Blum - Flash in the Pan: Life and Death of an American Restaurant

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FOR TERRI

Tomorrow is a busy day.

We got things to do;

We got eggs to lay.

We got ground to dig, and worms to scratch

Takes a lot of sittin gettin chicks to hatch.

Louis Jordan

AINT NOBODY HERE BUT US CHICKENS

Bruce Goldstein and Terry Quinn generously gave me complete access to their thoughts and actions as they created their restaurant, The Falls. They asked for nothing in return. In the beginning, they believed this book might promote their new restaurant; later, they were simply two honorable people ready to stand by their commitment. Were it not for their honesty and integrity, this book would not exist.

Both men talked to me at great length about their inner thoughts and feelings throughout the process. When you read such thoughts in the text, they reflect my best effort to describe their thinking at the time.

Beginning in February, 1990, I observed virtually all of the events described in the book. Where I did not, I have relied on at least one reliable source to re-create the scene or conversation.

Readers of nonfiction process books often wonderrightly sowhether a reporters presence has altered the events described. Their concern is that characters might be performing for the reporter. To guard against this, I spent hundreds of hours at The Falls over a fifteen-month period so that I would become, as much as possible, a part of the background. I often did not carry a notebook or tape recorder. When incidents appear in the book that I observed without the subjects knowledge that I was a reporter, I have concealed their identity. No one is quoted by name in the book unless they knew I wasat all timesa working journalist on the premises, a fact I made everyone at The Falls aware of as frequently as I could.

All the characters are real. There are no composites. The names of some characters have been changed, along with some identifying characteristics. In some cases, people asked for anonymity; in others, I gave it because the people were involved with The Falls for only a short time. Where a characters full name is given, that is their real name; when only a first name is given, that name has been changed.

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 tonights 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 Aiellos appearance on the marquee (actually there is no marquee; hell, there isnt even a sign out front!) tonight comes at a moment of complete and total desperationa 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 theyve 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 tonightnot so farfetched a possibility, really, not in New York City in the 1990stheyd 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 restaurants 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 wont 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 restaurants heart. They point downward, those monstrous lights, and even through the dust they cast a luscious huethough they never stop looking like theyre about to crash directly into the table below.

At least the waitresses look good. Human beings like to keep themselves dusted. Tonight its 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, Id rather get the wrong order from a pretty girl than a fat guy. The waitresses oblige this sexism, or maybe its 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 wont?

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 Jillys. 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, isnt it, when you consider what horrors most restaurants inflict when its your birthday?)