Flash in the Pan

Life and Death of an American Restaurant

David Blum

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781476735009
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Finally back in print, Flash in the Pan is the original—and still the best—reportage on the life and death of an American restaurant, a ground level view of every phase of its life. From the early, hope filled planning stages to the last, humiliating moments, it's a tragi-comic epic of hubris and human folly. Painfully hilarious and even more painfully true. This is a welcome reissue of a restaurant classic that should be read by every culinary and food service student in America and sit comfortably next to Orwell's Down and Out on every shelf."
—Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential In 1990, journalist David Blum got backstage access to the life and death of The Falls, a downtown Manhattan restaurant that captured the 1980s in all its extravagant excess. Its owners—a tanned, Brahmin barkeep and a handsome Irish firefighter from Queens—partnered with movie star pal Matt Dillon to cater to New York's most glamorous models, actors, and writers. Flash in the Pan captured in hilarious detail the quick decline and disastrous fall of The Falls, and has become a classic cautionary tale for anyone who might harbor the fantasy of opening a restaurant. David Blum is the editor of Kindle Singles, the storefront for high quality longform writing on Kindle. He was previously the editor in chief of The Village Voice and has written for New York magazine, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. Flash in the Pan, first published in 1992, was his first book.

SMOKING

PART ONE

HAVE YOU MET MISS JONES?

ONE

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Monday, March 4, 1991, 7:15 P.M. The war is over. War is not healthy for restaurants and other living things. But The Falls has survived.

And tonight . . . tonight is going to be hot.

Danny Aiello is coming. He is going to be here any minute for dinner. A table is being held.

Danny Aiello is tonight’s featured performer in the Lush Life Lounge. Otherwise known, to whomever it is known, as The Falls. Recently the place has taken to calling itself the Lush Life Lounge on Monday and Tuesday nights, because when The Falls was just calling itself The Falls on those nights, it was damn lucky if it got twenty customers for dinner all night. It is named for an old John Coltrane tune. It probably ought to be called the Last Ditch Lounge, since Aiello’s appearance on the marquee (actually there is no marquee; hell, there isn’t even a sign out front!) tonight comes at a moment of complete and total desperation—a final, wildly chaotic effort to inject new life into a restaurant that has just passed its first birthday, but hovers constantly near death.

A commercial storage facility has just opened up across the street. They are no doubt counting on some business from The Falls. Maybe they’ve noticed how goddamned dark it is inside there; is it to save electricity, or to make it look more like a wake? How about calling it the Lack of Life Lounge? The Lust for Life Lounge? One of the owners was moping around a few hours ago, talking about turning the entire place into a strip joint. That would presumably be called, simply, the Lush Lounge. If the Grim Reaper called for a table tonight—not so farfetched a possibility, really, not in New York City in the 1990s—they’d give him the corner banquette, ply him with free champagne and hope for the best.

Aiello shares a Sinatra obsession with The Falls; so it was discovered by Bruce Goldstein, the restaurant’s proprietor, who heard Aiello sing Sinatra in his movie, Once Around, one night when he probably should have been at work. The actor has been convinced by others, including Once Around producer Griffin Dunne, a pal of the management, to take the stage in a benefit. We are told the cause is a Bronx Catholic rest home, but if it saves the life of a trendy downtown restaurant gasping its final breath, surely the nuns won’t complain.

What is truly amazing about tonight is how, on the verge of catastrophe, The Falls is alive at all.

These days The Falls is getting five letters a day from its neighborhood bank. None of them are invitations to a cocktail party.

The venetian blinds look like they could use a dusting; so could that hot pink neon bulb that circles the window panels and gives off a cheesy afterglow. Even those overhead art deco light fixtures, four of them, hanging over the room like missiles, seem aimed directly at this restaurant’s heart. They point downward, those monstrous lights, and even through the dust they cast a luscious hue—though they never stop looking like they’re about to crash directly into the table below.

At least the waitresses look good. Human beings like to keep themselves dusted. Tonight it’s a gathering of Falls Stars, a constellation of beauties in tight black miniskirts, bending, touching, stroking, leaning. Only hot lookers need apply. Why the hell not? They go well with the place. Since opening night, it has been the firm policy of The Falls to have a Firm Policy. If someone is going to serve me the wrong order, an owner of The Falls said once, I’d rather get the wrong order from a pretty girl than a fat guy. The waitresses oblige this sexism, or maybe it’s just the recession and they need the money. One of them likes to keep two pens planted firmly between her breasts; is that so we will look at her breasts, or so that we won’t?

Hundreds of hours of jazz and pop standards sit on a shelf behind the bar, back where Bruce Goldstein likes to spend most of his nights, and it is a strict Goldstein rule that music be played at all times, no exceptions. Tonight we are hearing a preponderance of Sinatra, in anticipation of the arrival of many Italians, including an actual friend of Sinatra named Jilly Rizzo, who used to own a 52nd Street jazz joint named Jilly’s. Yes, Jilly is coming tonight, and he will want to hear Sinatra being played on the sound system. Jilly has a decided preference for the works of Sinatra.

So it is now 7:15 on an otherwise deadly quiet night in early March in the Year We Won the Persian Gulf War. No one was murdered in New York City on this night, not even an innocent by-stander.

The Falls is open for business.

And tonight . . . tonight is going to be hot.

/Hot nights come and go in the life of anyone, anything. The Falls has proved to be no exception. We are here, a few days into its second year of life, marveling at its defiance of the laws of business. By those laws, this restaurant should already be dead. And yet, when its first birthday went by a few nights ago, the blessed event did not warrant so much as a candle. (Odd, isn’t it, when you consider what horrors most restaurants inflict when it’s your birthday?)

Restaurants are not, either in the traditional or metaphorical sense, conceived or born. A seed is not planted and allowed to grow. There is no wonderful, charmed period where they come into the world all wrinkly and cute and cuddly. Friends and relatives do not make pilgrimages with little gift-wrapped presents to a restaurant upon the announcement of its birth.

Restaurants, alas, come to life fully formed, ready to deteriorate and wither away almost instantly. They must, from the day they face the world for the first time, act mature and sophisticated and wise. Frankly, it’s a lot to ask of anything, even an institution—and maybe that is the reason we are dealing here with a perilously fragile enterprise that is, perhaps, analogous to nothing. A moribund movie lives on in the video store, passed over thousands of times by discriminating renters; a novel gathers dust on a library shelf, a burial ground for obscure chapters in our culture. No such luck for restaurants. They live and then they die. They get no funeral plots or obituaries. There’s no place to put a wreath, or page to place a black-bordered announcement.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Which is why it is impossible to review the events on this particular corner of the earth—the corner of Varick and Vandam streets in lower Manhattan, a corner not known even to the vast majority of New York City cabdrivers let alone the nearly four billion people on this planet—without thinking about death.

Restaurants are not only mere mortals, but they suffer an infant mortality rate that—in human terms—would lead to the immediate end of civilization. Only one in four restaurants in New York City makes it past its fifth birthday.

Imagine! Would you have a baby if you knew it would be dead within five years? Forget human comparisons; would you start a business facing those daunting odds? Invest money? Place a bet? Is there anything in the world, really, that you would do if you thought that it had a 75 percent chance of failure within five years? Some people—were they to be told that they themselves had a 75 percent chance of dying within five years—would probably lock themselves in a garage with their car engine running.

But other people thrive on the very threat of failure that others find so daunting.

Dances With Wolves. Anybody wanna see a three-hour movie about Indians? Apparently so. The Gulf War. Big risk. Turned out to be a pretty damn successful idea.

It would make for a simple explanation to suggest that in the fall of 1989, nearly two years before Danny Aiello took the stage at the Lush Life Lounge, we lived in a more hopeful time—and that when Bruce Goldstein first pushed forward with the idea for The Falls, he managed to tap into the positive vibes of the late 1980s, the burgeoning affluence of the postwar baby boom generation that still had money to spend. Sure, the market had crashed—but that was two years before, we’d all had some time to get our shit together. We stopped taking drugs, didn’t we? Think of how much money we saved right there! In the late 1980s we became, as one wise member of this generation recently put it, “drugless home addicts”—doomed to covet apartments and houses larger than our own. We could no longer stop ourselves from marching into banks and requesting loans, loans, more loans; we mortgaged ourselves.

For what? For an apartment with a view of a filthy river called the Hudson? For a house with a pleasant yard and a quality school system? For convenient access to a grocery store that charges $8 for a six-pack of beer, and a dry cleaner that gets $4 to press your pants?

But it’s not that simple. Never is.

/We all know where babies are conceived.

In case you were wondering about restaurants, they are conceived in the mind.

It was the summer of 1989, and Bruce Goldstein was only just recovered from the death of a loved one, a restaurant that defied all odds and lived from 1978 to 1988, yes, an entire decade, making it by industry standards a miracle. A thriving restaurant! Its name was Central Falls; and The Falls got its name from that illustrious predecessor.

But The Falls is not what Bruce Goldstein would have called his new restaurant had it been his decision. It never is when Other People’s Money is involved.

It would have been called Miss Jones. Not Miss Jones Café. Not Miss Jones’s Place. Certainly not Ms. Jones.

It seems that Bruce was driving along the highway from the luxurious beachfront community of Sag Harbor, about three hours from New York, after a weekend of summer sun. His skin was dark; his mind was wandering. As always, Bruce was thinking, mostly about the new restaurant he had been saying he might want to start. He popped a Bobby Short tape into the tape deck, and hummed along with one of his favorite nightclub crooners.

Suddenly, as in stop-the-car-I-gotta-make-an-important-call suddenly, Bruce had it. The name.

“Have you met Miss Jones?” Bobby Short was singing.

Miss Jones! What a great name for a restaurant! Full-blown fantasies projected themselves in Bruce’s mind. He saw a beautiful, glamorous, rich, sexy couple. Probably in black tie. They were stepping into a taxi. “We’re going to Miss Jones,” the handsome young man instructed the driver. Without hesitation the cabbie drove off in the direction of Varick and Vandam.

I’ve got it, Bruce thought. People will drink champagne out of ruby slippers. Bobby Short will sing, models will dance, everyone will eat. Yes! Miss Jones it is!

“Hmmmm,” Terry Quinn said.

Bruce had, indeed, pulled off to the side of the busy highway, found a phone and called his partner on their new, unformed restaurant idea. This is what happens when you have a partner. You call him up with your epiphanies.

“I’m not sure I get it,” Terry Quinn continued.

What is Terry talking about? Bruce cannot believe that he doesn’t get it. It’s perfect. It’s got mystery . . . romance . . . style. Hell, I want to eat at Miss Jones. I want to say Miss Jones. I want to know her, to have her . . . she is my mystery woman.

“Nobody will know what it is,” Terry Quinn said.

It’s a restaurant! Miss Jones is an idea . . . and I will plant that idea in their minds. They will want to come visit Miss Jones. They will become obsessed with her, as I have. They will keep coming back, coming back, coming back . . . oh, it will be wonderful.

“It’s too confusing,” Terry Quinn said.

Too confusing? Two words? Come on, man! Miss Jones is the answer to so many questions in my life, the answer to so many problems. I know it will work. I am not wrong about this, believe me.

“You’re crazy,” Terry Quinn said. “Goodbye.”

Bruce Goldstein got back in his car. Okay, so I’m crazy. But it’s a great name for a restaurant.

VARICK AND VANDAM

TWO

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You know your life is devoted to restaurants when you are eighteen years old and you want to work in Rose’s Restaurant on Cape Cod for the summer and they’ll never hire anyone under twenty-one because they serve liquor. So you go in with your phony ID card that says your name is Joe Rose. They look at you kinda funny but they figure, why would he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Epigraph
• Part One: Smoking
• Part Two: Non-Smoking
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About The Author
• Copyright