It wasn't open when I went by, but all the paper was down and everything looked ready for business. The signs inside say it's an organic, gourmet, dairy-free ice cream place. It looks like every other boring fro-yo joint, with space-age white stools and blonde wood. Very swedish -- like Ikea.
Bari Equipment is a family-owned business with roots that go back generations. The company was started by my grandfather when he came over from Italy more than 75 years ago. Located in New York’s fabled Bowery District, the business is still in the very same neighborhood. It has also remained in the family. Through the years, my father, uncles, and I – along with our amazing staff – have all upheld the traditions of excellence started way back when.
Of course, it’s tradition that sets us apart. Our pizza ovens, crafted with an eye for detail and quality, have withstood the test of time. In fact, the very same ovens purchased half a century ago can still be found in pizzerias across NYC and beyond!
Ciao!
Jeanie
Watching all of these developments carefully is the family that owns Bari Restaurant and Pizzeria Equipment, a business that takes up 10 storefronts at Prince Street and the Bowery. As owners of one of the district's oldest shops, the Baris seem to know what's coming.
"I'm trying to envision it five, ten years from now," said Anton Bari as he sat on one of the restaurant chairs offered for sale in the Bari Gallery, one of the family's many enterprises. "I don't see the restaurant suppliers. I don't know if the reputation will still be here."
Mr. Bari, his brothers Mike and Nick and a cousin also named Nick run a company established in the 1940's by their grandfather, Nicola Bari, a radio repairman and purveyor of cheese graters. Besides selling an encyclopedic variety of restaurant supplies, the Baris manufacture pizza ovens and refrigeration units that are used in kitchens from Brooklyn to Russia.
On occasion, the Bari brothers are greeted by acquaintances who encourage them to turn their shops into trendy bars. But unlike many other suppliers on the Bowery, the Baris don't rent their stores -- they own them. They can sit back and watch the changes on the street without the pressure of a landlord or a lease.
Across from the Baris' main showroom at 240 Bowery, the family owns another building, but this one is not all mixers and ovens. Through a set of red doors marked "No Loitering" and up the stairs, an entirely different Bowery staple is still in operation.
"I can't stand the stink in here," said Mike Bari, squinting his eyes and turning toward the exit. He was standing in the hallway of the Sunshine Hotel, an S.R.O. above one of the Baris' warehouse units that the family inherited when it bought the building 15 years ago.
Once home to 200 residents, the hotel now houses just 40, with each man paying (or not paying) about $10 a day for the privilege of inhabiting one of its cell-like rooms. In the lobby, where a clerk collects rent and a painting of the main characters from "The Sopranos" hangs on the wall, the Baris greet nearly every resident with a warm familiarity.
"We're not looking to throw anybody out," said Anton Bari, when asked why he doesn't simply convert the Sunshine into $4,000-a-month apartments. "If they had to leave here, they'd be lost."
THE WALTERS FAMILY
Walters is your place for a peace of mind (well, sometimes you get a piece of our mind). The ambiance will remind you of a place long forgotten or finally found (they don't make 'em like they used to).
You see, you may walk into Walter's Bar a stranger, but you'll leave a regular. Walter's is like a home and the people are like family to anyone that walks in.
Okay, enough politeness, WE ARE A PLACE TO GET DRUNK!!!.
Having heard once too often that his outfit is kind of lame, Bobby (Justin Rice), a useless East Village hipster, tucks into the American Apparel store on Houston Street and picks out a baby blue T-shirt with some help from Charlotte (Charlotte Af Geijerstam), a failed actress in hot pants and leg warmers. Later they meet for a drink and commiserate about their boring, complacent, privileged lives.
“The old city,” Bobby muses, “like the one that I dreamed about, the one from the movies. It’s not there anymore. Maybe we’re both just maladjusted, you know, like we’re living in the past.”
And thus, for one brief moment, does “Let Them Chirp Awhile” acknowledge the source of its painfully unsympathetic take on postcollegiate New Yorkers who think themselves artists but don’t have an original thought in their heads.
Written and directed by Jonathan Blitstein, the movie really does live in an imaginary past, the one immortalized in classic Woody Allen films. How else to explain why Bobby and his circle of friends name-drop Chekhov, pontificate on Bergman, crack tired jokes about Los Angeles and spend all their time either failing at relationships or kvetching about their inadequacies while whimsical jazz coos on the soundtrack?
This sort of thing was indulgent enough the first time around; transplanted to the mumblecore milieu, it’s intolerable.
A new Citigroup scandal is engulfing Robert Rubin and his former disciple Chuck Prince for their roles in an alleged Ponzi-style scheme that's now choking world banking.
In the East Village, local cuisine is quickly whittling down to a single food: pig. With new pork-bun outlets and ramen shops, porchetta and hot dog specialists, plus bacon peanut brittle as a local bar snack (at The Redhead), the area is all bellied up.(New York Times)
Hey everyone, we'll be closed until December 3rd due to some renovations we are doing. As you know, or in case you didn't, we feature Southwestern cuisine on our menu, and so we are taking a little time to make our place a little more southwestern. Same excellent beer, sangria, margaritas and fine tequila. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Hop Devil Grill.
Located on the corner of Avenue A and East 7th up until its demise in 1984, A7 was — and still is — a place of legend. Agnostic Front, Heart Attack, the Beastie Boys, Urban Waste, the Abused, the Misguided, and countless others regaled the moshing masses at this shoebox-sized spot long before CBGB ever accepted them. And now that the entire Lower East Side is a fuckin' romper room, it's time for a reunion.
Co-promoter Bryan Swirsky considers Saturday night's event (subtitled "One Big Crowd," after an early NYHC compilation) both a celebration and a tribute to the "action-first" style prominent in the East Village underground at the time. "These weren't soft-handed kids from Iowa putting on a show in the most horrible neighborhood in Brooklyn to call it 'authentic,' " he says. "These were runaways involved in bad activity mixing with hardcore punks who were also rubbing elbows with curious suburban kids coming in for the shows. There was no irony dripping from the fangs of cultural vampires. There was no time to be a culture vampire back then. You just did it."
