Manhattan Is Back at the Center of the Restaurant Universe
It irritates Remm to hear The Corner Store described as a “clubstaurant,” and to have its culinary offerings—which include a plate of five-cheese pizza rolls—dismissed as a sign that the swing toward comfort food has gone too far.
“I think the people who have controlled what is considered a good restaurant are no longer in control. It goes against their brand to appreciate a big company that’s been around a long time, that’s successful, and that isn’t, like, two cousins opening a restaurant in Brooklyn,” he said. “We have 1,400 people on our waiting list, and that’s how I know we’re doing a good job.”
Walking up First Avenue, in the East Village, I came upon what at first seemed like an empty storefront. It was a Saw-like chamber, with one wall covered in mirrors, another of white-painted bricks, and a floor of scuffed, purple tiles. A purple awning out front read “SURPRISE SCOOP” and two touchscreens explained the deal: You paid $9.18 and, soon after, a small window in the back wall slid open and disembodied hands delivered a takeout container of ice cream. The scoop’s flavor was the eponymous surprise, and not subject to appeal. Before completing your order, you had to check a box acknowledging that you accepted the inherent risks. On a mirrored wall was the legend: “THEY WILL LEARN TO LIKE IT.”
On the one hand, I thought, walking on, this was one version of the perfect New York restaurant, circa 2025: low in overhead, high in potential virality, serving comfort with which only the most lactose intolerant could quarrel. On the other hand, “They will learn to like it” rang a bell so distant it might as well have been chiming on Mars.
There was a time when They Will Learn to Like It could have been the motto of every third restaurant in New York. Restaurants have always been acts of collaborative story-telling, narratives agreed upon between served and server. For a long stretch, these stories tended to be about restaurants as works of art, three-dimensional canvases on which chefs, newly elevated from the working to creative class, could paint their visions. In the wake of #MeToo and, later, Black Lives Matter, they became about restaurants as labor systems, communal hubs, and expressions of identity. It was COVID that lay bare what had of course been true all along—that above all restaurants are businesses, and precarious ones at that. In much the same way we inexplicably know what a Saturday Night Live cold open is, or can discuss the ad budgets of blockbuster movies, a diner today might be as familiar with food cost, average check size, and number of turns as they once were with sous vide techniques and heritage–breed chickens.
And so while chefs were once inclined to talk about their jobs in terms of activism, environmentalism, philosophy, science, fashion, celebrity—every possible role other than the sordid business of serving people food for money—they are now more likely to sound like Ed Szymanski, who, with his wife and partner, Patricia Howard, has methodically been putting his mark on the West Village.
