little terrified. Everything from running a restaurant on empty to dodging a still very deadly virus was sitting on their shoulders, apparent maybe only to regulars like us because we knew them. We’ve been dining at USC, the Bar at the Modern, Gramercy Tavern, Maialino, et al for decades, and have always taken the time to get to know the staff—the hospitality experts, our hosts, and our friends. Denez had come to know us as regulars in his first month. We follow Halle’s Instagram. Megan Sullivan, now at Ci Siamo, had introduced us to Chef Tom in the Modern’s Bar room literally the Saturday in March 2020 before everything closed, and with only that previous introduction, he came out from the USC kitchen that evening in August to welcome us back and to chat for a moment.
Of course they pulled it off that evening. Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) founder Danny Meyer had been leading the conversation in the media about restaurant survival since March, and we trusted that his company wouldn’t reopen a venue during the pandemic without some assurance that they would succeed. And they did and the assembled staff were all stars.
This, nevertheless, was pioneer dining. We weren’t eating in the well crafted, climate controlled dining shed that would go up at the curb for the following summer. The menu was limited and as ephemeral as the paper it was printed on. The maitre’d stand had been dragged out onto the sidewalk in front of the restaurant entrance, supplied with only a thermometer gun and a bottle of hand sanitizer. And inside, off limits to customers, the tables and chairs were pushed to the walls behind makeshift serving stations running from the kitchen to the door to the street.
It didn’t matter, though. There was an air of survivors popping open an aged bottle found in the wreckage, forgetting for a moment the question of how long we would be stranded. It was a shot of joy in that rickety anxious moment the City found itself in that first summer, pre-vaccine, pre-elections, pre-return of the businesses and residents who had fled the early months. That first evening back to USC was a taste of survival and hope, despite all uncertainty.
These and other restaurants saved New York City for us in the spring and summer of 2020. Within weeks of the start of lockdown, several excellent restaurants started providing takeout, including a few that had never offered takeout before. Online order menus from Union Square Cafe, Eataly, La Pacora Bianca, Hearth, Cafeteria, Toloache and others became our go-tos, replacing the buffalo wings and moo shu pork of pre-pandemic speeddials. Those of us who stayed through the lockdown banged pots and hooted at our windows for the frontline workers each evening at 7 p.m., and then waited like good New Yorkers for our takeout to arrive—only it was coming from places with award-winning chefs that we were missing terribly and feared for their survival. They made nights in our lockdown cells worth setting the table for, even snapping Instagram pictures of. They helped turn the eight-by-eight cube in which we’d Zoomed and daycared all day, back into a home.
When summer came the restaurants took over the abandoned streets, setting tables on angled pavement, stringing lights from awnings to flower boxes made from packing crates—a colorful parade catching the warm breeze down the Avenue, a taste of normalcy from what was absolutely not normal. The risks restaurants were taking for our sake were enormous and ranged from financial, to health and safety, to quality control and reputation. They made due with fewer staff, inconsistent supply chain, and smaller seatings per night. They measured their sidewalks in six-foot increments and scrubbed down every table, even if someone sat there for two minutes and left without ordering. But they did so to provide jobs to employees, food to weary residents, and most of all life to a City declared dead by outsiders.
The Modern was one of the last of the USHG restaurants to reopen, and on our first visit back Chef Tom greeted us with a big hug and an embarrassingly generous shaving of truffle. It was then, we discovered that the past months of their service to New York had been symbiotic, that our faithful patronage had meant as much to them as they had to us. Two years later, important questions arise about regulating the sidewalk sheds and outdoor dining, and while I hope we can take the opportunity to expand what was available before the pandemic, I also hope we can do it more graciously and cleanly, keeping in mind the quality of life of residents who live above. But of the many things good and bad that I will remember of that first year of the pandemic, I will remember the restaurants for the care they served up to a struggling city, and the way it made us feel at home. And I will continue to raise a glass and bang a pot now and then in their honor.
Cover Photo: Mussels, a dry white, and Union Square Cafe’s August 21, 2020 menu.
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