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Here, once again, is
a restaurant at which I didn't eat a thing. I just kind of sat back
with a beer and soaked in the gay. It's not as if I'm a burly mountain
man or anything, but the clientele at this Chelsea eatery did kind
of have me feeling like a big frat jerk. Perhaps that's why they banished
us to the basement space, and only sent a server down accidentally
at one point to most likely retrieve a mop or something from the utility
closet. The booth we sat in could only be likened to the weird half-shell
tilt-a-whirl ride that one finds at like church carnivals. It's probably
a false memory, but the all-white modern Ikea look of the place just
screamed theme bar to me. And what's a better theme than a space-aged
carnival? I suppose that thematically the food is, well, all about
the cafeteria. Literally serving pumped up, high quality versions
of junk you'd find in your average school cafeteria (mac 'n cheese,
meatloaf, etc.), it allows trendoid Manhattanites to live like the
rest of us schnooks--or at least pretend to. It's kind of like ordering
that PBR at the bar that's paying $15,000 a month in rent and pretending
you're in a shanty shack in Alabama. Three cheers for kitsch. My beer
tasted like beer, and eventually people filtered downstairs to join
us, but there was a weird homogeny I saw down there that was not repeated
upstairs when I ran up to use the restaurant. While we were a relatively
somber group, the main floor was a little more, uh, happy. Maybe it
was the lack of natural light. Maybe it was just the feeling of being
a pariah. All I know is that my outlook drastically improved when,
after one beer, I left to go get a nice greasy burger down the street
at Peter McManus. [MF]
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