Eli Zabar, the longtime king of a Manhattan food and delicatessen empire, teamed up with the online newsletter platform Substack on Tuesday night to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his Upper East Side cafe E.A.T.
As a jazz trio played, servers moved across the checkered floor carrying trays of mini brioche egg salad sandwiches and chopped liver on raisin nut bread. The place filled with writers who specialize in all kinds of topics, from politics to sex, from food to finance.
Mr. Zabar, 81, snatched an egg salad sandwich from a moving tray and tasted it for quality control. He explained that he had decided to throw the party with Substack as a throwback to the cafe’s early days, long before a turkey club at E.A.T. cost $32, when it served as a canteen to the neighborhood’s creative crowd.
“Back then, this area of the Upper East Side was an underdeveloped wasteland,” Mr. Zabar said. “My early customers were writers, artists and gallerists. People like Richard Avedon, Wayne Thiebaud, Leo Castelli and Nora Ephron.”
“William Shawn and Lillian Ross, they were here every afternoon,” he said, referring to the fabled former editor of The New Yorker and one of the magazine’s star writers. “They’d sit in a corner talking for hours. I called them Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”
“This crowd here tonight,” he continued, “they remind me of the same people I had back when I started.”
Among the guests were the election forecaster Nate Silver, the style writer Leandra Medine Cohen, the investigative journalist Vicky Ward and the chef Clare de Boer. There was also a bounty of politics writers, including David Nir, Ross Barkan and Michael C. Moynihan.
“Lots of these writers are new names to me,” admitted Mr. Zabar, whose gourmet businesses include the restaurant Eli’s Table and the grocery store Eli’s Market. “But ever since it was brought to my attention, all I hear now is ‘Substack, Substack, Substack.’”
While sipping wine and craft beer, some of the writers reflected on how last week’s election of Donald J. Trump has affected their newsletters. Noah Kumin, the editor of the Substack journal Mars Review of Books, said he had recently written “an anti-alarmist argument.”
“My belief is that no matter your political beliefs, you should be happy right now,” Mr. Kumin said. “Trump is going to do exactly what he did last time, which in reality was very little in my opinion. I argue that if you’re left wing, you’ve got nothing to fear, and that if you’re right wing, you can say to yourself that in 40 years, maybe you’ll finally get Barron Trump as your philosopher king.”
Laura Bassett, a former editor in chief of Jezebel who writes the Substack newsletter Nightcap, posted an opinion piece on Tuesday that was critical of the president-elect’s cabinet picks. “His voters thought they were voting for an anti-establishment figure,” she said. “But instead they’ve been hoodwinked, and they’re going to get everything they voted against.”
Across the room, two journalists who focus on sex and culture, Magdalene J. Taylor and Camille Sojit Pejcha, were deep in conversation.
“I definitely have some drafts right now where I’m trying to figure out what’s happened with sex in regards to the political sphere since the election,” said Ms. Taylor, who writes the newsletter Many Such Cases. “Especially the post-election interest in the 4B movement, which involves women withholding sex.”
Ms. Pejcha, whose Substack is called Pleasure-Seeking, had just published a piece that day arguing that the 4B movement, which first emerged in South Korea, was not necessarily empowering to women.
“My concern is it gives the sense of collective action and political organization,” Ms. Pejcha said, “but I worry that this feeling of solidarity also makes people less motivated to do the real political organizing now needed to improve our predicament.”
As the night waned, the critic Natasha Stagg was hanging out beside E.A.T.’s to-go aisle, which offered pints of matzo ball soup and whitefish salad sandwiches.
Ms. Stagg, the author of the newsletter Selling Out, said that she had not written about the election and didn’t plan to. As she took in the scene, she considered Mr. Zabar’s effort to recreate a bygone Manhattan literary era with Substack’s help.
“It does feel like everyone now is trying to recreate things that can’t be recreated,” Ms. Stagg said. “And it feels like everybody is a writer now. But the idea of trying to recreate a salon for writers and intellectuals, I don’t think it can really work.”
“Tonight’s party is also all about networking,” she said. “That’s not what Susan Sontag or The Paris Review were about. They did not care about how many followers they had.”
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