Alex Goldberger

Inventing Gotham

Mr. Meyers

Alex Goldberger

5/29/03

The New York City Diner

The scene on 72^nd and Broadway is archetypal. The best hot dogs in the city are being sold at Grays Papaya on the southeast corner. This New York staple, which originated in Frankfurt, Germany (i.e. frankfurter), is being sold by Hispanics alongside an array of exotic Caribbean fruit juices. It’s the place where bums and businessmen cross paths lunchly. Just outside the door is a middle-eastern man operating a nut stand that offers the Jewish knish and the American Coca-Cola as well. Across the street is Vinnie’s Pizza, Italian by name, product and ownership. And next door is the P&G Tavern, an old-style Irish pub that was used in the film “Donnie Brasco” as an example of an authentic Brooklyn bar.

But 72^nd St. is not the only place where one can find multi-ethnic cuisine in New York. In fact, the city is rife with such places. The diner is the best example of the concentrated melting pot in New York food. It is a uniquely New York institution, with a menu as long and mutable as the history of the city’s immigration. And of course it is justly so, as the history of the diner traces its roots back to immigration in the early 20^th Century. Looking at a menu from one of the thousands of New York diners, each reflects the ever-expanding palate of the New York restaurant-goer and at once tells the story of all the immigrant groups who have come before. So in the end, the quintessential New York food is multi-ethnic, like the quintessential New Yorker, comprised of traces of different cultures and nations all reconciled together harmoniously to yield a new center which is foreign, yet uniquely New York as it is defined so by its inherent diversity. A real New Yorker is not, for example, Italian or Jewish, but Italian and Jewish. Likewise, the true New York food is not pizza or bagels, but pizza and bagels. The City’s unique capitalistic ideals have always allowed for such diversity and relative tolerance, never asking for the color of a worker, but merely that he has two hands to work with. This tolerance of cuisine, found most notably in the diner, follows a similar mode of thinking that taste shall supercede a food’s background. (Both the work example and the food follow the same ends justify the means philosophy, except food poses gluttony as its aim rather than affluence.) But, more than a site for gluttony, the New York diner is the place where all ethnic foods meet, and is an institution whose seeds were sown over a century ago.

As millions of immigrants poured into New York, they brought a thousand exotic cuisines[i]. Those who had the economic means to start a business often chose food as their medium – case in point: there are currently over 200 restaurants in Chinatown. Food was an appealing trade because it did not require any new training and was an opportunity for immigrants to flood the market with a product in scant supply. It also required very little capital to begin a business in food, often even allowing production to take place in the home. In essence, it was an opportunity for immigrants to sell what they already had and already knew.[ii] As immigration fluctuated and push-pull factors led certain immigrants out of neighborhoods and others in, the ownership of these diners would change. The greatest influx of Italian immigration came between the years of 1899 and 1910 when 1.9 million Italians came to New York[iii] (from 1901-1910, more than 25% of all immigrants to the United States were Italians[iv]) and brought with them recipes for pizza, veal marsala and spaghetti and meatballs. At the same time, in droves, Jews were fleeing Eastern Europe and its persecution and by 1910, accounted for one fourth of the city’s population[v]. They too introduced new foods to New York. Soon pushcart vendors were offering bagels, bialys, and knishes, and later diners would feature the Jewish specialties as well. In the 1950’s and 60’s, many of the aforementioned diners opened under Greek ownership, as the city’s Greek-American population jumped by about 70,000 due to special refugee legislation in the wake of the Greek civil war[vi]. Although it was a growing sense of pluralism in the city that allowed these hundreds of Greek-owned diners to spring up and prosper, it was merely an act of good business to maintain the melting pot menu, incorporating Jewish, Italian, and other ethnic foods as well to cater to the tastes of the varying clientele. Another factor contributing to the diverse New York diner menu was the World’s Fair, hosted in New York in 1939. “The World’s Fair was not intended to be a food festival. But nearly every country that erected a pavilion seized the opportunity to show off its national cuisine.”[vii] All these factors have contributed to the thousands of diners in New York and their smorgas bord of ethnic dish options.

But the origins of the New York diner’s mutable and multi-ethnic cuisine actually began long before the diner and at a time when ethnicities rarely mixed. It was during these early stages of immigration – after the post-Erie Canal boom, yet before the turn-of-the century influx at Ellis Island – that the city began to dabble in foreign foods. Each immigrant group had its own foods which it brought, and many of them entered the field of distributing this food for reasons mentioned earlier. Early Jewish and Italian immigrant pushcart vendors in the late 19^th century sold inexpensive foods on Orchard and Grand streets[viii]. Shortly thereafter, ethnic restaurants opened elsewhere in the Lower East Side. This marked a departure from the traditional restaurants that took after English and French cuisine and combined them with seafood and game found in America. The influx of exotic foods spelled trouble for restaurants like Cafeteria on Broad St. which had traditional menu sections for “Oysters and Clams,” “Steaks, Chops and Ham” and “Teas and Coffees.”[ix] Restaurants like Rector St.’s Middle-eastern “Habib Assi,” which served tongue with sauce, stuffed eggplant, fried marrow, and cornish hen with tomatoes[x], Park Row’s Hong King Low, whose 500-seat dining hall reflected American interest in Chinese food, west 48^th St.’s Mama Leone’s, eventually a small chain of Italian restaurants noted for big portions and good prices, and Bowery St.’s Oxford’s Café, a Jewish favorite, all warmed New York up to foreign food. Thousands of these places still exist today as Delicatessens, more ethnically intact and single culture-minded. The Jewish Carnegie Deli, for example will never venture into Tex-Mex because it doesn’t have to; there is as big a constituency for delis as there is for diners. But it was the early ethnic places of the Carnegie Deli’s nature that pioneered the sale of foreign foods in New York and set the wheels in motion for the all-encompassing diner.

The first remnants of the modern New York diner may be found in Fleischmann’s Restaurant on 11^th St. and Broadway. The restaurant was created by the Jewish family to support its yeast company, which still flourishes today. And although it probably would have balked at a comparison to a diner, considering itself too high-end for such equivalence, its long and diverse menu suggests that it may well have been a forerunner to the Big Nicks and Market Diners of the last 40 years. Jewish pickles and potato pancakes, French soups, French and German cheeses, Russian caviar and Italian sausage[xi] all hint at the multi-ethnicity of the restaurant. Fast-forward 50 years and you’d likely see a gyro as well.

And if you continue on through the years, the menu expands to be bigger and bigger, more and more incorporating. One staple is the hamburger, widely understood to be ethnic and from Hamburg, Germany (thus its intermittent boycott throughout American conflict with Germany), however Wisconsin claims to be “Home of the Hamburger”[xii] as in 1885, Charlie Nagreen of Seymour, WI, supposedly sold hamburgers from his ox-drawn food stand at the Outagamie County Fair.[xiii] That same year, the Menches brothers, Frank and Charles, from Stark County, Ohio claim they created the hamburger and named it after Hamburg, New York.[xiv] Other Americans maintain that they’re the brains behind the staple sandwich, and each claim seems more ridiculous than the last – notably those coming from New Haven, CT and a man known as “Old Dave” from Austin, TX. Also present on the diner menu are other ethnic foods like the Italian Veal Parmigiana, the Greek Spani Kopita and the Jewish Reuben Sandwich. All three dishes were introduced to America upon the arrival of their respective creators. The mutability of the menu is evidenced in the increasing presence of Latin American foods since the Hispanic population in New York increased by 27 percent in the 1980’s.[xv] One food you will not see on the diner menu – and it seems odd considering its popularity in New York – is pizza. Because of the high cost and great space requirements of pizza ovens, pizza is sold separately. This has remained the case also, in part, because pizza has departed from its native Italian cousins in that it no longer is associated with the long, sit-down, communal meal that Southern Italy – and Greece, for that matter – have been known for. Pizza has evolved very much as result of its surroundings. New York has made pizza – even though it was originally a food for the poor in Naples – one of the most inexpensive foods of its size in the City. The City has also adapted it into an eat-on-the-run snack by serving it by the slice, where it can be folded easily for portability. One genre of food conspicuously absent from the diner menu is Chinese. There are two main reasons for this. The first reason is the late arrival of Chinese immigrants, who, largely because they still felt the effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act, did not begin to flood New York City in the numbers we recognize now until the Immigration Act of 1965 abolished restrictions on immigration according to race.[xvi] The second reason is the success of Chinese restaurants. Chinese restaurants and the advent of Dim Sum were an industry in and of themselves, and had no capital gain in sight were they to further assimilate onto the diner menu.[xvii] Whatever the prevailing causes for the lack of pizza and Chinese food on the diner menu, it still flourishes today with a host of other cultures (and dishes) well represented.

Niko’s Mediterranean Grill (affectionately dubbed “Big Nick’s”) on 77^th St. and Broadway epitomizes New York multi-ethnicity. Under the same Greek ownership for over 40 years, Big Nick’s has become a westside institution with its 28-page menu and 24-hour service. The menu is so diverse the diner seems ambivalent about its own orientation, calling itself a “Burger Joint and Pizza Joint.” Furthermore, even within dishes there is a call for pluralism – sure enough, there is a Mediterranean Burger, a Mexican Burger, a Prociutto Burger and, if one dares, an Ostrich Burger. The pizza varieties are just as exotic. On page six of the menu Big Nick’s offers some favorite Jewish side dishes like potato pancakes and matzoh ball soup. On page 19 is a list of Italian dinners. Almost every other page is devoted to doing service to the rest of European cuisine. And sprinkled throughout, of course, are things like gyros and souvlaki because, as the owner of rival Westside Diner said, “Every diner has to have at least a few Greek plates.” Surely, the menu does justice to Big Nick’s signs outside which promise a great range of things: “Pasta and Wine,” “Draft Beer,” “Charcoal prime steaks and ribs,” “Falafel and salads,” and “Heros and Calzones.”

But perhaps the best statement it makes about the diner as a fixture in New York is one sign from Timeout magazine. “The crowd is as eclectic as the menu.” And the menu serves to illustrate the changing waves of upper-westside inhabitants. Jewish delicatessen-style sandwiches served on Jewish rye bread help draw residents from that quarter, while the growing population of healthniks comes for the recently added gourmet and vegetarian dishes. Even a Middle East page has sprouted up since 1970 as that population in New York grows at the fourth fastest rate of all states in America[xviii]. The Greek dishes first existed on these menus because of the heroic struggle of Greece against Italy in the Second World War and the subsequent acceptability of Greek-owned businesses to identify with their countrymen abroad[xix] – in other words, the acceptance of Greek-Americans in the post-WWII era allowed Greek restaurant owners to resist assimilation without opposition and feel comfortable to include native dishes on their American diner menus. The best guess is that taste – and a continuing strong sense of nationalism among restaurant owners– has kept the dishes on menus ever since.

Truly, Big Nick’s smacks of New York attitude. From the signs to the hours to the menu, it meets every stereotypical criterion. It is an all-night Greek diner which doubles as a pizza joint, the latter catering to an essential demographic in the city where grabbing a slice is a prerequisite to calling it a night. Plus, they deliver.

This idea of Big Nick’s as the consummate New York diner raises the question of the uniqueness of the New York diner. In most of America, the diner is often associated with a middle-of-nowhere truck stop, somewhere between Omaha and Tallahassee, and yet nowhere in particular. America’s diner is a “greasy spoon” where a portly lady named Alice refills your coffee at no charge while you devour your hamburger or chili or whatever “American” food – i.e. assimilated food – is being offered as the that day’s special. This “pluralistically American cuisine”[xx] is associated with all non-urban and non-New York diners that proliferated in part as a product of the Interstate Highway system of the 1950’s. Targets for these post-WWII diners were “rapidly growing blue-collar communities that contained a high proportion of high-income wage earners.”[xxi] But these diners are almost antitheses of New York’s. In a contrived attempt to foster an “American” culture, traditional diners shun ethnicity. Those of New York embrace it.

To that effect, the Market Diner on 43^rd St. and 11^th Avenue is in some ways a fish out of water in New York. The exterior is conspicuously void of New York flavor. The diner is shaped in the tacky railroad dining car style (perhaps making it anachronistic as well) and a mini, diner-only parking lot obtrudes upon its sidewalk – the familiar sidewalk New York pedestrians rely on like the hydrophobic to the shore. However, the inside of the diner tells a different tale. The walls are covered with posters of New York landmarks like “Lunchtime atop a skyscraper, 1932,” “Manhattan Bridge, 1905” and “Customs House, 1899.” There is a magazine article on the wall with a photo of the 20-year Market Diner staple, short-order waitress, Reggie Grant, the lady who charmingly said, “This is a seafood place – you see the food, you eat it.”[xxii] The menu cover too seems unabashed in its attempt to win over New Yorkers. On it there is a picture of Lady Liberty munching on a hamburger below the line, “New York’s Famous Market Diner.” Even the place mats have landmark maps of Manhattan on them. Despite their patronizing presentation of sentiment, the place mats truly do give one the sense of the Market Diner as a New York institution.

Open the menu and the alfresco first impression is forgotten. As long and extensive and eclectic and reasonably priced as any, the menu offers all of the world’s Greatest Hits – spaghetti and meatballs, spinach pie with Greek salad, bagel with lox and cream-cheese, and the “Irish Breakfast,” to name a few. There are also signs of the change of ownership that has occurred. The Jewish Zellin family which founded the diner has given way to a Greek one, and although challah remains as the bread of choice, there is a distinctly Greek feel partly a result of the hung painting of the Greek Independence Parade on Fifth Ave. and the hung photo of the Acropolis in Athens. One recent addition to the menu is the “Grilled Chicken Sensations” section which subtly but surely mimics the Taco Bell menu in an attempt to catch on to the burgeoning Tex-Mex fast-food craze. But regardless of which ethnicity imposes its ambience above the others, the Market Diner, in its multi-cultural cuisine and paraphernalia, provides a vital sense of mutability in the New York diner, one of the distinguishing traits of all such eateries.

It is telling that Seinfeld, a show so determined to be a facsimile of life in New York, places as many of its scenes in a diner as anywhere else. The coffee shop, “Monk’s,” purportedly in the West 80’s, is actually “Tom’s Restaurant” at 2880 Broadway and 112^th St. It is the meeting place for the gang and often the site of many of their dates and other encounters. Whether it be for breakfast, lunch or dinner, bagels, salad or coffee, the Greek-owned diner is at the very heart of the Upper Westside neighborhood and represents the natural ebb and flow of the city, its commerce and its people. And the very fact that Seinfeld opted to make a diner, a stereotypically accurate diner, so central to its theme – the theme of city life – speaks volumes to the significance of the diner in New York.

But even more than its pop culture resumé, the diner serves as an apt metaphor for New York City immigration. It is tolerant of all ethnicities and utilizes the different ethnic foods, like the city used immigrant workers, as indistinguishable means for an aim, each hedonistic– to make money or eat well. All elements of the diner menu coexist with great diversity and great harmony in order to provide this suitable metaphor for immigration in New York City.

Finally, this coexistence must be further characterized, defined as either “melting pot” or “tossed salad,” where the former implies assimilation and the latter pluralism. When something ethnic becomes institutionalized by a non-ethnic entity, it has become assimilated, and that is the case with the food of the New York City diner. Spaghetti and meatballs and matzoh ball soup were once considered more exotic when they were first introduced a century ago, before the diner (our case’s “non-ethnic entity”) standardized them as American favorites, even if not fully American – yet. But as time goes on, assimilation inevitably occurs more and more. Even if immigrants simultaneously shift the center toward a certain ethnicity, the ethnic properties of an immigrant group, over time, gradually diminish.

Now, if we examine our final case study, the new Zeytuna Market, on 59 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan, we see the course of this gradual assimilation of ethnic foods. Zeytuna is a 21^st Century manifestation of the New York City diner, combining a world menu of typical New York City diner foods with newer, more trendy genres like Fusion and Sushi. (It also doubles – or triples, as the case may be – as a gourmet grocery store and gift shop). The shift in the New York City diner culture, or rather, the representation of ethnic food, is that while the menu stays somewhat similar, the medium in which its items are consumed changes. It is a wide-open market with sit-down sections, but is certainly a departure from the long, communal, seated meals of 19^th and 20^th Century Southern Europe. The shift reflects the change in the new culture of New York and the neighborhood in which it’s situated in Lower Manhattan. It is a gentrification of ethnic food as commodified by the 21^st Century yuppie, but it’s really just a new-age diner.