At Rao’s
Dear Diary:
I have been reading about Rao’s, at the corner of Pleasant Avenue and East 114th Street, for years. It is notoriously hard to get a table there, but it was on my bucket list. One day, I decided to try.
Arriving at the bright-red storefront at the bottom of a nondescript apartment building, I encountered what appeared to be a half-dozen regulars in suits mingling at the bar.
I took a seat on one of the stools.
“What do you want?” the bartender asked gruffly.
“Manhattan, please,” I replied, a slight trepidation in my voice.
He made the drink and put it in front of me.
“Can I eat dinner at the bar?” I asked.
“No,” he barked. “And the wait list is 10 years.”
The drink was beyond stiff, all the better to savor while stretching out the evening.
The small number of tables were soon packed with beefy types and laden with hefty dishes of pasta. Raucous laughter filled the room.
Two women in their early 20s sat next to me at the bar, and we began to talk. They lived in the neighborhood. We chatted for the better part of an hour about affordable housing, social causes and Spanish Harlem.
Suddenly, the women got up and wished me a good night. I turned and saw an older man gesturing them toward his table.
I finished my drink, paid the check and left. Ravenously hungry, I devoured a sack of White Castle sliders while walking the mile home.
— Kayvan Gabbay
Footloose
Dear Diary:
I was waiting for the 6 train to take me home from work when I noticed a single shoe on the platform right where the subway doors open.
I considered it cautiously. Had a fight occurred, causing someone to lose a shoe? Had it fallen out of someone’s gym bag? Was it a trap?
A train pulled in. As soon as the door opened, a man standing on one foot with only a sock on the other reached out.
“My sneaker!” he exclaimed.
— Sarah Krauss
Midtown Viking
Dear Diary:
I was wandering around Midtown Manhattan with a friend on a heavy February afternoon in the early 1970s. We were in our late teens and had made an ill-advised move to New York from Southern California.
We were broke but smitten with the city. Whenever we weren’t looking for jobs, we were out exploring the streets.
Turning a corner somewhere in the 50s, we encountered a towering figure who appeared as if from out of this mist — a Viking by all outward appearances, silent and unmoving.
As we approached him, it became clear that this looming apparition was actually a man wearing a costume of layered and quilted leather and fabric swatches. A pointed helmet sat low over his eyes. At his side, he carried a long staff.
Someone was talking at him — jabbering, as I recall — but this giant gave no indication that he was listening.
“Are you a prophet?” my friend Tim asked.
The man turned toward us slowly and tilted his head down.
“No,” he said. “I am a total loss.”
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized we had had an audience with Moondog, the blind musician and composer.
Soon after that, the city spanked us and sent us home. New York is not a place to indulge the unworthy. But neither is it stingy with its charms.
— Grant Loud
Negotiations
Dear Diary:
It was 1997, and I was one of six graduate students in Columbia University’s theater producing program. One day, we shuffled into Gerald Schoenfeld’s ornate office above Shubert Alley.
Schoenfeld was the chairman of the Shubert Organization, probably the most powerful man on Broadway and, somehow, our professor.
He burst into the room, settled behind his desk and stared us all down.
Today, he said, I’m going to teach you how to negotiate a lead actor contract. Here’s how we’re going to do it: I’m going to call Patrick Stewart on the speakerphone. You six are going to sit there, take notes and not make a sound. Got it?
We nodded. He dialed. Stewart answered.
For the next hour, we sat perfectly still while two legends worked through the terms of Stewart appearing in “The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.”
Our pens moved furiously across our notebooks as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard’s voice filled the room. Not one of us made a sound. I don’t even think we breathed.
— Matt Olin
Clam Chowder
Dear Diary:
It was lunchtime circa 1982 on upper Broadway. I stopped into a Chock full o’Nuts to get a bite to eat.
Perusing the menu, I saw they had clam chowder. I asked the server whether it was Manhattan- or New England-style.
“I think it’s from the Bronx,” he replied.
I ordered a bowl of chicken noodle.
— Todd Mathews
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Illustrations by Agnes Lee
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