“I came because of the Skee-Ball,” said Ashley Bonnell, 28, on a recent Saturday night, as she sipped a gin gimlet alongside the white subway-style tiles of the smaller bar. “My friends have been calling me to join them in the East Village, but I told them I’m hanging out in my hood.”
From the next stool, her friend Joachim Boyle, 28, who was also drinking a gimlet, concurred. “You don’t know how excited I am to be out of the Village and live here.”
Mr. Boyle pondered whether old-timers would dismiss them as invading hipsters.
“I’m not a hipster,” Ms. Bonnell, a physical therapist, insisted.
“Yes, you are,” Mr. Boyle said, waving toward her long cardigan, red scarf and chunky boots. He tugged on his subtly sheened blue button-down. “So am I.”
The address was a sleazily ungentrified street of bins and boarded-up tailors’ shops on the Lower East Side. If La Esquina looked like the place where people get shot on NYPD Blue, this was where they’d dump the body. By the cracked plastic bell push was a dirty sign: “Alterations”. Not promising — but a buzz, a word on the intercom, and we were in.
It took a while for our eyes to adjust to the light. About 10 minutes, in fact. You can tell how cool a place is by the degree of gloom, and if Milk & Honey were any cooler, you’d have to order your drinks in Braille.
In fact, there’s no list. You tell the waitress what mood you’re in and the barman rustles up what he deems appropriate. He sent me a cherry daiquiri. I hate cherries. As Dexter Gordon sax tunes floated lazily in the darkness, we peered at the people around us. From what we could see, they were all very beautiful, which was nice, and appeared to know it, which wasn’t.
“So, here we are,” I said to Jaqui. “This is the coolest place in New York. What do you think?”
She sipped her eggy concoction thoughtfully. “It’s a good bar, and I like the fact we got in,” she said. “But can we go and be tourists now?”
She had a point. Digging into Gotham’s hidden underbelly was fun, but there’s a limit to how cool you really need to be.
“Up the Empire State tomorrow, then a carriage through Central Park?”
“I’ll drink to that,” Jaqui said.
Punk is not dead, though these days on the Bowery it’s a whole lot quieter. Silent, even.
Every week, dozens of people, usually young and artfully scruffy, climb three creaky flights of stairs off this formerly gritty stretch of downtown Manhattan, a block from where CBGB, the hallowed hall of punk, once stood. Often shrouded in hoodies, inked with tattoos and studded with piercings, they look primed for a serious rock show, and perhaps a few related vices. But in a softly lighted loft, in earshot of the traffic’s roar, they instead find a spot on the floor, close their eyes and take long, deep breaths.
Called Dharma Punx, the gathering is part of a nationwide Buddhism-based meditation network that is part Sid Vicious and part Dalai Lama.
Mr. Korda freely uses four-letter words and makes frequent references to his favorite bands, like the Suicidal Tendencies or the Cro-Mags, a seminal hard-core group. Dharma Punx regulars like the fusion of grit and Zen, and they appreciate that there is no preaching, no proselytizing, no chanting and no mention of dogma.
As more and more Slavs move out of the East Village, their presence is being felt less and less. Two major landmarks recently disappeared: Leshko's and Kiev.
Of course, both are still standing. It's just that both have been renovated, reimagined and reopened, losing much (if not all) of their Ukrainian flavor along the way.
First to go was Leshko's (111 Avenue A at 7th Street), which opened in 1957. New owners closed down the old-school favorite in 1999 and turned it into something that ended up in an issue of Wallpaper* not long after. The menu lost almost all of its Slavic dishes, with the exception of pierogies. But they were reworked almost beyond recognition - mushroom and leek pierogies?
For decades, Leshko's has held down a corner near Tompkins Square Park in what was once called the Pirogi Belt, in deference to the neighborhood's Slavic population. Aside from providing early-morning and late-night sustenance to the local clubbing crowd, Leshko's served Ukrainian staples like cabbage soup, boiled beef and the occasional special of jellied pigs' feet.
The Leshko family sold the restaurant in the 1970's, though, and it began to decline, becoming grungier and less and less inviting. Its site, at Avenue A and Seventh Street, is heavily trafficked, and one can easily imagine the new owners selling out to, say, the Gap or Starbucks, one further step in homogenizing the East Village. The owners did, in fact, want to sell the restaurant, but the Leshko family still owned the building, and any new tenant required its approval. The family preferred to maintain the site as a restaurant.
Meanwhile, two business partners who wanted to open a restaurant, Robert Pontarelli and Stephen Heighton, finding that Leshko's was for sale, decided to pursue it. They met with Jerry Leshko, a son of the original owners, who is an art history professor at Smith College, and hit it off. Leshko's was theirs.
First came a thorough renovation. The crumbling coffee shop interior was replaced by handsome hearthstone columns, a dark oak floor, Danish modern lamps and beige-and-white Saarinen chairs offset by burgundy banquettes and a black Lucite bar. The winning look is part Frank Lloyd Wright and part Dick Van Dyke Show.
Uhhhh, as someone who has attended and worked shows there. Where are they planning on setting up operations?
does anybody actually think about eating when they got to a show there?
Or, perhaps this will be one of "lifestyle marketing" attempts at sucking off what money is left with the music buying public. $7 budweiser and a $15 puck personal pan cardboard pizza. AWESOME!!!! maybe MOMOFUCKO can open a flavored milk stand? this AINT rock n'roll.
"There are new signs up on the restaurant going in at the NW corner of 12th Street and Avenue A indicating that the restaurant will be called OST Cafe." Another tipster tells us this space is "going to be an eastern european style coffeehouse. Kind of like Cafe Sabarsky meets Pravda."
I actually met the owners while they were getting signatures for wine, or something like that. They were nice, though I am not sure they will succeed. They are going to have a doggy window, since they are dog owners and dogs aren't allowed in cafes in this country. Their rent is reasonable at first, especially for the space, but their increases are going to be insane. If they do really well, they might survive. But it does seem like those corners are cursed!
