Times Union South of Houston
On Candy Flipping Danny Meyer and Sam Delany
Let me start by saying I haven’t read Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential yet. I know I have to, but because I’ve read and watched almost everything else he did, I’ve become lazy about catching up on how he broke out as a writer. So…
I recently read and re-read two books, which renewed my curiosity about a third book. Two were written by restaurateurs and the third was by Samuel R. Delany. I picked up Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table because I remember really enjoying the editorial he wrote for the NYTimes (or was it the New Yorker?). It was a primer on hospitality and management practices, rules like “if their plate is more than half full, they didn’t like the food and you don’t need to ask them.” I got the book because thought I’d benefit from brushing up on my own management and hospitality skills, as my day job winds up for a year of hosting two major events.
Simultaneously, I wanted to ground myself back in queer history while preparing for two college visits I have approaching. And college being that utopia of expansive genders and sexualities, of course I’d re-read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany.
I don’t know if we still refer to the act of boosting one chemical drug reaction with the consumption of a second competing drug as “candy flipping” — and speaking of “college,” that’s surely where and when I learned the high efficacy of LSD followed by smoking a blunt—but reading Danny Meyer and Sam Delany at the same time had the same profound effect of one reaction oxidizing the other, like foam in a Diet Coke catalyzed by a Mentos, one thing ejaculating, and the other, disappearing into the synthetic and saccharine atmosphere of conception.
For the unread: Setting the Table is about Danny Meyer’s journey to becoming a foremost restaurateur, business manager and CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group whose flagship operation was, at least at the time of publication, Union Square Café. The book was published in 2006. In other words, he had not had a chance to talk about his now publicly traded restaurant company that Americans are much more familiar with—Shake Shack. Setting the Table begins with his upbringing in St. Louis Missouri. Parents and close family members from whom he arguably inherits a love of food, music, and culture, as well as formidable business acumen. He moves to New York as a kind of travel agent with tons of anecdotal wisdom about Rome and Paris, specifically. Capitals of cuisine. But the majority of the book is about the Union Square and Madison Square Park neighborhoods of New York City from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Readers here are probably more familiar with Times Square Red Times Square Blue. The namesake is the obvious milieu of that book, published in 1999. It is mostly about Time Square porn theaters, johns, hookers, consumers of sex media, and direct intercourse. And in reading these two books as reflections on New York neighborhoods and changing communities, the fact that there are two men with first person accounts of business sectors, telling a story taking place in more or less the same time frame, and that those accounts tell such starkly different stories while also somehow sharing many conceits of self-discovery and change in a community, is astonishing.
Meyer writes with a patrician naiveté about New York’s hard knocks and the harder work ethos of manifest Americans. Delany’s account of the transmogrification of Times Square on the other hand, is denuded of hope, is clinical at times, bordering on what I’d cheekily describe as anthropological, and because it is dry in such a way as to seem academic, his personalization of the truth hits like thunder. Meyer’s soap opera has a soundtrack. Delany’s tragedy has sound effects.
I don’t pretend one is more important than the other. Meyer’s wisdom could be exceptional to those who follow in similar footpaths of leadership and complex project management, and Delany’s lived experience is critical, should be requisite, to the telling of any history of a neighborhood. But Meyer’s Union Square, his relationship to his team, his conflicts with the media (and the bygone status of today’s service journalism) are all metaphors. An light perversion of aggregate cliches. Statements like “I have gay friends” and “the staff, not the client, is number 1” truisms we’re all familiar with now, but were once ironic.
If metaphors abide, Delany’s Times Square is Atlantis. The tales of “how to survive without trying,” mean this culture has failed to thrive, and that that may be the more important story for the reader.
The third book I have to harken to is Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything—I’ve already talked about this somewhere else so I won’t belabor—but I think of it because of the synthesis of moods alongside Delany’s Times Square and Meyer’s Union Square. McNally is a bisexual bus boy turned manager turned restaurateur of Balthazar. Balthazar is the Tower of Babel.
Meyer and McNally ultimately read to the public as “successful” because they are real estate mavens, and it is any wonder SoHo and Union Square have positioned themselves by class in a way Times Square simply cannot. Even with the m&m store in the shadow of the Renzo Piano New York Times building, Times Square has continued to make itself much more inclusive than these hotbeds of fine food. What’s funny about these juxtapositions is also the gayness of it, and by gay I mean homosexual penetrative sexual gayness. I’d say queer but that leaves the option of penile intercourse left ambiguous. Who is left to take it up theirs is a question I will keep asking myself when I think about this city.
I <3 New York. Its neighborhoods and their stories are palimpsests. Where is the crossover, where is the crossdress, and where is the switch?
