Al fresco dining at Gemma — pay no mind to the diner's unattended purse on the sidewalk

On the Bowery last evening.

The Bowery now safe for celebrity smooching

Photogs spotted actress Diane Kruger and her boyfriend Pacey Witter Johusa Jackson necking and stuff on the Bowery before lunch at Gemma the other day. And now you can get on with your day.

[Photo via OK!]

Gemma's fake history

Earlier this week, Brooks at Lost City noted the "Est. 1886" underneath the sign for Standings, the sports bar on Seventh Street that has been there for, what, five years? He writes, "They even put up letters for 'Standings' that rather matched the font of the 'Est. 1886.' False advertising, I say, designed to snare rubes." (This formerly housed Brewsky's, a bar that likely wasn't around in 1886 either.)

I have the same feelings about Gemma at the Bowery Hotel.

Workers started tearing down John's Garage (below) here on the corner in the fall of 2003... which is now home to the Taavo Somer-designed Italian eatery ...

[Photo by rollingrck via Flickr]

... which is notable for introducing fine china to the sidewalks of the Bowery...



Anyway, I've never understood one thing about Gemma... up there in the corner...

...the 1954 date. The placed opened in 2007. The previous building here was demolished...

Last August, BoweryBoogie unearthed real-estate marketing materials for the Dry Dock Savings Bank, which called this corner home since the late 1870s... Dry Dock moved in the fall of 1954...

[Image courtesy of rollingrck via Flickr]

So it's possible that Gemma is paying homage to the year when the bank moved... or maybe they're just trying to give the impression to tourists that there's a lot more history behind Gemma than there really is...

Gemma still tempting us to take all their table settings and run as if we just didn't steal something

Back on Friday, we dedicated a post to how easy it would be to borrow place settings and what not from Gemma at the Bowery Hotel ... only, of course, if we were the type of people to borrow table settings from hotel eateries...

Anyway! We walked by Sunday morning, and found the tables and set up with zero adult supervision...



Also, thanks to our friend Esquared for passing along a City Room link at the Times... J. David Goodman used our post as a jumping off point for a piece on the great responsibility that comes with great weather. As he writes:

While there’s no data in the post to show that cutlery et al. are not routinely pilfered from these tables, the very fact that it’s all laid out there nonchalantly seems to prove, not that New York restaurateurs are reckless, but rather that we pedestrians are just not that larcenous as a group.

You can read the whole piece here.

Best sidewalk cafe from which to start your own restaurant

As we exclusively reported, it will be sunny and warmish-for-March out today and tomorrow. Which means many people will be taking to sidewalk cafes for eats and drinks and stuff. And there are many fine sidewalk cafes hereabouts ... and many of them make it awfully easy to borrow something from a table while walking by...as if management thinks they're operating somewhere other than a huge city....




To our continued amazement, nothing beats Gemma at the Bowery Hotel for pure potential lawlessness... Management really makes it tempting to borrow a table setting or two... At certain parts of the day, things are left unattended...



We've walked by so many times that, by now, we could have enough stuff to open our own restaurant... (patrons not included)



And we'll be charging $32 for the scrambled eggs. Not that we approve of serving $32 eggs ... or borrowing stuff from restaurants -- best to leave the stuff alone.

Related reading:
A Sign of Spring on Avenue A : L.E.S. Jewels Absconds With a Pitcher Full of Sangria From Yuca Bar's Window ... and Drinks It All Too (Neither More Nor Less)