Category: pandemic

2020 hindsight: how restaurants saved new york

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

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.

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my new york manifesto

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

I wrote the following comment on a friend’s LinkedIn post earlier this morning and then spent the rest of the day on the streets of my City:

I came to New York in 1989, met my husband within two weeks of both of us arriving for art school, and have called this amazing City home ever since — to the point that I cannot imagine living anywhere other than this tiny cluster of islands. The brief time we lived away from the City confirmed that, and we got ourselves right back here as quickly as we could.

I’ve watched the City change so much over the past 31 years, sometimes for the good, sometimes not. Lived here through 9/11, hurricanes and nor’easters, blackouts, financial slumps, service strikes, and now a pandemic, and watched a resilient community return time and again.

The real estate developers will tell you glass towers and shopping malls full of franchised boutiques are what make NYC better and better. But, to me those are what dumb it down, homogenize it, and make it too much like everywhere else in our strip-mall-paved world. And those glass towers and malls are most failing to do anything for the City through this pandemic.

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